(Bloomberg) -- Kamala Harris made her first direct pitch to union workers as a 2024 presidential candidate, a bid to lock up a prized constituency among which she can ill-afford defections.
Harris said Thursday she would boost workers’ organizing rights, defend public education and protect entitlement programs in a speech to the American Federation of Teachers, one of the first unions to endorse her candidacy. The vice president is on a travel blitz to spread her message, rally voters and counteract a furious effort by Republican Donald Trump to define her.
“Donald Trump and his extreme allies want to take our nation back to failed trickle-down economic policies, back to union busting, back to tax breaks for billionaires,” Harris said at the AFT’s national convention in Houston. “Ours is a fight for the future. Ours is a fight for freedom.”
The outreach to labor is an early sign that Harris’ campaign sees union voters as a potentially decisive group in the presidential race, as it retools its strategy with just over 100 days to go until Election Day.
Harris took over the top of the ticket from Joe Biden, who branded himself as the most pro-union president in history. Without that established track record, Harris has work to do to win over some wavering union juggernauts.
That’s especially true in the face of an effort by Trump to make inroads with rank-and-file workers by using a populist economic pitch on issues like trade and tariffs and conservative appeals on cultural issues.
“I have the economy on my side,” Trump said Thursday morning on Fox News. “They have a lousy economy that’s so inflation ridden.”
The Teamsters, which has more than a million members and backed Biden in 2020, has yet to make a presidential endorsement. The Teamsters invited Harris to a roundtable with members as it weighs its decision, a union spokesperson said. The group has a long history of supporting Democratic candidates.
Teamsters President Sean O’Brien angered Democrats by addressing this year’s Republican nominating convention. Some progressives and labor advocates viewed the decision as a slap in the face to Biden, who in 2022 bailed out a strapped pension fund largely composed of retired or active Teamsters members with $36 billion.
O’Brien said he sought speaking appearances at both parties’ conventions as a reflection of what he said are the diverse views of his union’s membership.
Harris ticked off a number of policies in the conservative Project 2025 agenda authored by Trump allies she said would hurt organized workers and public school teachers, including ending the Department of Education and cutting the Head Start early childhood education program — as well as rolling back policies that make it easier to unionize.
“America has tried these failed economic policies before, but we are not going back,” Harris said. “We will move forward and one of the best ways to keep our nation moving forward is to give workers a voice, to protect their freedom to organize, to defend their freedom to collectively bargain, to end union busting.”
The vice president also went after Republican efforts in several states to ban books in school libraries that are deemed to include inappropriate sexual material or deal improperly with racial issues. Critics have said those policies amount to an attack on the ability to teach about issues like racism and gay rights. She contrasted those policies with Democrats’ efforts to tighten gun laws.
“We want to ban assault weapons and they want to ban books,” Harris said.
Labor Record
Harris will have the advantage of running on a shared record with Biden on labor issues. She led a White House task force on making it easier for workers to organize and established strong ties with the Culinary Workers Union, an influential group in battleground Nevada.
She quickly gained endorsements from major labor groups in the days after she announced her candidacy, including from the AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union, which previously backed Biden.
AFT President Randi Weingarten said in an interview “there’s a lot of excitement about Kamala Harris” because union workers see her as a leader “who can really make clear the contrasts between Trump and Democrats.”
“I would have voted for Biden, but I was not thrilled. I did it the first time, this time I wasn’t thrilled. Now I’m excited,” said Jason Roberts, president of the Kansas City teachers union, AFT Local 691.
In her remarks, Harris highlighted the administration’s efforts to forgive student-loan debt, including for public-sector workers like teachers. Harris vowed to push for passage of the PRO Act, a sweeping labor law reform bill that would make it easier to organize.
As a senator, Harris backed the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights and the Fairness for Farmworkers Act, efforts to extend labor protections to workers who had been excluded from them for decades. Her failed 2020 presidential bid also was advised by now-Senator Laphonza Butler of California, who had been a longtime SEIU leader.
--With assistance from Catarina Saraiva.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
