A key constituency for President Joe Biden’s climate agenda is mobilizing behind Vice President Kamala Harris. With a twist.
Labor unions, hoping to maintain the influence they’ve had with the Biden administration, have loudly backed Harris on her way to becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee. They hope Harris continues Biden’s policies of muscular labor advocacy coupled with progressive economic policy.
But even as Harris leans on a labor legacy built by Biden, the Californian also brings her own history with unions that is distinctively West Coast, where labor skews more female, less white and lower-income.
Whereas Biden boasted deep ties with industrial and building trade unions that worry climate action could cost them fossil fuel jobs, the service and public sector unions close to Harris see climate primarily as an issue that impacts their workers’ health and safety. And they say she has been a major ally on that front.
“She has made important calls to important people behind the scenes on our issues,” United Farm Workers President Teresa Romero said in an interview.
That was true this summer, she said, crediting Harris with advancing heat protections for outdoor workers with almost unprecedented speed through the White House’s bureaucratic review process. The protections have been a major priority for the union.
And it was true in 2016, Romero said, when Harris used her clout as attorney general and as a Senate candidate to help persuade Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown to sign legislation expanding overtime eligibility for farm workers.
“I like to say show, don’t tell,” Romero said. “And Kamala Harris has shown us that she supports farm workers, and she understands the struggles.”
Which unions have Harris’ ear is a question with far-reaching implications for her climate policy.
Biden built his climate agenda around unions, especially the autoworkers who used to dominate Delaware politics, as well as the building trades with heavy ties to fossil fuels. With their support, he crafted a climate agenda that emphasized domestic manufacturing — to the point that some climate hawks chafed at his tariffs on imported solar components or his refusal to subsidize foreign-made electric vehicles.
Harris has mostly unified labor behind her campaign, picking up quick support from the AFL-CIO as well as steel workers, teachers and service workers — some of the largest unions in the country.
But other building trades and industrial unions have been slow to endorse Harris. Some, like the United Association, which represents pipefitters and sees oil projects as a major source of jobs, issued short endorsements after Harris had already corralled enough support to become the nominee. Others, like the Laborers International Union of North America, emphasized Biden’s legacy when pledging their support to Harris.
“She will keep President Biden’s torch alive and shining bright,” LIUNA General President Brent Booker said in the union’s endorsement, praising Harris for helping to “transform renewable energy jobs into family-supporting union jobs.”
Both of those unions, which have been among the most critical of aggressive climate proposals such as the Green New Deal — which Harris once co-sponsored — declined to comment on Harris’ candidacy beyond their endorsement statements.
Unions are primarily looking for Harris to continue Biden’s pro-labor policies. Biden’s climate legacy also offers Harris an advantage over former President Donald Trump’s campaign, said Rob Bieber, president of the Michigan AFL-CIO.
“This has been the most pro-worker, pro-union administration in history. And there will be no change going forward; it will continue to be with Vice President Harris,” Bieber said, mentioning her climate record. “Our vision is going to be the same.”
The vision might be the same, but the emphasis could be different.
In the week since she launched her campaign, Harris’ labor events have featured few of the industrial unions historically tied to fossil fuels, whose leaders became key surrogates for Biden’s 2020 campaign. Instead, Harris’ loudest supporters have been unions pushing for aggressive climate action.
Tia Orr, executive director of Service Employees International Union California, said Harris has a long history of battling the oil sector in court, where she successfully defended California’s climate laws and won millions of dollars from oil companies over pollution.
“That takes some fortitude, to take on Big Oil,” Orr said, expressing hope that Harris could enact climate policies that Biden had “in his heart” but have remained unaccomplished. “For us, I couldn’t imagine more excitement.”
A Democratic National Committee call last week with labor leaders supporting Harris featured the SEIU; the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union; and Yolanda Bejarano, a former Communications Workers of America official who now chairs the Arizona Democratic Party.
And in one of her first campaign events, Harris last week addressed the American Federation of Teachers, which has voted to declare a climate emergency and whose members are bargaining for climate provisions in some labor contracts.
The first place they did that was in Harris’ home state, when Los Angeles teachers and SEIU-affiliated support staff went on a three-day strike to demand climate justice commitments from the district, such as making schools into community cooling centers.
“I want to thank you for being the first union to endorse me this week,” Harris said last week to the teachers union, which gave her a long standing ovation. “Today, we face a choice between two very different visions of our nation — one focused on the future, and the other focused on the past.”
Building trades in California, one of the top oil-producing states, remain aligned with the fossil fuel industry. Although that’s a source of tension within the California Democratic Party, Harris has cultivated those relationships too.
“We are still a state that has unionized construction workers and unionized refinery workers,” said Vivian Price, a former refinery worker and union electrician who is now a professor of labor studies at California State University Dominguez Hills.
Harris’ history suggests she will listen to those workers, Price said, while also heeding the unions that weren’t as close with Biden.
“She expands on that union base,” she said. “She brings to the table her time working with farm workers and [unions] in the public sector, which maybe Biden didn’t have as strong a record.”
As vice president, Harris co-chaired the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment. That role helped her develop relationships with a broad range of unions.
Many unions used their endorsements of Harris to highlight the Biden administration’s clean energy and domestic manufacturing policies.
Those endorsements seem to be worded in such a way that enables unions to hold Harris accountable to their expectations, said Saba Waheed, director of the Labor Center at the University of California Los Angeles.
“They can provide workers that will door-knock for her — boots on the ground, critical resources. And so in return, what they’re asking of her is that ‘you need to continue the labor-worker agenda,” she said.
Harris has room to do more, she added, because major portions of Biden’s climate agenda, such as a clean electricity standard, were stripped from the Inflation Reduction Act. Harris doesn’t have to build a fresh coalition to back those policies, because unions already have signaled support for it.
“Labor right now is rallying around not even the person, but the pathway … to continue to expand this agenda,” she said.
Indeed, some of the union hesitancy to embrace Harris has nothing to do with climate policy, or even the vice president herself. The Transport Workers Union is refusing to back the Democratic ticket until Harris picks a running mate, because some of the contenders have baggage with labor.
“There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell we support a ticket that has a candidate that is pro-right-to-work or not sufficiently anti-right-to-work,’ TWU president John Samuelsen said in an interview. But Harris herself, he added, has been good for labor.
“She comes from a different world than Joe Biden,” he said, adding that he doesn’t have a personal history with her, but her record has been “nothing but positive.”
“I have confidence,” Samuelsen said, “that Kamala Harris would continue with the Joe Biden trade union legacy.”
