West Coast Teamsters break with national chapter in endorsing Harris

West Coast Teamsters announced their endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday, just minutes after national Teamsters leadership declined to issue a presidential endorsement.

The move represents a sharp break within the powerful union’s membership in liberal states like California, where former President Donald Trump remains a widely unpopular political figure. The union’s national headquarters released internal survey results earlier in the day that showed close to 60 percent of its members backed Trump.

Teamsters Joint Councils 7 and 42 — which are made up of 39 local unions representing 300,000 members in California, Nevada, Hawaii and Guam — wrote in a statement that Harris and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz have a history of supporting expanded labor protections for workers, like the proposed Protect the Right to Organize Act and a Minnesota law that will ban employers from forcing workers to attend anti-labor meetings.

“Teamster members work and live in cities as well as in rural communities, come from diverse backgrounds, and have different views, but Joint Council 7 and 42 Teamsters refuse to be divided by extremist political forces or greedy corporations that want to see us fail,” said Teamsters Joint Council 7 President Peter Finn. “As Teamsters we will stand together to have a strong voice on the job, provide for our families, and serve the communities where we work.”

Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien said the national union declined to endorse after it hadn’t secured pledges from either campaign to not interfere in “in critical union campaigns or core Teamsters industries.”

Neither candidate “was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business,” he wrote in a statement.

The powerful union has deep roots in the automotive, warehouse and other blue-collar industries critical to battleground states in places like the Midwest. Harris had in recent days met with the Teamsters to shore up support among the historically Democratic-leaning bloc, which had made an appeal to both campaigns to support a union-friendly overhaul of federal labor law, bankruptcy reform and antitrust policies.

The union has opposed California policies on autonomous vehicles over concerns about job losses. Finn recently compared Gov. Gavin Newsom’s support of the industry to Trump's policies.

“The reality is now Newsom is turning into Trump,” he said. “He’s acting like a dictator that bullies and disrespects the legislature, and he’s consistently siding with his rich friends and big tech instead of looking out for who he was elected to look out for.”