Unions bet big on Kamala Harris. Now they're bracing for consequences

Besides the Harris campaign and its affiliated political action committees, few economic or political sectors placed larger bets than organized labor on Vice President Kamala Harris winning the presidency.

And few might reap more consequences from the incoming Trump administration. For public-sector unions that represent government workers, the threat is institutional and existential: Top advisers to President-elect Donald Trump want to eliminate them outright.

For service industry unions that represent hotel and restaurant workers, the threats may be to the members themselves: vulnerable and low-paid workers, often immigrants, who could be swept up in Trump's promised mass deportations.

And for the leadership of the old-line industrial unions, the threat is from their members, many of whom ignored the pleadings of their leadership and voted for Trump.

"We do understand we have issues that are confronting us, major issues," said Lee Saunders, chair of the AFL-CIO's political committee and president of the 1.6-million-strong American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. "This is going to impact the entire labor movement."

Unions poured nearly $43 million into the Harris campaign, according to Open Secrets, but that understates the resources they put into phone banks, canvassing operations, education and persuasion efforts with their members and outreach to nonunion working-class households.

Union leaders insisted in the wake of Trump's victory that they had done their job: Initial exit polls showed that Harris had won union households by 55% to Trump's 43%, about the same as President Joe Biden's margin in 2020. In narrow Democratic Senate victories in Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada, and in the still-uncalled Senate race in Arizona, union households might prove to be the difference makers.

But with unions representing less than 10% of the private-sector workforce, their true failure was their inability to extend their influence on Harris' behalf beyond their memberships to the far larger numbers of working-class Americans who do not belong to any union at all, who came out in force and voted overwhelmingly for the former president.

"Working Americans elected President Trump because they trust him," said Karoline Leavitt, a Trump-Vance transition spokesperson.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said voters who felt they had control over their lives -- through higher education or union representation -- had sided with Democrats.

But, she said, "people who felt like there's too much change, in the pace of technology, in the cost of living, in the fear of a country being different than they thought it was -- they wanted a strongman to fix it," and that man was Trump.

The explanations for Harris' defeat are myriad, but union leaders have been among the most outspoken in saying she and other Democrats have failed to center the struggles of workers. Jimmy Williams Jr., president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, a strong Harris ally, complained on social media that Harris had failed to make a strong case for "what immigrant workers bring to our country," including immigrant workers in his union.

Democrats were too slow to acknowledge the pain of inflation, he said. At the same time, they were ineffective in communicating what the Biden administration had accomplished, in infrastructure jobs, manufacturing and bringing back semiconductor production from offshore -- all accomplishments that are now likely to redound to Trump's benefit as those projects build out.

"The party did not make a positive case for why workers should vote for them, only that they were not Donald Trump," Williams said of the Democrats. "That's not good enough anymore."

In Trump's first term, he appointed union foes to the National Labor Relations Board who clamped down on organizing and strongly opposed union-backed rules to make it easier for workers to vote for collective bargaining. His secretaries of labor were no more pro-union.

But in his campaign this time around, he openly courted union workers, if not their bosses. He made expensive promises to end income taxation on tips and overtime. More important, though, were his larger promises that by imposing tariffs on almost all imported goods, he would bring manufacturing jobs back from overseas; that by deporting millions of immigrants in the country illegally, he would free up work for citizens; and that by ending environmental regulations intended to push the U.S. economy toward electric cars and renewable energy, he would bring back a golden age of muscle cars and oil derricks.

It did not help that a scattering of prominent unions declined to endorse Harris, in large part because their rank and file backed Trump. Most prominent were the Teamsters, whose president, Sean O'Brien, addressed the Republican convention and wanted to preserve a place at Trump's table if he won. But he was not alone.

The International Association of Fire Fighters, the International Longshoremen's Association and the United Mine Workers all sat out the election -- and if union leadership's education efforts really did help swing most union households to Harris, those unions' decision not to endorse might well have helped Trump.

Now, with Trump victorious, leaders like O'Brien have chits to call in.

"The Teamsters look forward to working with President-elect Donald Trump, and to sharing with his transition team our priorities for how he can best support working Americans and the future of labor," said Kara Deniz, a Teamsters spokesperson. "The Republicans, under the leadership of Donald Trump, indicated throughout the campaign that they want to be the party of working people. The campaign is over. It's time for Republicans to show up."

Leaders like Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, who became outspoken surrogates for Harris, may face the consequences of their decisions.

A defiant Fain said in a statement: "It's time for Washington, D.C., to put up or shut up, no matter the party, no matter the candidate. Will our government stand with the working class, or keep doing the bidding of the billionaires?"

While leaders like Fain brace for Trump's famous penchant for retribution, service workers unions are bracing for Trump's policy promises. In Nevada, the organizing power of unions like the Culinary Workers had propelled Democratic presidential candidates to success in every election since 2004 -- until this one.

Union leaders might say they succeeded in significantly helping Harris' support among their members; in Nevada, they didn't. Recent polling of Nevadans who are registered voters found that Harris performed only a single point better among union members than Trump, 48% to 47%. The same poll in 2020 found Biden beating Trump by 22 percentage points among union members in Nevada.

Now, Ted Pappageorge, the head of the immigrant-heavy Culinary Workers Local 226, said he was worried about Trump's draconian promises to deport immigrants in the country illegally en masse and slam closed the U.S.-Mexican border.

Harris' "messaging was on point," he said. But what Trump was doing was tantamount to the efforts of a manager to undermine an organizing drive, he suggested, and he had significantly more time to do it.

"She had a couple of months to do that, and Trump has been banging away doing what we call 'a boss campaign' for years, introducing a massive amount of fear and division," Pappageorge said.

For unions representing government employees, the threat is to the unions themselves. Project 2025, the blueprint for a new Trump administration drawn up by several Trump advisers, suggested eliminating such unions altogether.

"Congress should consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place," the document stated.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the Ohio entrepreneur now frequently mentioned as a potential official in the incoming administration, made eliminating teachers unions a priority of his campaign for president last year. He said Friday that what he had meant was eliminating collective bargaining protections for public schoolteachers when their contracts come up for renewal.

"It is about the latitude of how employment contracts are written," he said.

Some Trump advisers, including Ramaswamy, have also pushed for the elimination of the federal Department of Education, though campaign aides said Friday that Trump had not taken a position on public-sector unions.

"There's no doubt it's an existential threat," Weingarten said. "Am I worried? I'm Jewish. I worry about everything."

The workers themselves may be far less concerned. Brian Ursua, a member of Teamsters Local 631 and a Trump supporter in North Las Vegas, said overtime pay on weekend shifts setting up trade shows was critical to him, and Trump has promised to end taxation of overtime pay.

"I felt that Donald better understood the middle-class citizens," he said.

Union leaders are not so sanguine. The Biden administration recently finalized regulations that would expand mandatory overtime pay to workers earning the equivalent of $58,656 a year, beginning Jan. 1, up from $43,888. Advisers to the Trump campaign have proposed rolling the rule back.

Leavitt said the president-elect had taken no position on the issue.

"President Trump will keep his promise to the hardworking men and women of America," she said. "He will bring jobs back home, restore American manufacturing, slash inflation and cut taxes."