President Joe Biden speaks with supporters and volunteers attending a campaign training event at the Carpenters and Joiners Local 445 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on April 16, 2024.
CNN —
Joe Biden will land a major union endorsem*nt WednesdayfromNorth America’sBuilding Trades Unions,whose leaderssaythe presidenthas his infrastructure bill largely to thank for it.
In making one of their earliest ever presidential endorsem*nts,NABTU leaders are kickstarting an eight-figure organizing programto try to delivertheir 250,000 membersin the battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin for Biden.
The Teamsters, whose endorsem*nt is being pursued by both Biden andDonaldTrump, are members of NABTU but abstainedfrom Tuesday’s boardvote, according to people briefed on the proceedings. They will endorse after their own upcoming convention.
The backing from NABTU, which has 3 million members nationwide, is more enthusiastic than its 2020 backing of Biden. And it comes at a moment when a significant slice of union rank-and-filehas splitfrom traditionally Democratic-aligned union leadership in ways that are reverberating through elections. That’s raised questions aboutthe political future of the next generation of union members.
It’s “almost like the perfect leader was sent at the perfect time for working people,” NABTU President Sean McGarvey told CNN about Biden in an interview announcing the endorsem*nt.
Biden will appear at the union’s conference in Washington on Wednesday to officially get the nod– whichunion leadersalso want to be seenas a stark rebuff of Trump, who eagerly solicited support from union members and leaders during his time in office, but, theirleaderssay,didn’t deliver. NABTU had called for Trump to resign after the January 6, 2021, insurrection.
In praising Biden’s efforts for working people, McGarvey citedthe investments and union protections built into the infrastructure act, the Covid-eraAmerican Rescue Plan, the CHIPs Act to increase technological production nationwide and the Inflation Reduction Act.He acknowledged that, for the moment, Biden’s support is stronger among hisunion’s leadership than it is among many of his members, whom he said were close to evenly split in 2020 between Biden and Trump, and generally remain so.
“They think now Joe Biden and Trump are running again, they think it’s just two politicians, ‘Sameold, sameold,’” McGarvey said. “Lo and behold, it’s not the sameold,sameold.”
The building trades union has a long historywith Trumpin the private sector, going back to working on projectstogetherdirectly and even partially financing, through a union-owned financial services company, several of them in the 1980s and 1990s.
“He was one of the worst clients we ever had, because he rarely kept his word and it was a fight to get him to pay us back,” McGarvey said.
The financial relationship ended with the Trump tower in Chicago, for which the project manager search featured inthe first seasonof “The Apprentice.”
The union was eager to support Trump’s promises of an infrastructure bill while he was in the White House, and McGarveysaid he talked with Trump about getting support for multi-employer pension funds in the first Covid-19 relief bill in 2020.
“All your people are going to love me, right Sean?” McGarvey recalled Trump telling him by phone.
But none of that came to pass, which McGarvey saidhasmade the contrast with Biden even clearer, along with theunion jobs that have been created and the long-term worker protections and apprenticeship programs that have been written into law.
“Donald Trump talked about infrastructure once a week, once a month, once a year. He was committed to it, it was going to be easy for him,” Brent Booker, the president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, said in a mocking tone.
Trump came into office promising a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, which he repeatedly returned to over his years in office but never put forward an actual bill or plan.
McGarvey added that his conversations with Biden have had a different feelingthan those with Trump:The president has twice grabbed him by the shoulders and made him promise to take the benefits of all the billspassed during his administrationand make sure he is spreading training centers to both rural towns and inner cities.
Booker said that “it’s a persuasive argument” to those members whoare not drawn to Trump for other reasons – whether because of his positions on immigration or his general promise to blow up the usual way the government does business.
“When they know what he’s done for them, everything points to moving the needle dramatically,” Booker saidof Biden.
The outreach programs the union will now fundwill hit hundreds of thousands of members and their families in the blue wall states thatBiden flipped from Trump in 2020and that will be crucial to 2024, connectingmembers through their local union halls, social circles and at home.
“When you have the time to explain where these opportunities come from, their eyes light up, they say, ‘I didn’t vote for him last time, but man, he’ll have my vote next time,’” McGarvey said. “I will assure you that we will do the work that’s necessary in the states that matter, with the capital investments and the feet on the ground to make sure that everybody who needs to know the story knows the story, to vote in their economic interests for the first time in a generation.”
As for Trump, union leaders hope the former president feels their brushback in particular, laughing off the potential of anangry response on Truth Social: “I really don’t give a f**k if he’s pissed,” McGarvey said.
A Trump spokesman didn’t respond when asked for comment about the endorsem*nt and McGarvey’s comments about the former president.
In a statement about the endorsem*nt, Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said Trump turned infrastructure “into a punchline,” but “Biden kept true to his word, and at every step of the way throughout his presidency,he’s foughtlike hell for union workers.”
Reached by text as he was flying to tout Biden’s record, campaign co-chair Mitch Landrieu, the administration’s former infrastructure coordinator, said the endorsem*nt “has to do with the president honoring his commitment to rebuild the country in a way that produces good high paying union jobs and creating the strongest economy that we have seen as years,” adding, “If you want more of it, you stay the course and push ahead.”
Landrieu said that he was glad to see the infrastructure investments and othersdelivering politically: “A watched pot never boils,” he wrote. “Until it does.”
