Labor News & Commentary July 22, 2024 major unions respond to Biden's exit with mixed emotions, many backing Harris

[Omaha Steve]

https://onlabor.org/july-22-2024/

By Otto Barenberg

Otto Barenberg is a student at Harvard Law School.

In today’s news and commentary, major unions respond to Biden’s exit with mixed emotions, many backing Harris.

President Joe Biden’s historic decision to withdraw from the presidential race set off a cascade of reactions from labor leaders—a chorus of regret, relief, consternation, and gratitude. Even as Biden faced overwhelming pressure from key players in the Democratic Party coalition to step aside, America’s unions had remained staunchly in the President’s camp, with only a few recent defections. A substantial majority of unions had endorsed Biden, to whom labor leaders have often referred as the “most pro-labor president in history.”

In the hours after the President’s announcement, labor leaders appeared to be closing ranks around Vice President Kamala Harris. As of early Monday morning, a handful of major unions had already issued formal endorsements. “The most important thing for working people right now is uniting behind Vice President Harris, the candidate who can beat Donald Trump and finish the job that we started under the Biden-Harris administration,” Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President April Verrett said in a statement, highlighting Harris’s support for home care workers, childcare funding, and reproductive rights. SEIU, which had pledged to spend $200 million this election cycle to reelect Biden and boost Democrats in battleground states, will now deploy its war chest on behalf of Harris’s campaign: “Our $200 million commitment has been to electing a pro-worker champion to defeat Donald Trump … And that’s going to be Vice President Harris,” Verrett told the Washington Post. Other major unions echoed the SEIU’s endorsement, including the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the country’s second-largest teacher’s union; the United Farm Workers (UFW), who represent thousands of farmworkers across Harris’s home state of California; and the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), who praised Harris’s record on reproductive rights.

FULL story at link above.