IN DETROIT — Members of the Teamsters will soon have Vice President Kamala Harris over for a roundtable talk. However, union president Sean O’Brien has not yet been invited to speak at the Democratic National Convention next week.
In an email on Friday, Kara Deniz, a spokeswoman for the 1.3-million-member union, said that the Teamsters are working with Harris’ campaign to set times for the roundtable.
But Deniz said Friday night that O’Brien has not heard back about his request to talk at the Democratic National Convention, which starts Monday in Chicago. Speaking at the GOP convention last month made some Democrats angry.
She said that O’Brien asked the Democrats the same thing he asked the Republicans.
On Saturday, someone who knows about the plans for the convention said that O’Brien will not be speaking, but that the Teamsters will have a presence on the stage. The person, who asked to remain anonymous because they are not allowed to talk about the plan in public, would not give any more information.
Democrats have been the party of labor groups for decades, while Republicans have mostly been against them. The AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers are two of the biggest groups that have already backed Harris.
But in January, the Teamsters met with her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. Also, O’Brien didn’t get much of a response when he spoke in Milwaukee on the first night of the Republican conference. O’Brien said that both big political parties were not doing enough to help working people in his speech.
Teamsters say that a choice about a presidential support won’t be made until after the conventions.
At the beginning of this year, Trump met with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to try to get their backing. After the meeting, Trump said that a lot of union voters had backed him and joked about a possible Teamsters support, saying, “Stranger things have happened.”
But in a Monday chat on the social media site X with Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla TSLA 0.92%, Trump praised Musk for firing workers who went on strike. Musk laughed and agreed with him. Even though it wasn’t clear what Trump was talking about, unions criticized his comments and said that he and Musk were against working people.
The United Auto Workers even went so far as to file unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board. They said that Trump and Musk’s comments made it harder for workers who might want to join a union. The NLRB said it would look into it.
In a statement, UAW President Shawn Fain said, “Both Trump and Musk want working-class people to shut up and don’t say anything.” They also laughed about this.
The claims made against Trump were seen as baseless and a “shameless political stunt” by his team.
In a statement, O’Brien also said bad things about Trump and Musk. “It is economic terrorism to fire workers for organizing, going on strike, and exercising their rights as Americans,” he said.
