President Barack Obama placated one wing of his liberal base,
environmentalists, with his decision to kill the Keystone Pipeline,
but he’s angered another — labor unions. Some of them, anyway.
Terry O’Sullivan, head of the Laborers’ International
Union of North America (LIUNA ),
has called
Obama’s action “politics at its worst,” saying that “once
again the President has sided with environmentalists instead of
blue collar construction workers.” O’Sullivan angrily vowed that
“workers across the U.S. will not forget this.”
The Keystone project has long pitted the two key Obama
constituencies against one another. Green groups agitated against
the pipeline over worries of water contamination and other (largely
baseless) environmental fears, while many building and trade unions
lusted after the thousands of construction jobs the pipeline would
create in the United States.
Mark H. Ayers, president of the Building and Construction
Trades Department, AFL-CIO has publicly hammered the jobs issue. In
a January 18th press release, Ayers voiced the frustration of many
union workers,
saying “…with a national unemployment rate
in construction at 16 percent nationally, it is beyond
disappointing that President Obama placed a higher priority on
politics rather than our nation’s number one challenge:
jobs.”
James T. Callahan, president of the International Union of
Operating Engineers, agrees,
complaining to the Washington Post
that Obama’s decision was “…a blow to
America’s construction workers,” who are struggling in “the sector
hardest hit by the recession.”
In his rejection of the pipeline, Obama blamed Republicans
for forcing him to meet what the
While House deemed an arbitrary deadline.
This despite the fact that the State Department
has had the application for Keystone since
2008, held 20 meetings on the subject, and produced a gargantuan
1,000 page Environmental Study to assess the possible consequences
of the pipeline, which would bring oil from the tar sands of
Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast of the United States. As
Rep. Joe Barton of Texas ruefully noted, the U.S.
“fought and won World War II” in a shorter amount of
time.
Besides causing a fissure between the President and some
of his key union allies, the Keystone issue has also ruptured the
once-strong Green/Labor alliance between environmental and union
organizations, and has even pitted union against union. LUINA
announced on January 20 that it left the so called “BlueGreen
Alliance,” citing “Job-killing attacks on the Keystone XL pipeline
by some of the alliance’s labor and environmentalist
members.”
The Alliance describes
itself as “a national, strategic partnership
between labor unions and environmental organizations dedicated to
expanding the number and quality of jobs in the green
economy.”
While LIUNA has left the Alliance, many unions remain
committed to the partnership between the Democratic Party’s two
most powerful special interests and staunchly oppose the pipeline.
O’Sullivan has called this emerging divide “as deep and wide as the
Grand Canyon.”
To these unions, the LIUNA President said he was “repulsed
by some of our supposed brothers and sisters lining up with job
killers like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense
Council to destroy the lives of working men and women.”
Obama made the choice to kill Keystone as a sop to
environmentalists, gambling that labor leaders, enticed by the
promise of continued political favors, will eventually forgive and
forget. Maybe they will, but will the thousands of rank-and-file
union workers who are unemployed or underemployed forget the
decision that has cost an estimated 20,000
jobs?
Not likely.
