When Vice President Kamala Harris met with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 16, she was hoping to walk away with a major union endorsement. The Democratic nominee offered plenty of reasons why she was better for labor than Donald Trump, but she returned to one issue more than once.

She reinforced the pension thing over and over, said John Palmer, a member of the Teamsters executive board who was in the meeting.

In 2021, Democrats attached an expensive pension bailout to the American Rescue Plan , the $1.9 trillion stimulus package they muscled through the Senate on a party-line vote at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. The inclusion of an estimated $74 to $91 billion to shore up troubled multiemployer pension funds was a small legislative miracle for the Teamsters and other unions and it never would have happened without Harris.

At the time, the Senate had 50 members caucusing with Democrats and 50 with Republicans, with Harris, as president of the chamber, serving as the tie-breaker to end deadlocks. She cast the deciding vote in a crucial step known as the motion to proceed , allowing the stimulus package to advance with zero Republican support.

But two days after the meeting with Harris, Teamsters President Sean OBrien announced that the 1.3 million-member union would not be backing Harris or Trump. The controversial non-endorsement effectively boosted the Trump campaign, since it marked the first time since 1992 that the Teamsters didnt support a Democrat for the White House. OBrien also gave Trump a lift by releasing internal polls showing members preferred the former Republican president over Harris.

Many OBrien critics are angry that the union could look past the pension rescue, to say nothing of Trumps hostility to unions during his first term. The Teamsters Central States pension fund was the biggest plan facing insolvency, with thousands of Teamsters facing benefit cuts so steep it would threaten their retirements.

The Biden-Harris administration carried out their promise to solve the Teamsters pension problems, Jim Hoffa, the unions former longtime president who preceded OBrien, said in an interview. That alone should be enough to cement a commitment from the IBT.

Local Teamsters councils covering a majority of the unions members across the U.S. have since come out for Harris, often citing the pension issue, among others.

Kara Deniz, a Teamsters spokesperson, said there were a number of factors that played into the executive boards decision to stay out of the presidential race. She cited conflicting surveys of Teamsters membership: Early town hall straw polls suggesting members backed President Joe Biden when he was the presumptive Democratic nominee, and later online and phone polls showing they backed Trump over Harris after she replaced Biden atop the ticket. (Town halls would tend to draw a lot of union activists, which could partly explain the discrepancy.)

Deniz also said the union couldnt secure important commitments from Harris in their Washington meeting. That included a guarantee to keep Biden antitrust chief Lina Khan atop the Federal Trade Commission, and a promise not to intervene in potential Teamster work stoppages like the rail strike Biden and Congress preempted in 2022 .

She said the Teamsters shouldnt be beholden to Harris or Democrats just because they bailed out the pension funds.

If a party does one thing, does this mean that we owe a single party forever? she said. There were a lot of other issues that were important that were discussed.