(The following story by Chris King appeared on the St. Louis American website on August 21. Herbert Harris Jr. is Chairman of the BLET’s Washington D.C. Legislative Board.)
ST. LOUIS — The Teamsters National Black Caucus rolled into St. Louis this week with a message of unity and the determination to help elect Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States.
“We need to organize workers, which makes us powerful. We need to elect a president who cares about working people,” C. Thomas Keegel said Tuesday morning in the opening General Session.
Keegel is general secretary-treasurer of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which counts some 1.5 million members. One-third of those members are black, according to the Teamsters National Black Caucus, and some 650 of those black Teamsters are in St. Louis this week for the caucus’ 33rd Annual Educational Conference.
One of the union’s most powerful leaders, Keegel is not a black Teamster, but he spoke as forcefully for Obama as any of the African Americans who followed him at the podium.
“Our union President Jim Hoffa is going to the convention as a superdelegate. We know who he is going to vote for, don’t we?” Keegel said.
The Teamsters endorsed Obama relatively early, on Feb. 20. Only the 1.9 million-member Service Employees International Union and the 1.3-million member United Food and Commercial Workers Union endorsed him earlier.
Keegel also attacked presumptive Republican nominee John McCain in salty language.
“He wants to take away employers’ tax deductions for providing health insurance to their employees,” Keegel said of McCain. “That’s one hell of a thing for a maverick to want!”
Held on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, with all eyes focused on the Nov. 4 General Election, this year’s black caucus conference has a tinge of history.
“It’s ironic to be in the center of the country as we are battling for the heart of the world,” said Herbert Harris Jr., chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen in the District of Columbia, which has been a division of the Teamsters since 2004.
With that merger, Harris witnessed directly the power of growing a union’s membership.
“When we showed up at the table with your thunder and lightning, guess who started talking?” Harris said.
The answer is Amtrak, which in April reached an agreement with the Teamsters Rail Conference that included precedent-setting wage increases.
Harris – an African-American operator of a high-speed Amtrak train – said the expanded union gives the black caucus added leverage.
Harris said, “Our merger gives us the opportunity to move our union forward on issues of diversity, access and equal opportunity.”
Harris issued a cry of urgency that was echoed by other speakers, before and after him.
“If you were never political before, this is the year you have to be political,” Harris said.
“We are asking people to do something they have never done before. We are asking them to cast their vote for someone who looks like us as president of the United States. They have never done that before.”
Harris, who does political work for the union in the nation’s capital, listed states typically dismissed as Republican – Virginia, Colorado – that are now “in play” for Obama and the Democrats.
Harris said, “We are not talking about a class of people knocking at the door – we are talking about them sitting at the head of the table.”
Terry Freeman, chairman of the Teamsters National Black Caucus, prepared his members for the struggle ahead with a reference to the founders of the caucus who fought for black inclusion in the union.
“Our founders were people who understood things were not quite right, not where they should be, and they took bold steps,” Freeman said.
“You need to go back home and take bold steps. You need to go home and organize, register people to vote and get people to the polls.”
The conference continues through Sunday at the Crowne Plaza hotel downtown.