Jim Cassidy, business manager of the Insulators Local No. 2 union just outside Pittsburgh, knows Joe Biden as a friend of labor.
He keeps a photo of himself with Biden in his office from when the former vice president visited Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, in 2018 to campaign for then-U.S. House candidate Conor Lamb, a centrist Democrat.
It’s a visual reminder of Biden’s longtime support for unionized workers who build things.
But Cassidy, 55, is torn over whether Biden the Democratic presidential nominee would be an enemy of the fossil fuel industry whose workers he represents, workers who install insulation material on piping and boilers in natural gas plants.
“Joe Biden is really one of us. I always loved the man,” said Cassidy, a registered Democrat. “He scares me now. Is he embracing the new Green Deal or whatever they are calling it? He needs to get some stuff straight.”
Cassidy said he will vote for Biden, trusting Biden will “come around” to recognize how the natural gas fracking boom over the past decade has been a “godsend” in western and northeastern Pennsylvania, replacing the fading coal and steel industries.
But Cassidy’s concerns are shared by leaders of other building trade unions based in these closely watched regions of Pennsylvania, a key swing state.
“I am completely shocked and stunned about the language coming from Joe Biden, allegedly a union guy,” said Jim Snell, business agent for Steamfitters Local 420 in southeastern Pennsylvania, whose 4,600 members install piping systems in oil refineries, natural gas plants, and infrastructure projects. “The Democratic Party has kicked the building trades to the curb, and they are all in with the environment groups.”
Biden moves left
In a series of conversations with the Washington Examiner over recent weeks, the union officials, all registered Democrats, expressed alarm at Biden’s shift to the left on energy policy while giving him some benefit of the doubt that they would not grant to more liberal candidates such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, who pledged to ban fracking during the campaign.
Biden has promised to end new fracking leases on federal lands, where only 13% of natural gas was produced in 2017. But he has struggled to overcome a gaffe during an exchange with Sanders in a March debate, in which Biden declared “no new fracking.”
“With Biden, there is some level of thought that he is saying certain things because it’s a line you need to walk at this point to get elected. There are folks giving him that leeway,” said Jeff Nobers, executive director of the Builders Guild of Western Pennsylvania, representing 60,000 workers and contractors in construction trades.
Biden, seeking to energize young and liberal voters, is doubling down on an agenda to build a clean energy economy of the future that transitions away from fossil fuels, viewing the recovery from the coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity to respond to climate change.
Up by double digits in recent polls of Pennsylvania, Biden is not only speaking to constituencies such as the affluent, educated Philadelphia suburbs that helped spark a blue wave against President Trump in the 2018 midterms and 2019 local elections.
[Related: Biden lurch left on climate risks alienating moderates]
Keeping unions in mind
Biden is betting he can peel off some white residents in blue-collar union counties around Pittsburgh who once voted Democratic but defected to Trump over Hillary Clinton, delivering the state to Trump by less than 1 percentage point in 2016.
He’s playing up his local roots, visiting his childhood home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, this month and positioning union workers as beneficiaries of his revamped climate change agenda he unveiled this week that he said would spur millions of new jobs building wind turbines, energy-efficient homes and buildings, railroad lines, and electric vehicles.
The word “union” appears 32 times in the climate plan, with Biden pledging to spend $2 trillion on clean energy initiatives over four years in order to eliminate carbon from power plants by 2035 as part of a “once-in-a-century opportunity to jolt new life into our economy.”
Former Rep. Ryan Costello, a centrist who represented the Philadelphia suburbs until 2018, said that Biden could win Pennsylvania “convincingly” if he can persuade some union voters who voted for Trump.
“Building trade voters have replaced suburban women as Pennsylvania’s swing voters,” Costello said. “I can tell you how suburban women voters are voting. I can’t tell you how building trader voters are. He doesn’t need all those votes back. He just needs to make sure Trump has to compete for them still.”
Skeptics of Biden’s ‘half-truths’
Shawn Steffe, business agent for Boilermakers Local 154 in Pittsburgh, is not buying Biden’s outreach and is distrustful about promises by Democrats to help workers in high-paying fossil fuel jobs transition to new ones in clean energy. Steffe said he’s noticed Biden’s association with Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who collaborated with Biden on a joint policy task.
“Biden needs to steer his car out of the far-left ditch back to the middle if he wants us to support him,” Steffe said. “It’s not happening. I don’t see my members voting for someone who will take away their jobs and pensions over something that has a lot of half-truths to it.”
Steffe, a 53-year-old “lifelong Democrat,” voted for Trump and intends to again, overlooking the president’s adherence to a Republican economic agenda that he acknowledges is broadly unfriendly to organized labor.
The more than 1,500 active members of his union install, maintain, and repair boilers in coal and natural gas plants, refineries, steel mills, and petrochemical plants, but none in the wind and solar industry, which he says is not prominent in western Pennsylvania.
“If I don’t have a job, it doesn’t matter what I fight for on the union end with collective bargaining,” Steffe said. “If I don’t have a job, I don’t have a seat at the table.”
Steffe’s skepticism of clean energy jobs mirrors concerns by the lobbying group American Petroleum Institute, which argues the renewable sector largely lacks union representation and that oil and gas jobs pay more.
Pennsylvania hosted more than 90,000 clean energy jobs in 2019, covering wind, solar, energy efficiency, according to the group Environmental Entrepreneurs, but API says the oil and gas industry supports more than 350,000 related jobs in the state.
Snell, a 50-year-old from the Philadelphia suburbs who started working for the steamfitters out of high school, admits renewable energy is gaining ground on natural gas, a fossil fuel cleaner than coal that provided 38% of U.S. electricity in 2019.
But he worries policies to transition off fossil fuels too fast will hamstring steel plants and other large manufacturers in Pennsylvania that rely on “baseload” power.
“I am no dummy. I see what is coming down the pike with renewables. But you have to have that bridge natural gas has,” Snell said. “The industry might be a little ugly sometimes, but it’s needed.”
Biden’s trust factor
Darrin Kelly, a firefighter and president of the Allegheny County Labor Council, likes to remind fellow union leaders of Trump’s “damaging” agenda toward them. He blames Trump for overseeing declining workplace inspections by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, implementing tax cuts that have benefited large corporations, and giving contradictory positions on minimum wage laws.
Kelly’s union represents a broader and larger swath of nearly 100,000 workers across Pittsburgh and its immediate suburbs, including firefighters, service workers, government employees, and some oil and gas workers.
Kelly, 44, backed Clinton, who won Allegheny County, and plans to vote for Biden, whom he credited with including unions in his clean energy plans and promoting new opportunities for fossil fuel workers in jobs such as plugging abandoned oil and gas wells.
“I will say this with complete certainty — no one has worked harder for the American worker than Joe Biden,” Kelly said. “The fact he is clearly mentioning protecting the workers in these sectors is evidence he wants to make sure they have a future. “
Kelly is not alone.
The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and United Auto Workers are among the unions that have endorsed both Biden and his new climate plan, with the former saying the Biden clean energy agenda would create jobs in sectors such as construction, utility, telecommunications, manufacturing, and railroad.
Mixed reviews for Trump
Trump has not delivered on campaign promises to revive the coal industry, union leaders acknowledge, unable to stop an economic-driven shift to cheaper and cleaner natural gas and renewables. But he has never stopped speaking to fossil fuel workers, promoting oil and gas as part of an “energy dominance agenda” enabled by easing of permitting rules.
“Within this region, the perception is Donald Trump is a supporter of this industry and Joe Biden is not,” said Jim Kunz, business manager of the International Union of Operating Engineers in Local 66, covering Pittsburgh, representing nearly 8,000 workers operating cranes, backhoes, and bulldozers building pipelines and power plants.
Kunz, a 65-year-old “lifelong Democrat,” won’t be voting for Trump, though.
He faults the president for incorrectly taking credit for the development of a $6 billion petrochemical plant in western Pennsylvania, known by locals as “the cracker,” that will convert ethane, a natural gas byproduct, into polyethylene, a form of plastic.
Project developer Shell approved the petrochemical plant in the Obama administration.
“The president talked the great fight, but he has done absolutely nothing to create additional employment in western Pennsylvania,” Kunz said.
Perception beats reality
But Kunz said he won’t vote for Biden either, arguing he is “going down the same road” as Clinton, whom unions criticized for saying she would put coal miners and companies “out of business.”
Biden has been less explicit about banning particular fossil fuels and is even promising to invest in carbon capture, a technology that can capture emissions of coal and gas plants that has not been widely scaled.
Kunz, however, fears perceptions of Biden among building trade workers are baked in, amplified by local television ads from Trump misleadingly accusing Biden of wanting to ban fracking.
“The average working person doesn’t read every newspaper or be a political junkie,” Kunz said. “They get everything in 30-second sound bites. Right now, his 30-second sound bites are not very good.”
“I don’t know if that’s a perception that will be easy to change,” Kunz added. “It’s about perception. The world doesn’t work on reality.”
