A top union leader slammed the Senate’s rejection of a bill to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, calling it a “vote against all construction workers” and saying that Democratic lawmakers “cowardly” knuckled under to pressure from the White House. Other unions also criticized the Senate.
Terry O’Sullivan, president of the 500,000-member Laborers’ International Union of North America, made the comments in a scathing statement posted late Tuesday after the Senate failed to break a filibuster on a pro-Keystone bill by a 59-41 vote.
“Today’s failure of the U.S. Senate to authorize the Keystone XL pipeline is a vote against all construction workers, a vote to keep good, middle-class jobs locked out of reach and a vote to continue to rely on nations that hate America for our energy,” O’Sullivan said.
He added that the White House had “politicized” the approval process and as a result, “41 Senate Democrats cowardly stepped in line, throwing one of their own colleagues, Sen. Mary Landrieu, along with hard-working blue-collar construction workers, under the bus.” Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, had been counting on approval to boost her chances in a Senate runoff election.
LIUNA has been the most vocal of the several construction-related unions that have backed the project. The union hoped that its members would get many of the more than 42,000 jobs the State Department estimated would be created by building the pipeline. The project would build a 1,700-mile long pipeline to transfer oil from Canada’s tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico. It would cost an estimated $7.6 billion to construct.
Others supporting project include the AFL-CIO labor federation’s 3 million-member Building and Construction Trades Department, which issued a statement Wednesday saying it was “disappointed” by the vote and thanking Landrieu and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, for backing the project. The 1.4 million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters included the vote as part of its daily “war on workers” news roundup.
O’Sullivan has been pushing for the administration to approve the project since 2011. At the time, it appeared that President Obama was leaning toward green-lighting it, but the administration pulled back after environmental groups made opposing the pipeline a major cause. The State Department is still conducting its review of it.
The project is controversial within organized labor, though, as other unions are trying to forge alliances with environmentalist groups. The AFL-CIO has not taken an official stance on the project, though its president, Richard Trumka, indicated during a press conference earlier this month that it was one area where the Congress and the White House ought to work together.
