“She will stand strong for the workers of America by fighting to reject job-killing trade deals,” Teamsters President James Hoffa said in a statement. | AP Photo Teamsters endorse Hillary Clinton

The 1.4-million-member Teamsters endorsed Hillary Clinton, the union announced Friday, in a unanimous vote by its executive board.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is the nation's fifth-largest union, and the last of the country's labor giants to fall behind the Democratic presidential nominee — well behind the National Education Association, the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Teachers, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which all endorsed Clinton in 2015. Unlike these other unions, the Teamsters do not consistently endorse the Democratic candidate for president.


“She will stand strong for the workers of America by fighting to reject job-killing trade deals, enforcing labor laws, and working to provide retirement security for millions of people who have sacrificed so much for the chance to retire with dignity,” Teamsters President James P. Hoffa said in a statement.

The endorsement comes after Clinton supported the Treasury Department's refusal earlier this year to cut pension benefits for Teamsters retirees at the request of trustees for the union's Central States Pension Fund. The trustees had sought permission to make the cuts to keep the fund solvent. Their application was filed under a bipartisan 2014 law intended to stabilize Central States and other so-called multiemployer pensions in financial distress.

At the time of the Treasury decision, former Rep. George Miller (D.-Calif.), who cosponsored the 2014 rescue bill, called it "a calculated response to sort of stop the discussion in this political year." For her part, Clinton called on Congress to “come together around an alternative solution." But the problem remains unresolved and will likely end up on Clinton's desk, should she become president.

The Teamsters' inconsistent support of Democratic presidential nominees is a legacy of Robert F. Kennedy's aggressive investigation of mob ties to Hoffa's father, Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa, when Kennedy was general counsel of the Senate Rackets Committee in the 1950s and, subsequently, attorney general. The elder Hoffa served a four-year prison sentence for jury tampering and fraud, then disappeared in 1975 in what is presumed to have been a mob hit.

Richard Nixon's 1971 pardon for the elder Hoffa won the GOP 25 years of Teamsters presidential endorsements (with the exception of Gerald Ford in 1976). The union finally endorsed a Democrat, Bill Clinton, in 1992, possibly because of an investigation initiated by the Justice Department under President George H.W. Bush that put the Teamsters under strict federal supervision through a consent decree . The Justice Department announced last year that it wished to phase out the consent decree, and a federal judge promptly assented. The union made no endorsement in 1996.

The Teamsters became more reliably pro-Democrat starting in 2000, when they endorsed Al Gore. They subsequently endorsed John Kerry in 2004, and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misstated the size of the Teamsters union. It is the fifth largest union, not the fourth.

