At Chicago’s Democratic National Convention, we’ve seen a high-powered lineup of speakers take the stage. Everyone from the old guard of the party, represented by the Clintons and Obamas, to relatively new progressive leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have united to endorse Kamala Harris for president. One of the most consequential speeches of the entire event, though, came from United Auto Workers leader Shawn Fain on Monday. Fain came out swinging, branding Donald Trump a “scab”—the worst four-letter word there is, to a union member—and blasting the “corporate greed” that Trump and his cronies represent. He didn’t hold back in his support for the Vice President, either, saying: “In 2024, who will stand with the working class in our fight for justice? Kamala Harris.”

The UAW has almost a million active and retired members (about 40 percent of whom swing between supporting the two parties), so Fain’s word carries a lot of weight in this election. That’s especially true in the all-important swing state of Michigan, where he led the UAW to victory in a historic strike against the Big Three automakers last year. But Fain wasn’t the only labor leader to speak at the DNC on Monday. Six others did as well, including the leaders of the Service Workers International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LiUNA), the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), the Communications Workers of America (CWA), and the AFL-CIO. Together, they represent tens of millions of American workers—and thus, voters. In a race that’s still disturbingly close, their endorsement could make all the difference. 

To see the Democratic Party—which has been shedding working-class support for decades—embrace organized labor on the biggest possible stage is encouraging. It shows that maybe, just maybe, Kamala Harris and the advisors around her recognize that the Democrats’ 2016 strategy of “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs” was a losing bet. The choice of Tim Walz, who’s pretty pro-union himself, as Harris’s running mate is also a positive sign. 

But is it actually true that Harris will “stand with the working class in our fight for justice,” as Fain said? Despite all the pro-worker rhetoric soaring around Chicago, there’s still room for doubt. It’s worth noting that the DNC's opening night also included a speech from California Senator Laphonza Butler, who was once a labor leader with the SEIU, but later made an abrupt heel-turn to work as a corporate lawyer for companies like Airbnb and Uber. During the time Butler worked for them, the latter company was trying to prevent its drivers from being legally considered “employees” in California, and thus deny them labor rights and benefits. Butler is now in Harris’s “inner circle,” according to the Washington Post, and Harris’s brother-in-law—a major campaign fundraiser—is also an executive at Uber. So it’s safe to say the Vice President has closer ties with the bosses in that particular fight. 

To her credit, Harris has pledged to pass the PRO Act, which would dramatically expand workers’ rights to organize and join unions. But she also co-sponsored Medicare for All a few years ago, only to abandon her support for universal healthcare when it became inconvenient. That creates a serious trust issue, as there’s no guarantee the same thing won't happen again. Meanwhile, the rest of Harris’s labor policy is pretty vague. She has promised to “raise the minimum wage,” but so far, hasn’t said by how much or when she’ll do it, both of which are critical points. (In 2021, infamously, Harris refused to override the Senate “parliamentarian” to raise the federal minimum to $15 an hour, so her track record on this issue isn’t great.) She also refuses to say whether she’ll bow to pressure from wealthy donors to fire Lina Khan, the monopoly-busting head of President Biden’s Federal Trade Commission. On other key labor policies, like banning mandatory anti-union meetings in the workplace, she has no stated position whatsoever. There seems to be a policy of deliberate ambiguity in place, in which Harris and her spokespeople will say all the right pro-working-class things, but won’t make too many specific commitments. That’s worrying. 

It’s also noteworthy that certain labor unions were not represented at the DNC. There was nothing, for instance, from either the upstart Amazon Labor Union or Starbucks Workers United, which have been two of the biggest success stories for organized labor in recent years. The exclusion of the Teamsters is also glaring. According to Axios, Teamster president Sean O’Brien made a request to speak at the DNC, but was “ghosted,” receiving no response at all. 

It’s likely that the Democrats are unhappy with O’Brien for speaking at the Republican National Convention last month, and to be fair, plenty of people in the labor movement feel that was a bad move. But even so, the solution was for the DNC to make its own pitch, offering a better deal for workers and winning the Teamster leader back to the Democratic side—not to snub him and the estimated 1.3 million members of his union entirely. That suggests that the party’s commitment to labor is conditional and transactional. It shows that the DNC wants labor leaders to support Democrats uncritically, no matter what, and isn’t too concerned with what they might want. Again, worrying. 

It might have been wise for Fain and his fellow union leaders to demand some concrete concessions on policy from the Harris campaign before handing over their valuable endorsements. Speeches are nice, but they’re no substitute for laws on the books and money in workers’ pockets. If Harris becomes president and then governs as a standard-issue corporate Democrat, it’s the union leaders who stood behind her during the election who will find their credibility to their members damaged. Endorsing her campaign is a major gamble. Let’s hope it pays off.