‘People Are Pissed’: Keystone Pipeline Sparks Labor Civil War

Some of President Barack Obama’s biggest labor supporters are fuming over his Keystone XL pipeline verdict, but they may be angrier at their labor brethren than at the president himself.

Unions representing construction workers that would directly benefit from building the pipeline feel stabbed in the back by unions that joined environmental groups to congratulate Obama for killing the project.

“People are pissed,” said one U.S. labor official who supports the proposed TransCanada pipeline. “The emotions are really, really raw right now. This is a big deal.”

“It’s repulsive, it’s disgusting and we’re not going to stand idly by,” Laborers’ International Union of North America General President Terry O’Sullivan told POLITICO. “The rules have changed. So we’ll react accordingly.”

O’Sullivan said the first move will be to pull his union out of the BlueGreen Alliance — a coalition of environmental groups and labor unions that represented nearly all of the groups that signed a joint statement backing Obama. (The BlueGreen Alliance itself did not take a position on the pipeline.)

“Unions and environmental groups that have no equity in the work have kicked our members in the teeth,” O’Sullivan said. “And anger is an understatement as to how we feel about it. We’re not sitting at the same table as people that destroy our members’ lives.”