06/04/2020
USAS: Police Out of the House of Labor -- A Demand to the AFL-CIO
United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), the nation’s largest student-led direct action campaign organization, is in solidarity with the uprisings for Black lives across the country and globe. and we won’t stop fighting until liberation. George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police is not just one isolated awful event, but an everyday reality that Black people face. The brutal lynchings of Black people must end! Say their names: and the countless others who should still be with us today. Police don’t make our communities safe and have no place in our labor movement. USAS demands that the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) disaffiliate with the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA).
The issue of police brutality and rampant anti-Blackness is nothing new. Policing in the U.S. started with white supremacist groups acting as slave patrols. Since then, police have continued to suppress, intimidate, and murder people with every movement for justice - from the Stonewall Riots which were led by Black and brown trans people, to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, to union strikes, to protests, and more. The fact that “Black lives matter” needs to be said over and over again just goes to show how much work we still have to do -- from participating in protests, to having conversations about anti-Blackness with our families (both white AND non-Black POC), to supporting Black-led organizing efforts. Enough is enough!
We know that the struggle takes many forms. We want the police out of schools, universities to cut ties with law enforcement including campus police, military equipment and surveillance technology out of our communities, the severing of police training with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and more. We also want a better labor movement. There is no worker justice without Black liberation. We must understand how these struggles are intimately connected, and to win we will need to fight together. To be clear, Black workers have been and continue to be crucial leaders in the labor movement. We commend ATU Local 1005 bus drivers in Minneapolis, ATU Local 627 bus drivers in Cincinnati, and TWU Local 100 bus drivers in New York City for refusing to transport police and arrested protestors, among other unions, locals, and worker organizations that have taken a stand. As the Minnesota AFL-CIO wrote in their statement on June 2nd, “There is no room for white supremacists in our movement.” We agree, and we also assert that there is no room for police in our movement -- some of the biggest perpetrators of white supremacist violence.
Police unions have no place in the labor movement. They actively threaten the solidarity we have, and must continue to build, for complete societal transformation. By bargaining for contracts that keep abusers, murderers, and white supremacists in positions of power, police unions are inherently opposed to the interests of workers that the labor movement is meant to protect. Abolishing police unions is an integral step in the fight for worker justice and Black liberation. When workers are on strike, protesting, and on the picket line, where are the cops?
They aren’t joining the picket line en masse, instead, they’re called upon by the bosses to protect capital. It is clear in these situations that police are never on the side of working people, but always on the side of the oppressors keeping workers down. Police say they protect and serve, but who? What they’re really protecting is capital and the ruling class. Why? Because they are protected in turn. Cops don’t want to lose their most coveted possession: impunity.
Police union collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) serve to protect their impunity, and this is unacceptable. CBAs are supposed to protect the wages and conditions of the working class, not the actions of the police officers terrorizing and murdering the working class -- Black people in particular! Workers face consequences for their actions and cops do not. For example, why are police unions so easily able to bargain for contract provisions that block effective investigations into their violence, when food service workers, domestic workers, farmworkers, and countless others are constantly fighting tooth and nail for just the ability to be covered by a CBA? Cops are not workers! Unions are for workers. The bottom line is unions aren’t for cops.
Since we know that police unions are illegitimate and directly oppose the goals of the labor movement, we see no reason why organizations such as the AFL-CIO continue to affiliate with the IUPA. Police unions have no place in the House of Labor, and as the official student partner to the AFL-CIO, USAS demands that the AFL-CIO disaffiliate with the IUPA. We call on others to join us. As stated previously, some unions have already taken action to support Black lives, which shows the potential for workers at large to understand the necessity of Black liberation to the struggle for labor justice. There’s so much potential to build a better labor movement; let’s start by cleaning house.
