In 2012, seeking not merely to preserve its members’ jobs but also to halt the steady drain of needed services from the city’s South Side, the Chicago Teachers Union came up with a novel—if, in hindsight, obvious—strategy to counter Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s proposal to shutter 50 inner-city schools. The union formed an alliance with parents and community activists, brought them to the bargaining table, and recast its protests as those of an entire community, an entire section of the city and its electorate.
The strategy worked. Many of the schools were kept open. And since then, a number of other public-employee unions have also repositioned their struggles, and in some sense, their mission. The name now affixed to this is Bargaining for the Common Good: working jointly with communities to use the collective-bargaining process to secure more public services from local governments, not just higher wages and benefits. Since 2018, striking teachers in particular have worked with community allies to formulate demands and thereby win not just the usual contractual gains but also greater health, child care, and other services for neighborhood residents and their families.
Whereas union gains once resulted from the high level of representation of particular industries (“density,” in union parlance), unions’ decline over the past half-century has left labor scrambling for new ways to amass power. Bargaining for the Common Good offers one such avenue. In the words of American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, “community is the new density.”
The strategy is more easily applied to unions in the public sector. One group of public-sector unions has gone in the completely opposite direction, however. I refer, of course, to police unions, which have largely employed a strategy we might term Bargaining Against the Common Good.
And until the last couple of weeks, they have gotten away with it.
Most police unions have successfully shielded their members from facing any serious consequences for racist, brutal, violent behavior. George Floyd’s indicted murderer, Derek Chauvin, had had 18 civilian complaints lodged against him; Tou Thao, who has been indicted as Chauvin’s accomplice, piled up six. The tools that police unions employ to protect members, down to and including Chauvin and Thao, include contractual provisions making it exceptionally difficult to investigate, discharge, or penalize officers, and campaign contributions to elected officials to make sure that the police’s hold on policy—and sometimes, the polity—goes largely unchecked. Some police unions go further, openly promoting a culture of violence and racism; more do so tacitly, implicitly, with codes of silence, winks and nods.
But public support for the police is clearly crumbling, as a host of polls taken in the past week make very clear, and nowhere more so than in the cities they patrol. Three factors have played a decisive role. The invention and deployment of iPhone cameras and body cams have made previously unseen police violence now universally visible. Large American cities have moved well to the left in recent years as racial minorities and millennials have come to dominate many populations and electorates; in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and other cities during the past two years, voters have elected radical district attorneys, who ran on platforms of decarceration, police reform, and reducing indictments.
Even as cities have been moving left, however, the police forces patrolling them have been moving right—and that’s the third factor in the estranging of the police from the broader public. These opposite-direction movements are a kind of synecdoche for the larger polarization besetting America. Police forces are disproportionately composed of working-class whites, and like a clear majority of that population, they have become President Trump’s most ardent supporters. (Since Trump has a long history of encouraging cops to become more violent and using violent rhetoric himself, we might view the cop-Trump alliance as an extreme form of identity politics.)
As a survey in The Washington Post documented, most big-city police forces are a good deal whiter than those cities’ residents; in the Bronx and the D.C. suburb of Prince George’s County, for instance, the police forces are three times as white as the people they patrol. The fact that many cops don’t actually live in the cities they police (only 8 percent of Minneapolis officers live in Minneapolis) contributes even more to the Grand Canyon–sized rift between city cops and cities.
So how should unions increasingly embracing Bargaining for the Common Good respond to unions that have long embraced Bargaining Against the Common Good? What should a union movement that is existentially committed to driving Donald Trump from power do about police unions that enable many thousands of officers imbued with Trump’s racism and proclivity for violence to roam the nation’s cities as though their residents were a conquered enemy?
It’s complicated. For many unions, it’s too complicated.
LAST WEEK, AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka hosted a Zoom gathering of union leaders to discuss America’s plague of racism and how labor has worked and will keep working to dispel it. The union presidents offered generally cogent presentations on how to overcome America’s structural racial inequality, but they said relatively little about police brutality as such, and nothing about police unions until one question from the press forced the issue.
This is Bargaining for the Common Good: working jointly with communities to use the collective-bargaining process to secure more public services from local governments.
“The short answer is not to disengage [with those unions] and just condemn,” Trumka said. “The answer is to totally re-engage and educate.” More helpfully, AFT President Weingarten said that union contracts should never shield miscreants from consequences, and allusively suggested, without getting into specifics, that the decision of her union’s massive New York local to speed the investigative and disciplinary process for those of its members accused of malfeasance might serve as a model for other unions.
Yesterday, the AFL-CIO, apparently having concluded that reticence wasn’t an adequate response, took a stance that will ultimately (or sooner) prove to be unsustainable. Convening a rare meeting of its General Board—which includes the leaders of all its member unions, big and small—it passed a three-part resolution. The first two parts (calling for the resignations of Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley; embracing many of the police reforms laid out in the congressional Democrats’ new bill) were uncontroversial.
The third part, however, plunges the Federation into deeper waters. It asserts, quite reasonably, that cops, like all workers, should retain their right to collectively bargain. But it also rejects calls that the AFL-CIO should expel the one police union (the International Union of Police Associations, IUPA) that is directly affiliated with the Federation, or that the several AFL-CIO member unions that have police locals should similarly end those affiliations. In the past couple of days, two small unions—the Association of Flight Attendants and the Writers Guild of America, East—had called for the Federation to end IUPA’s affiliation. Instead, the General Board decided that working to improve its affiliated police unions was the better option.
Many of the union leaders who took this position understand all too well just how oppressive routine police practices are to their African American members and their families. Why, then, did they opt to keep the cops within the fold? In a few of these unions, police make up a nontrivial share of their dues-paying members, though in no union other than IUPA does that share exceed 7 or 8 percent. Another reason is that right-wing critics of public-sector unions—a group that includes virtually the entire Republican Party and its media allies—see the current loss of police-union legitimacy as a way to expand their attack on all public-employee unions. As an editorial that ran this Monday in the Washington Examiner put it, “Like other public-sector unions, teachers’ unions, in particular, police unions have become a powerful machine that defends officers against investigation, discipline, and dismissal, even when they deserve it.”
The Trumpian right loves cops, but they hate the teachers unions, AFSCME and SEIU even more, since those unions provide perhaps the largest and most effective liberal voter mobilization programs in virtually every election. When Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker effectively stripped public-employee unions of their collective-bargaining rights, he exempted police and firefighter unions from his diktat. But if Republicans need to throw those unions under the bus, too, in order to rid themselves of the other public-sector unions, they might just do it.
As many police forces have drifted rightward with the Trumpian tide, some police unions have become breeding groups for a Trumpian hatred of residents they police.
The vast majority of police unions do not belong to the AFL-CIO, its local federations, or its affiliates. Still, the precedent of stripping the right to bargain collectively from any group of public employees—at a time when some on the left are calling for withdrawing those rights from cops, and also when the Supreme Court has declared war against all public-worker unions with its Janus decision—makes some union leaders nervous, and rightly so.
However, if police unions have devised contracts that have allowed members to get away with murder—sometimes, literally—the solution is to make the elected officials they bargain with stop ratifying provisions that preclude police accountability, and start demanding actual disciplinary practices. This does not have to come at the cost of denying the right of these workers, or any workers, to bargain for wages and benefits.
Unions don’t make unionized cops more racist, abusive, violent, and sadistic than their non-union counterparts. The record of non-union police forces in the South and of America’s police before the 1970s, when cops and other public employees won bargaining rights, is every bit as racist and brutal, if not more so. Moreover, many police departments stink from the head down. The fact that only 14 of the nation’s 18,000 police departments chose to participate in the Obama administration’s signature police reform initiative is the result of decisions by mayors and police commissioners and chiefs, even if they were influenced by rank-and-file resistance from cops, whether unionized or not. Some particularly dangerous police practices—such as “kettling” (completely surrounding a public demonstration with heavily armed officers, making it impossible for anyone to leave and raising the possibilities for a violent encounter)—are devised by senior officials, not union members.
But if police unions don’t turn cops into dangerous thugs, they do enable many such thugs to enjoy long and violent careers. And as many police forces have drifted rightward with the Trumpian tide, some police unions have become breeding groups for a Trumpian hatred of residents they police. That seems a fair description of the Minneapolis union, and there are hundreds like it.
Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo
Jamie McBride, director of the union that represents Los Angeles Police Department officers, comments on the leadership of L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, who has promised to slash $150 million from the police budget, June 5, 2020, in Los Angeles.
While a clear majority of union leaders realize this, only some have begun to act on their realization. Last Wednesday, a group of Los Angeles progressive leaders—including the heads of the city’s unions of teachers, supermarket employees, hotel workers, janitors, home care workers, and nonteaching school employees—sent a letter to Mayor Eric Garcetti demanding he redirect $250 million he had allotted to the police department in his just-proposed budget to social service programs in the city’s minority communities. Garcetti convened a meeting with those leaders, and the following day, acting in concert with city council members, agreed to the $250 million boost, funding it by taking $150 million from his police budget and $100 million more from other sources.
The Seattle AFL-CIO (formal name: the MLK Labor Council) has initiated a kindred action. It asked the mayor and city council to reconsider the city’s financial support for policing, and threw down a gauntlet to the city’s cops. In 2014, the Council had admitted the city’s police union to its ranks. Last Thursday, the Council issued a challenge to the union: Initiate anti-racism education and, more importantly, eliminate language in future contracts allowing members to skirt responsibility for their actions. If the union failed to do these things, the Council promised to expel it.
Seattle’s action could have set the pattern for the national AFL-CIO—publicly setting clear standards that IUPA and other affiliated police locals would have to meet to retain their Federation membership. Instead, the General Board’s statement “backs” the Seattle Council’s action but doesn’t set it as a template for the national Federation itself. It should have.
It’s not as if the AFL-CIO had been monitoring what IUPA—a hitherto obscure Sarasota-based organization of police unions from small cities and towns—was up to before the past week. What we know of the union’s politics is that it endorsed President Trump for re-election last September; what we know of its ability to fly beneath the radar is that no one at the national AFL-CIO even knew about this endorsement until many months later.
The national AFL-CIO has expelled member unions in the past, most notably the Teamsters in the late 1950s for its failure to clean up corrupt practices after the Federation had given it a “shape up or ship out” ultimatum. The Federation has never expelled a member union for endorsing a Republican, but the threat Trump poses to American democracy—without which American unions will surely perish—is so urgent and real that IUPA’s endorsement alone should be grounds enough for expulsion.
THE LABOR MOVEMENT has never felt anything warmer than ambivalence toward police unions. In 1897, a group of Cincinnati policemen formed a union and asked the American Federation of Labor if they could affiliate. The AFL was hardly a radical organization at the time; it was an association of craft unions whose members were largely Protestant, entirely white, preponderantly anti-immigrant skilled craftsmen. Nonetheless, accepting a police union within its ranks was too much for these old-stock Americans to swallow. The Federation rejected the cops’ application because, it said, American police were “too often controlled by forces inimical to the labor movement.”
From the post–Civil War years through the Great Depression of the 1930s, hundreds of police forces routinely harassed, beat, and now and then killed labor organizers, rank-and-file strikers, and workers who merely were considering joining a union. After World War II, police generally ceased their anti-union jihads (save in the South), but their abuse of minorities continued apace.
In the 1950s and ’60s, progressive unions like AFSCME and the AFT took the militant actions and waged the strategic campaigns that compelled state and local governments to grant collective-bargaining rights to public employees. Not surprisingly, as those rights spread across many states during the 1970s, it was disproportionately those unions, and other left-leaning unions like SEIU and the Communications Workers, that organized the cops or had their unions affiliate with them. At the same time, these were among the unions that campaigned most strenuously for equal rights for minorities and immigrants—and in some cases, the unions whose members were disproportionately the very minorities so endangered by the police.
In 1968, AFSCME led the drive to win bargaining rights for the sanitation men of Memphis—an all–African American workforce whom the all-white city cops savagely attacked during a peaceful demonstration, permanently injuring the eyes of AFSCME’s national organizing director, P.J. Ciampa. At the same time, AFSCME was organizing the cops in other cities.
Elizabeth Flores/Star Tribune via AP
Minneapolis police union president Lt. Bob Kroll, seen here in 2018, sent a letter to union members this month in which he criticized state and city leaders for failing to support the Minneapolis Police Department, following the death of George Floyd in police custody.
AFSCME’s president at that time was Jerry Wurf, a combustible democratic socialist (his office walls were decorated with large photographs of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas) who more than anyone was responsible for winning bargaining rights for American public-sector workers. “In the Wurf era,” one AFSCME veteran told me, “AFSCME was a living example of the contradiction between law enforcement officers as workers and law enforcement officers as agents of repression. I saw firsthand the deal Wurf implicitly offered correction officers and police: If you want to think of yourselves as workers and act like trade unionists, ‘this union will go to the wall for you’ (a favorite phrase of Wurf’s and Ciampa’s). But if you’re going to be racists or fascists, get lost’ [Wurf and Ciampa would actually use much stronger language].”
“Sometime in 1978,” the AFSCME alum continued, “I was standing in the lobby of the AFSCME headquarters carrying my beat-up luggage. Wurf got out of an elevator and offered a friendly greeting, like ‘Where the fuck are you going?’ When I said I was working with [an AFSCME prison guard local], he offered an expression of solidarity: ‘Those are great people—the kind of people who elected Hitler.’”
Eventually, this Wurfian contradiction proved difficult for the union, and other such unions, to sustain. Noting the decision of many police locals to sever their affiliations with his union, another longtime unionist told me, “Oftentimes the decertification was precipitated by a resolution dealing with criminal justice passed by the International.”
Unions need to join the campaigns to defund and demilitarize the police, to transfer many of the duties misassigned to the police to mental-health experts and social welfare workers.
Today, the gap between the union movement and cop unions has never been wider. Unions like AFSCME and SEIU are key players in the battles for civil and economic rights for minorities and immigrants. Their members fear and loathe Trump, while police unions celebrate him.
It’s time for those disaffiliations to become universal—at least as applied to those police unions that don’t meet the kind of standards that the Seattle Council called for. Unions need to join the campaigns to defund and demilitarize the police, to transfer many of the duties misassigned to the police to mental-health experts and social welfare workers, to insist that the remaining police or new hires in reconstituted agencies be people who reflect the values and demographics of the communities whose safety they’re supposed to ensure. Unless police unions go along with such changes—for starters, the reforms in the Justice in Policing Act that congressional Democrats introduced on Monday—they should not be affiliated with the greater union movement. As few police unions are likely to countenance such changes, it’s time for this bad marriage to end. The AFL-CIO’s failure to realize this—at minimum, with a clear statement of actions that police unions would have to undertake to retain their affiliation—could drive a wedge between labor and the broader liberal community, the likes of which greatly weakened both labor and liberal forces when the AFL-CIO, in its George Meany days, was a vehement supporter of the Vietnam War.
Cops should still have collective-bargaining rights. But until they can bargain for the common good, enlisting as allies and embracing the demands of the people they police, they should not be part of the broader labor movement. A house bargaining for and against itself should not stand.
