Let’s try to figure out the position of one of America’s biggest unions—the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), chiefly a union of supermarket employees—on police reform.
In early June, the union’s massive Los Angeles chapter, Local 770, joined a group of other unions and community groups to urge Mayor Eric Garcetti to reduce funding for the Los Angeles Police Department by $250 million, and redirect those funds to increased social services in minority communities. Local 770 has generally been a union with progressive, but not radical, politics, and there’s no doubt that many of its predominantly Latino and African American members’ interactions with the LAPD informed the union’s position.
In part because Local 770’s stance could be taken as a bellwether of the emerging Democratic consensus to diminish the police’s capacity for abuse, Garcetti did indeed direct an additional $250 million to social services, funding those programs by reducing the police budget $150 million and cutting other spending as well. The city’s police union responded by questioning Garcetti’s sanity and health.
But even as UFCW Local 770 was all for curtailing the cops, across the country in Maryland, Local 1994—comprised chiefly of civil servants along with a small number of deputy sheriffs—fired one of its staffers for promoting police reform. In 2016, Local 1994 had hired Gabriel Acevero, a Black Lives Matter activist, as an organizer. Two years later, Acevero was elected to Maryland’s House of Delegates, a part-time position which therefore requires its nonwealthy members to keep their day jobs. Acevero kept his with the local, even as he introduced bills in the legislature that would repeal statutes that made it difficult to discipline or discharge police for violent misconduct.
When a local police union (not part of the UFCW) complained to 1994’s president, former deputy sheriff Gino Renne, about Acevero’s attacks on what amounted to its members’ immunity from discipline, Renne convened a meeting, which concluded with Acevero being fired.
So how do we describe the UFCW’s position on police reform? Contradictory? Incoherent? Self-negating?
If we consult the international’s website, we find a brief statement from UFCW President Mark Perrone in response to George Floyd’s murder, which doesn’t address anything about the police. “Now more than ever,” Perrone writes, “we must stand together to end the hate and discrimination that is poisoning this nation, and to make clear that we all stand in support of peaceful protests and in opposition to violence of any kind.” If we’re trying to discern a coherent UFCW position on policing, this provides no guidance.
The UFCW, I hasten to point out, is a union well within the generally liberal mainstream of American labor, and its positions on the police are by no means exceptional. The reason is relatively straightforward. A number of the nation’s leading unions—and in particular, the nation’s most progressive leading unions—contain locals of prison guards or police.
While it’s rare to find an individual local like 1994, a local that represents a smattering of sheriffs alongside offices full of non-police government employees, it takes no special effort to find cop and guard locals affiliated with national unions. You’ll find them in AFSCME, which represents all manner of public employees; in SEIU, which represents health care, home and child care, janitorial, and public-sector workers; in the Teamsters; in the Communications Workers; and in a host of other major unions. Cop and guard locals do not comprise more than 7 or 8 percent of these unions’ members, but they are proving to be impediments to American labor’s ability to advance the cause of police reform.
THOSE LOCALS are there in part because, over the past 40 years, as employers have succeeded in almost totally shutting down private-sector organizing, organizing cops has been a comparative breeze. Their employers—local and state governments under both Democrats and Republicans—were not about to stand in the way of police if they wanted to join a union. As many as 80 percent of the nation’s police are unionized, a rate far higher than that of any other sizable occupation.
This has plunged a number of our most powerful unions into a fine mess. Many of them are heavily Black or Latino, and some of them have been among the leading and most powerful advocates for social-justice campaigns. AFSCME has been joined at the hip with the civil rights movement even before its historic campaign to unionize the (all-Black) sanitation workers of Memphis in 1968. SEIU has been perhaps the leading funder of the immigrant rights movement over the past three decades. In election seasons, no one has devoted more resources to turning out the Black vote than AFSCME, or to turning out the Latino vote than SEIU. And at a time when the broad liberal community, of which AFSCME and SEIU are pillars, has come to see policing as a major instrument of white supremacy and minority suppression, and when a majority of the members of unions like AFSCME and SEIU share that assessment (in too many cases, based on their personal experiences), you’d expect institutions like AFSCME, SEIU, and the AFL-CIO to be leading the charge to rein in the cops.
Except, as currently constituted, they can’t.
Cop and guard locals do not comprise more than 7 or 8 percent of these unions’ members, but they are proving to be impediments to American labor’s ability to advance the cause of police reform.
To be sure, they support much of the police reform agenda; just not all of it. When the House passed its police reform bill in late June with unanimous Democratic support, AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka gave the bill a half-throated endorsement. “While not perfect,” Trumka wrote, “the Justice in Policing Act includes concrete, commonsense actions like banning chokeholds, expanding the use of body cameras, ending racial profiling and demilitarizing police departments. Today, the House took an important step forward in creating a fairer, more community-centric policing culture.”
What wasn’t perfect? One important feature of the bill that Trumka chose not to put on his list of commendable “commonsense actions” was the bill’s reeling in of “qualified immunity,” a court-created doctrine that has made it impossible for victims of police violence to sue abusive police officers for damages.
On the one hand, Trumka’s reticence reflects a general fear in labor that making police officers personally liable could open the floodgates for suits against all public employees, just as attacking the police’s right to collective bargaining could encourage anti-union forces to attack all public employees’ right to bargain collectively (as, indeed, anti-union forces already have).
On the other hand, his stance also reflects the dilemma of organizations constrained by their own duty to represent their members. While there has been substantial progressive criticism of the AFL-CIO for having a police union, the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA), in its ranks, that’s not really what is holding back an otherwise progressive federation. IUPA is just one of the 55 unions that make up the AFL-CIO; its 100,000 members constitute roughly 1 percent of the total Federation membership. Unions like AFSCME, a Federation powerhouse whose police and prison guard unions make up about 7 percent of its overall membership, present more of an obstacle.
In a sense, the problem now confronting AFSCME, SEIU, the AFL-CIO, and the rest of mainstream labor is that the experience of police unions—theirs and others’—has validated organized labor’s fundamental premise: Collective bargaining by workers with clout really works. While nothing about police or prison guard work is easy, it certainly pays a lot better, and offers much more generous benefits, due to union successes. Those same union successes, however, have also managed to shield cops and guards from the consequences of their actions, which in turn has had dire consequences for those unions’ African American members.
A 2017 report by Reuters of police contracts in more than 80 cities found that the overwhelming majority of those contracts ensured that officers’ disciplinary records would be erased. Roughly half the contracts also enabled officers to see the evidence against them before being subjected to questioning. The following year, a University of Oxford study of America’s 100 largest cities found a high correlation between the scope of officer immunity established in union contracts and the level of police violence and abuse.
In short, bargaining for cops doesn’t lead to the kind of win-win situation that bargaining for other workers largely produces. That doesn’t mean that cops shouldn’t have the right to collectively bargain. All workers need that right, and when some police practices result in police abuse, the solution shouldn’t be to outlaw police bargaining, but to outlaw those particular practices.
Rather than see their affiliation with police locals as an obstacle to their ability to fully represent the interests of their Black members, however, a number of these unions argue that they’re working with those locals to establish, upgrade, or maintain “codes of excellence” in responsible, color-blind policing. But the data we have on who police officers actually are, on what they believe and feel, strongly suggests that such codes won’t mean much by the time they trickle down to the streets.
A 2017 PEW survey of police reveals a workforce—most especially, the white segment of that workforce—with what we might term a Trumpian worldview. Pew found that 92 percent of white officers said that America had made the changes that assured equal rights for Blacks, a view shared by just 29 percent of Black officers and a distinct minority of the public at large. Just 27 percent of white officers believed that protests that followed police killings of African Americans were at least partly motivated by a sincere desire to make policing more accountable (69 percent of Black cops believed they were).
White male police officers also revealed clear behavioral differences from their Black and female co-workers. According to Pew:
A third of all officers say that in the past month, they have physically struggled or fought with a suspect who was resisting arrest. Male officers are more likely than their female counterparts to report having had this type of encounter in the past month—35% of men vs. 22% of women. And white officers (36%) are more likely than black officers (20%) to say they have struggled or fought with a suspect in the past month. Among Hispanic officers, 33% say they had an encounter like this.
It’s the worldview of white male police that infuses the perspectives of most police unions, which may be as much a story of racial bias in advancement into leadership positions as anything. When the AFL-CIO released its statement in the wake of the George Floyd killing—which made clear it supported some reforms but had no plans to expel or otherwise part company with IUPA—Sam Cabral, president of IUPA, sent an indignant response to Trumka. “Your recent statement,” he began,
where you speak of “America’s long history of racism and violence against Black people” is inflammatory and patently false. Further your call to end racial profiling and “demilitarize” police forces makes assumptions that are, again, ridiculous. Racial profiling is already banned in every police agency I am aware of. If by “militarization” you are referring to our members having military surplus armored vehicles and other equipment, you should first have, at least, gained a passing knowledge of when and why those vehicles and equipment are deployed. In short, they save both law enforcement and civilian lives.
The most revelatory sentence in Cabral’s response is the first. Nothing in the AFL-CIO’s resolution required him to label “America’s long history of racism and violence against Black people” as “inflammatory and patently false.” That’s simply an expression of IUPA’s Trumpian worldview. (Not surprisingly, IUPA endorsed Trump for re-election late last year, though until the Floyd murder, IUPA had flown so far beneath the AFL-CIO’s radar that hardly anyone there even knew of the endorsement.)
What Cabral (and white cops generally) believe comes as no surprise to the leaders of America’s unions. As I noted in a previous piece on police unions, Jerry Wurf, AFSCME’s president from 1964 through 1981, once referred to the members of an AFSCME prison guard local as “the kind of people who elected Hitler.” Moreover, the predominant white male working-class segment of police forces also hails from the segment of the American people that has most moved rightward, or at least Trumpward, in recent years. Some doubtless view themselves as the point of the Trumpian spear.
There was an institutional logic, as well as genuine belief, behind IUPA’s endorsement and Cabral’s letter. Only about 20 percent of the nation’s unionized police are part of the AFL-CIO, its member unions, or other nonexclusively police unions that don’t belong to the AFL-CIO, like SEIU and the Teamsters. The vast majority of cops belong to unions, like the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), that are exclusively of, by, and for police officers, and that frequently market themselves to cops as tougher, more confrontational, more macho, and more Trumpian than IUPA or the presumably wussy cop locals embedded in anti-Trump unions like AFSCME. This leads to a kind of Gresham’s law among police unions; to avoid being out-machoed and out-Trumped, even the presumably wussy locals have to simultaneously sound tough and enforce omertà when their members are accused of abuse. If they don’t, their members may well decertify them and hook up with the FOP.
This institutional logic, abetted by Trumpian beliefs, makes it highly unlikely that police unions will take the sage advice of Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. Facing a barrage of criticism over the years-long purgatory in which some New York teachers accused of misconduct inhabited, on full salary but forbidden to teach, AFT agreed to an accelerated process. Weingarten has suggested that police unions similarly agree to allow a more open, less obstructionist process when their own members face charges. It’s a good idea that I doubt will fly with many police unions.
In short, bargaining for cops doesn’t lead to the kind of win-win situation that bargaining for other workers largely produces.
The United States also has the highest rate of incarceration of any nation, and more than two million Americans are directly employed staffing our prisons and jails. While their rate of unionization is not as high as police officer rates, it’s still considerable, and many mainstream public-sector unions have prison guard locals in their ranks. These unions are beginning to come under fire for their police locals, but they haven’t yet encountered similar criticism for their guard locals.
But as the movement for decarceration grows (and it has received a boost from the downsizings of prisons due to COVID-19), the critiques of their affiliations with prison locals are likely to grow. Policing and incarceration are the nation’s most devastating expressions of our institutional racism, and unions that are otherwise champions of racial justice will find themselves hard-pressed to defend either the quality or the quantity of these institutions.
Should those institutions shrink, so will union memberships and financial resources, which is not a negligible consideration for union leaders at a moment when COVID-19 and the fiscal crisis of state and local governments stand to decimate union membership and resources, and when unions have planned to wage massive, and costly, campaigns to oust Trump and Senate Republicans over the next 100 days.
Suppose, however, that those campaigns succeed, as current polls indicate is likely. While unions, like most other institutions, will suffer so long as the pandemic persists, the public-sector unions to which police and guard unions now disproportionately belong stand to register major membership gains under a Biden presidency and a Democratic Congress, which augur to be more pro-union than the Democrats have been since the 1940s. Though it drew little public notice, one part of Biden’s recently released economic plan calls for federal legislation that would grant collective-bargaining rights to public employees. While the 1935 National Labor Relations Act conveyed such rights to private-sector workers, no such federal legislation has ever extended those rights to public employees. Some states have enacted them; many have not. Should Biden’s plan become law, unions like AFSCME and SEIU could greatly expand their memberships.
That would make disaffiliation from their police and prison guard locals, and the AFL-CIO’s disaffiliation with IUPA, a less financially onerous process. A good thing, that, since those affiliations have already come under criticism from many of labor’s staunchest supporters, including the academics and journalists who focus on unions and the working class, and from several of the nation’s most left-leaning unions, too. (Full disclosure: the Prospect union, of which I am not a member as I’m management, has formally called for disaffiliation.) And unless and until unions side with Black America, and with their own Black members, by severing their link to police unions, that criticism will only grow as more and more of labor’s liberal allies come to see how unions’ links to the police compromise their political purpose and moral clarity.
Last week, the AFL-CIO formed a task force on racial justice “to address America’s long history of racism and police violence against Black people.” We can only hope it concludes that it can’t represent both the police and its African American members. For a movement that long has sung “Which Side Are You On?” and asked the public to make a choice, labor’s inability to sever its ties with the cops means it can’t even answer its own defining question.
