When the Harvard Graduate Students Union went on strike last winter, I was on the picket line at dawn every day for two weeks. Early morning picket shifts, which usually started at 5:00 a.m., were meant to delay deliveries and disrupt university business. One morning, three of us, bundled in winter coats and marching in circles to keep warm, found ourselves surrounded by eight officers from the Harvard University Police Department who physically stopped us from blocking delivery docks and verbally harassed us. That moment was a reckoning for me as a labor organizer: HUPD might have been an unionized workforce, but police unions were not, and have never been, on the side of organized labor.
My own experiences with HUPD are reflective of a long history fraught with violence. For two centuries, the police have been used to suppress labor action and promote corporate interests. The police, the National Guard and the U.S. Army played an integral role in suppressing the Great Strike of 1877, the Homestead Strike of 1892 and the Lawrence Strike of 1912, to name a few examples. In each of these incidents, the police resorted to extreme violence, acquiring new legal powers and protections as they terrorized working class communities. By the middle of the 20th century, the police had become an autocratic, militarized force whose primary role was to challenge organized labor through union-busting and strike-breaking. They continue to occupy this role. For evidence, we have to look no further than the ongoing protests for racial justice in which the police have been called to attend to instances of rioting. Their brutal treatment of protesters, including the use of teargas and rubber bullets, is further proof of their commitment to property over people.
It is no coincidence that cops interfere with labor action; the fundamental objective of the police is to protect property. Modern day police forces in urban cities like Boston were founded to safeguard trade and protect commercial property, and in the South, policing evolved from slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaway slaves. Policing was, and continues to be, a way to protect and serve capitalism, not people. By attending to private property, which itself depends on the extraction of labor from the working class, the police align themselves with capitalists, rather than with workers. The material interests of the police are antithetical to the very ethos of organized labor, which seeks to protect workers from capitalist exploitation. It is impossible to build a working class movement while supporting an institution that was founded to oppress working class and Black communities.
Police unions are also complicit in anti-labor action in the federal political arena. The Fraternal Order of Police and the International Union of Police Associations, the two largest police unions in the country, endorsed President Trump in 2016 and recently endorsed his reelection campaign. By funneling money into President Trump’s campaign, the IUPA is directly responsible for his blatantly anti-labor policies, which have restricted the freedom to join unions, silenced workers, and gutted health and safety protections.
Furthermore, much of the power of policing lies in police unions, which enable racist, anti-labor action by making it nearly impossible for police officers to be held accountable for their actions. Collective bargaining agreements allow officers to evade the consequences of innumerable wrongs — including the violent killing of Black people, sexual assault, lying to investigators and falsifying documents — by limiting independent oversight and expunging misconduct records. In addition, unions spend millions of dollars lobbying against police reform on the local, state and federal levels. By shielding officers from consequences and blocking reform, police unions embolden violence against the Black and Brown communities that are the most vulnerable to police brutality.
One way to put an end to racialized police violence is to put an end to police unions. Dismantling police unions is a crucial step in taking power away from the police and giving it back to working class communities and communities of color. Although not all police departments are unionized or affiliated with a larger labor federation like the AFL-CIO, those that are must be expelled. However, disaffiliation must be only the first step in a broader struggle to dismantle the police in its entirety. Police abolition means building a world that does not rely on capitalism and racism to structure society.
Although some critics of abolition argue that disaffiliating police unions would threaten other public sector unions, many trade unionists disagree with this position, indicating support from public sector workers themselves. Union members represented by the Service Employees International Union and United Auto Workers have demanded the disaffiliation of police unions from the larger labor movement. In addition, a coalition of labor organizers called “No Cop Unions” have called on the AFL-CIO to expel IUPA and urged AFL-CIO affiliates with partial law enforcement membership to terminate their relationships with unionized police and correctional officers.
Ultimately, the call to separate police unions from the labor movement is a recognition that they have no role in a society that truly values workers. The goals of the police, which are maintained and facilitated by police unions, are incompatible with pro-labor ideology. The labor movement must take a firm stance against police unions and work to develop an anti-racist praxis. There can be no labor justice while police unions continue to protect anti-worker interests.
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