By Tamara Lee
Police unions and their proponents deny systemic racism, defend excessive force and racialized brutality by their members, and fight against accountability, transparency and substantial criminal justice reform. Big Labor’s #AllUnionsMatter response is a knee on the neck of the #BlackLivesMatter cries of its membership.
The top leadership of the AFL-CIO, whose D.C. headquarters were targeted during the protests, refuses to denounce the International Union of Police Associations. President Richard Trumka said in a recent interview that he prefers to “engage with our police affiliates rather than expel them.”
And while the Writers Guild of America East, Workers United Upstate New York, and a handful of other unions are calling for disaffiliation, scores of top unions and their leaders are declining comment on police unions or just evading the point. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called the issue of collective bargaining and police misconduct a “false choice.” She suggested we focus on demilitarizing the police.
Such tepid responses are in stark comparison to the unaffiliated SEIU, whose top leadership has publicly committed to alignment with the goals of the Movement for Black Lives, despite directly representing police and correctional employees.
The AFL-CIO’s blind defenses of collective bargaining fail to address a fundamental truth of collective power. Renowned labor law scholar Benjamin Sachs summed it up when he wrote, “Unions have used collective bargaining to protect their members from accountability for racist killing. And, in doing so, they may well have made such killing more likely and more frequent.”
What the biggest labor federation in the United States fails to see is that this is not just about a few militarized, killer apples. Systemic anti-Black racism is about the institutional abuse of power against Black Americans, and that potential also exists in well-intentioned “good unions.”
It’s time for labor leaders to re-examine the “false choice” narrative and scrutinize structural biases within their organizations. They should radically reimagine how unions can use collective bargaining power to address the long-running and unremedied systemic racial and economic abuse of Black union members.
The structural, identity-based injustices that are normalized in collective bargaining agreements are especially apparent in the persistent economic disparities facing those workers whom the labor movement historically and traditionally opposed: Black, non-white, immigrant, women, etc., and those falling in the intersections.
Let’s consider a few stats on racial inequities. Despite being twice as likely to unionize, Black workers continue to suffer twice the unemployment rate of white workers. And while unionization significantly narrows the wage gap for Black workers, it does not eliminate it.
Economist Christian Weller wrote in a 2018 Forbes column, “Among union members, whites had a little over five times the median wealth of African Americans between 2010 and 2016. This is a large difference, but a far cry from the overall gap of 10-to-one. And it is a lot better than the wealth gap among non-union members, where whites had 37 times as much as African Americans did.”
Although unionization benefits all workers, these statistics reveal that unions have not done enough through collective bargaining to erase systemic white supremacy and racial inequities such as wage disparities.
But there is cause for optimism.
There is great hope in the “new labor energy” present in a reimagined contemporary labor movement that is led increasingly by women and people of color. It has shown real innovation with “whole squid” organizing approaches and successful campaigns to “bargain for the common good.” The teachers’ unions in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis exemplified this by standing up for their students and communities, not just their members, in recent negotiations.
To play a bigger part in rooting out the overarching racial inequities embedded deep in the U.S. political economy, the obvious next step for the labor movement should be to lead the national discussion on reparations and reparative justice — not only in policing, but in a broader fight against racial capitalism. This would require more than mere support for H.R. 40.
Yes, unions should continue to prioritize and support legislative efforts for reparations for the institutions of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. But they, like their police brethren, must also fight implicit racial abuse of their collective power. Unions must acknowledge and intentionally target internal systemic abuse hidden in traditional colorblind collective bargaining agreements.
Resting on a distinction between the collective power of Big Labor and the darker collective action of police unions sets up a false extraction of economic injustice from policing injustice. For Black workers, those oppressions are inextricably linked.
Tamara Lee, Esq., is an assistant professor in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
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