Written by Adam Heenan1
09/01/2020
There is a growing number of workers like me who are calling on our national organization, the AFL-CIO, to disaffiliate from police unions,2 to oust members of law enforcement including not only the International Union of Police Associations, but also those who are affiliated within other unions even in my own, the Communication Workers of America (CWA).
We don’t want cops in our union because we don’t want to be party to the code of silence, and we don’t want blood on our hands. We recognize that Black Lives Matter, that the origin of policing in America is slave-catching, and since then til now the police serve the interests of capital and the owner class, NOT workers.
Our AFL-CIO leadership is not there with us yet. Out of one side of their mouth they say Black Lives Matter, but go on to tout the Justice in Policing Act of 2020,3 while the Movement for Black Lives calls for Defund to Abolish. The majority of unionized workers today are women; Black and Indigenous, but most near all leaders are still white men. And to them we say,
“Ok, Boomer.”
I am an abolitionist. And I will continue to work to convince my union siblings that that must be our end game. If you are part of a union I ask you to do the same. If you seek to start a union in your workplace start it from a place of solidarity with workers of color.
The Justice in Policing Act calls for some reforms, but I taught during both No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, I see the words, “incentives to change behavior of police” all throughout this new bill and think, ‘aw damn.’ This is going play out just like the Common Core fight and states will just say, “no thanks; we don’t need your incentives. We’ll go it alone.”
The Justice in Policing Act calls for more training, but we know from June’s BlueLeaks4 that the kinds of training that officers are getting is “warrior mentality” and training on crowd-control gadgets that amount to increased militarization. It’s anti-Terrorism come home. It’s Fallujah in Ferguson and Kandahar in Kenosha.
And that’s not hyperbole because we know the same folks who trained police in the Gaza Strip also trained ICE at our border with Mexico.5
I can actually empathize with people who serve as police officers. One thing I’ve learned as a unionist is that we are not our jobs. See when it comes to the workplace, bosses want two things: lower compensation – they want to pay you less- & higher comportment- they want more ability to tell you what to do and have you comply – even when you know you shouldn’t do it. And it’s that second one that’s the most valuable to the Boss. Because those two things combined means they’ll do what the boss says even when it’s against their moral judgement as a person.
I’ve had cops on my picket line tell me to my face, “I believe in what you’re doing, my sister is a teacher,” then turn around and arrest me when the mayor gave the order. It’s that directive to protect the interests of capitalists that’s the problem: it creates conditions of dehumanization. And it’s systemic, not a few bad apples.
We know prisons harm not only those incarcerated but the guards too,6 and it’s systemic.
The instructions officers receive corrupt their humanity, steal their empathy, so when we have instructions so corrupt that it infects everyone it touches: the job shouldn’t exist. If this were actually a case of a “few bad apples” and not baked into the system then we’d see officers’ union protecting the integrity of the work. Instead they operate as a mafia: protecting each other no matter the social cost.
It’s under these conditions that we say loudly ‘Cops out of Our Unions.’ Because the dynamic is such that they’ll never be on the side of Labor and the Working Class. They’ll always be the Arm of the State and the clenched fist of Capital grasping at our wealth the Owner class has pilfered from us.
- Adam Heenan is a rank & file member of the Illinois Organizers Union Local 34071, affiliated with the News Guild and Communication Workers of America; he is also a delegate to the Bloomington-Normal Trades and Labor Assembly, as well as a Democratic Socialist. Heenan wrote this in response to a ‘Back the Blue,’ rally in Bloomington, IL on 08/30/2020. You can find more of him here.
- Sign the petition! https://nocopunions.com/
- AFL-CIO: Justice in Policing Act an Important Step Forward, June 25, 2020
- “What is BlueLeaks?” Lorax B Horne, Jul 10, 2020.
- Deadly Exchange report, Sep 12, 2018
- ‘Prison guards can never be weak’: the hidden PTSD crisis in America’s jails, The Guardian. Dasha Lisitsina, 20 May 2015.
