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Early Draft of AFL-CIO's Report on Police Reform Shows a Commitment to Defending Police Unions
The long-awaited draft report is an explicit rejection of calls for the labor movement to separate itself from police.n July 2020, a month after protests over racial injustice and police violence set the AFL-CIO headquarters on fire, America’s largest union coalition formed a “Task Force on Racial Justice” as a signal that it was taking the issues seriously. A subcommittee of that task force was charged with producing a report on the touchy issue of the labor movement’s relationship to police unions. In These Times has obtained a copy of that committee’s draft report, which is currently circulating within the group before being released to the public. As it stands, the report amounts to a definitive rejection of calls for the labor movement to separate itself from police unions, and a clear statement that the AFL-CIO intends to stay closely aligned with its police members.
The subcommittee on policing that produced the report is being led by United Steelworkers vice president Fred Redmond and by Liz Shuler, the AFL-CIO’s second-in-command, who is widely seen as a possible successor to current AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka. The committee is made up of representatives from 13 unions that have police members, along with the Teamsters and SEIU — neither of which are in the AFL-CIO, but were invited to participate. Among those included is the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA), the only all-police union in the AFL-CIO. The makeup of the committee therefore lends the imprimatur of the AFL-CIO’s top leadership to a group made up exclusively of those already obligated to represent police.
Since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in May of 2020 and the subsequent wave of Black Lives Matter protests, the left wing of the labor movement has made calls for the AFL-CIO to kick out police unions altogether. Last June, the Writers Guild of America East, an AFL-CIO member union, called on the federation to disaffiliate from IUPA. [Disclosure: I am on the council of the WGAE and voted in favor of that resolution.] A number of local branches of various unions passed similar resolutions, and the Seattle police union was kicked out of the county’s central labor council in June 2020. Mary Kay Henry, the head of SEIU, vowed that the expulsion of police unions from the labor movement would have “to be considered” if those unions didn’t change.
Yet the top leadership of the AFL-CIO stood behind police unions’ place in organized labor, even in the face of harsh criticism from IUPA itself — the head of the police union called Trumka “disgraceful.” Last June, as the clamor over the issue reached its peak, Liz Shuler suggested that rather than kicking out police unions, the AFL-CIO should have them adopt “codes of excellence” to change police behavior from within.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/afl-cio-police-reform-unions-black-lives-matter?link_id=2&can_id=1e64f3279f4e4dc5ccfc81759379e873&source=email-the-union-busting-consultant-spreading-far-right-conspiracy-theories-choosing-sides-on-the-gig-economy-3&email_referrer=email_1168275&email_subject=early-draft-of-afl-cios-report-on-police-reform-shows-a-commitment-to-defending-police-unions-this-old-steel-mill-town-is-now-a-hub-for-green-energy
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