Writers Guild East Leading Charge to Take Cops Out of Labor

Ari Paul

Minneapolis police union chief Bob Kroll (Intercept, 6/2/20): "If you’re in this job and you’ve seen too much blood and gore and dead people, then you’ve signed up for the wrong job.”

The demand to expel police unions from mainstream labor organizations was once a fringe demand. Now, in the wake of the ongoing Black Lives Matter uprising, the demand is taking center stage in labor news, and the Writers Guild of America East—which has been proactive in organizing new media newsrooms—is leading the charge to remove cop unions from the AFL-CIO. (As this article went to press, the body voted to keep unions in the fold, but the debate rages within the labor movement.)

“As long as police unions continue to wield their collective bargaining power as a cudgel, preventing reforms and accountability, no one is safe,” the union said in its statement to the federation. “Therefore we believe that police unions do not belong in our labor coalition.”

As scrutiny of American policing has intensified, the New York Times (6/6/20) and NPR affiliate WNYC (6/3/20) have profiled how police unions have been a major force against meaningful police reform. The topic isn’t entirely new: The Al Jazeera show Fault Lines (12/6/16) investigated how the police union power in Chicago blocked accountability measures for cops, and Jacobin (1/12/14) took an in-depth look at police unions from a left perspective.

The WGAE asking the AFL-CIO to consider removing police unions from the federation is taking the conversation to the next level. It’s not an incongruous demand, given that  media workers have been particularly hard hit as victims of police while covering these protests: The Associated Press (6/3/20) reported that several of its workers were assaulted by cops while covering protests in New York. A Vice reporter (5/31/20) explained how he was attacked by cops while covering the protests in Minneapolis. The Hill (6/1/20) reported how an Indiana journalist lost an eye from a cop’s tear gas canister, while the New York Times (5/30/20) covered a similar incident in Minneapolis.

The ACLU of Minnesota is suing state and city law enforcement agencies over attacks on journalists. The US Press Freedom Tracker has tallied more than 400 aggressions against journalists during the George Floyd protests, including 79 journalists attacked and 23 arrested.

Dave Jamieson

So distrust between media unionists and the police is understandable. Dave Jamieson, a labor reporter for Huffington Post (a WGAE shop), who has written (6/6/20) about the issue of cop unions in relation to the current nationwide protests, emailed FAIR about the notion of removing cop unions from organized labor:

It's been fascinating to watch it become a more mainstream argument pretty much in real time. Of course, there was a lot of talk about this after Michael Brown was killed in 2014, too. But I think the debate over this within the labor movement has shifted quickly for the same reason the broader discussion of police reform has: The protests that erupted after George Floyd was killed have changed everything. They're raw, they're broad-based and they're everywhere, from big cities to small towns. When you see a city like Minneapolis moving to possibly disband its police force in its current form, major change really seems possible.

It’s a controversial idea in the labor movement, to be sure. Many non-cop unionists might have relatives or friends in police unions. In New York City, a Teamster local represents school cops, while the Communications Workers of America represents traffic cops. (The CWA is an umbrella organization that also includes the NewsGuild, which represents news workers.)

But the WGAE request has sparked the question: What do cop unions do for the rest of the labor movement? Obviously, if the house of labor is to keep police unions, the latter should be making some contribution to the former. Jamieson said:

I ran a Twitter poll, asking labor activists how frequently they've encountered off-duty police showing support at their protests or picket lines. This isn't scientific, but the vast majority who responded said they have seen very little support from police generally when it came to their own unions' causes. (Plenty did say, however, that they've had on-duty police undermine their labor actions.) Of course, there is a long history of police breaking up strikes and protests.

So I think a lot of people within the labor movement understandably feel that police are apart from them. There seems to be little sense of mutual aid.

Whether police should have collective bargaining rights is a completely different question from whether police should be part of the labor movement. I think a growing number of folks will say yes to the former but no to the latter.

Hamilton Nolan (In These Times, 6/8/20): "The biggest union coalition in America has as a member a union of more than 100,000 cops. They are the same cops who are beating, tear-gassing and otherwise oppressing all of the other working people who are right now out in the streets asking to be free of that oppression."

And as labor journalist Hamilton Nolan, one of the WGAE councilmembers who voted (unanimously) in favor of the WGAE resolution, said at In These Times (6/8/20), unions have a responsibility to hold the labor movement accountable. “Many police unions are also run by racists, and have been for a long time,” he said:

There is no better sign of how bad police unions have become than the fact that the loudest calls to rein in their power are coming from inside the labor movement—from people who usually spend their time fighting against efforts to rein in unions.

There is concern that blaming cop unions for the lack of accountability in policing plays into the right’s talking points about public-sector unions generally, which hold that teachers’ unions protect bad teachers and hold back needed reform. Indeed, enthusiastically negative coverage of police unions from the libertarian magazine Reason (6/9/20, 6/3/20) might give some unionists pause. Jamieson, again:

We could see a situation where conservative lawmakers say, “Okay, if you want to take away the ability of cops to bargain over discipline, we think the same needs to be done for teachers and sanitation workers.” And I fully expect that argument to be made if reforming police unions actually makes it onto the table. I think that's why some leaders of public-sector unions—even those that don't represent law enforcement — will be leery of going down this road.

But the right will attack public-sector unions no matter what. With then–Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s move to strip the state’s workers of collective bargaining rights, and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Janus v. AFSCME that forces a “right-to-work” regime on public-sector unions, the right’s war against these unions was declared long ago. The schism between some unions like the WGAE and the police unions might add fuel to the fire, but that battle will go on regardless.

The WGAE,  a union of both online media workers and entertainment writers, has a much more liberal inclination than, say, the building trades unions that make up one of the AFL-CIO’s most powerful blocs—kicking cops out of the federation was always a long shot. But just as “abolish police” and “defund police” were fringe ideas in May that became mainstream topics in June, the notion of excluding cops from labor federations is coming into the mainstream, in part thanks to the WGAE. And that’s happening not just because it is a relatively liberal union, but because the media workers covering these uprisings are risking their lives and safety in the face of an out-of-control police response.