Univ. of California Academic Workers’ Union Calls on AFL-CIO To Terminate Police Union’s Membership

Citing a "long history of police intervention in labor politics and its complicity in racial violence," the UAW members say they want the cops' union out of the country's largest labor federation. (Ben Musseig / Flickr)

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18240/afl-cio-police-unions-racism-black-lives-matter

MONDAY, JUL 27, 2015, 11:51 AM

BY MARIO VASQUEZ

United Auto Workers Local 2865, the union representing 13,000 teaching assistants and other student workers throughout the University of California, called on the AFL-CIO to end its affiliation with the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA) in a resolution passed by its governing body on July 25.

The resolution came in the wake of a letter written by the UAW’s Black Interests Coordinating Committee (BICC). The group formed in December 2014 in response to the acquittals of police officers in the deaths of Mike Brown and Eric Garner and is largely inspired by recent actions in the Black Lives Matter movement. With the letter, BICC aims to “start a really difficult conversation that the labor movement has had in the past and needs to continue to have around the intersections of race and labor, economic privation and racial disparity,” according to BICC member Brandon Buchanan, a graduate student currently studying Sociology at UC Davis who serves as Head Steward.

The letter charges that police associations operate in ways that are antithetical to the mission statement of the AFL-CIO, particularly its stated goal "to fulfill the yearning of the human spirit for liberty, justice and community; to advance individual and associational freedom; [and] to vanquish oppression, privation and cruelty in all their forms."

It provides historical evidence to its allegations, saying, "Police unions in particular emerge out of a long history of police intervention in labor politics and its complicity in racial violence," before referencing deadly disputes with activist workers in the 19th century, the defense of Jim Crow segregation, the lobbying that enabled the circumstances of Freddie Gray's death and the crackdown on the Occupy movement across the country as examples of American police acting as a “violent supressive force.”

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