In late July, United Auto Workers Local 2865, representing 13,000 teaching assistants and other "student-workers" throughout the University of California system, issued a call on the AFL-CIO to end the affiliation of the International Union of Police Associations with the labor federation. Local 2865's call is here, with a link to a PDF of its full statement:
http://www.uaw2865.org/uaw-
Reproduced below is a letter from the CSEW to UAW Local 2865 on this call.
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From: Class Struggle Education Workers
New York City
To: UAW Local 2865
2030 Addison Street, Suite 640A
Berkeley, CA 94704
1 August 2015
Dear sisters and brothers of UAW Local 2865:
On behalf of Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW), which is active as an opposition tendency in New York City education unions, we are writing to express appreciation for your important initiative in calling on the AFL-CIO to end its affiliation with the International Union of Police Associations. Here in New York, this helps create new opportunities to put forward our call for the unions to break from all police, prison-guard and security-guard "unions," as part of the urgent fight to mobilize the power of labor against racist police terror.
We strongly agree with you that the International Union of Police Associations "is inimical both to interests of labor broadly, and Black workers in particular"; and that police "'unionization' allows police to masquerade as members of the working-class and obfuscates their role in enforcing racism, capitalism, colonialism, and the oppression of the working-class."
Since the CSEW’s foundation in 2008, our program has demanded "Police and military recruiters out of the schools. No cops, prison or security guards in the unions." The fact that campus police and security guards are also part of the police apparatus has been brought home in the most horrific way by the recent racist murder of black motorist Samuel DuBose on July 19 by a University of Cincinnati campus cop. Today's New York Times carries an article* highlighting the "Off-Campus Power of College Police." On campus as well, police – whether city, state or federal agencies or campus cops – serve to repress students, faculty, staff and others, as was shown during protests against tuition hikes and the hiring of ex-general David Petraeus at the City University of New York, and as you have experienced as well.
Breaking police groups' ties to the union movement will not be easy. In Brazil, our comrades of the Comitê de Luta Classista (CLC–the Class Struggle Caucus, affiliated to the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil) led a 1996 campaign to disaffiliate city guardas from the Municipal Workers Union of Volta Redonda (SFPMVR) in the state of Rio de Janeiro. In retaliation, supporters of the police got the courts to oust the elected SFPMVR union leadership. Undeterred, in 1999, CLC supporters in the Rio state teachers union sparked the first strike action for the freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal, working in conjunction with the ILWU in the U.S. Mumia's decades-long imprisonment on frame-up charges is due in large part to the vicious vendetta by the Fraternal Order of Police, another clear example of the nature of police "unions."
In the U.S. today, the unending list of racist police murders from Staten Island (Eric Garner) to Ferguson (Mike Brown) to Baltimore (Freddie Gray) and Texas (Sandra Bland), and so many others, has highlighted the role of the police as the armed fist of capitalist repression. As we have insisted, it is crucial that the labor movement take action, using the power of workers as a class, against this reign of terror. The May Day 2015 shutdown of the Port of Oakland by ILWU Local 10, which UAW Local 2865's Berkeley Unit supported, was an important step in this direction. In solidarity with the ILWU action, on May Day our comrades of Class Struggle Workers – Portland (Oregon) organized a "Labor Against Racist Police Murder" contingent, supported by several area unions. The ILWU action was just a beginning, which must be built on, deepened and broadened through workers action around the country.
For this to happen, in our view, the urgent task is to unchain the power of labor in the struggle against every form of oppression. This can only occur through breaking the chains that subjugate the workers movement to the bosses' state, including its police, courts and anti-labor laws (like New York State's Taylor Law that makes it "illegal" for us as public education workers to go on strike!). The labor officialdom's use of the unions as a mechanism to support the bosses' Democratic Party is central to that subjugation, bringing one defeat after another. Thus we see the fight for a new, class-struggle leadership of labor as essential to unchaining the power of the multiracial, multiethnic working class, including its still unorganized majority, against oppression.
In greeting your call for the AFL-CIO to break all ties to the International Union of Police Associations, we consider the fullest clarity crucial in a struggle of this kind. Your statement rightly points out that "[t]he police force exists solely to maintain the status quo" and "protect capital," while "their 'unionization' allows police to masquerade as members of the working-class," yet undercuts this by wrongly stating "it is true that police are workers."
As we wrote last year in the CSEW newsletter, police, prison guards and security guards:
"are not fellow workers but the bosses' agents of repression – 'producers' only of repression for the owning class against the working class, poor and oppressed. Whether public or private, proprietary or contract, police and guards of all kinds seek 'unionization' to improve and strengthen their position to 'do their job' of repression, which in the racist USA, founded on slavery, falls most heavily on doubly and triply oppressed African American, Latino and immigrant poor and working people and youth."
– "Campus Protest, Capitalist ‘Security’ and the Program of Class Struggle," Class Struggle Education Workers Newsletter, Summer-Fall 2014Of course, nobody actually thinks police "unions" would or could work to "negate their own power and abolish the police" as referenced (perhaps ironically) in your statement. More to the point, it is important to counteract illusions that civilian or governmental "oversight" could change the repressive function of the police, which cannot be reformed away. Only the working class and oppressed taking power and abolishing the capitalist system can do away with racist repression.
Enclosed please find issues of the CSEW newsletter and a copy of our pamphlet reprinting the article on police and security guards from our Summer-Fall 2014 issue. We look forward to hearing back from you.
Yours for the mobilization of labor’s power in the fight against racist police terror.
* http://www.nytimes.com/2015/