The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor Highlight

After those protests, many activists inside the labor movement—including my own union, the Writers Guild of America, East—pointed out that the AFL-CIO has a police union as an affiliate, and police as members of more than a dozen of its unions. It is impossible to represent the interests of both workers at protests and the police who body-slam those workers. In recognition of that, my union and others urged the labor federation to expel those police unions and recommit to the priority of organizing the people in the streets—the ones who were angry at the injustices that many of those police unions had helped to enable. (Nobody said that police can’t have unions; we just argued that those unions shouldn’t be included in a labor federation that they relentlessly poison with the opposite of solidarity.) Instead, the AFL-CIO convened a “Racial Justice Task Force” that met for a year and then produced a report calling for increased funding for police, more police training programs, and the continuation of police unions as members in good standing.