New Frontiers in Disrespecting Workers

Here’s what Christian Smalls, who was recently fired after organizing a walkout at JFK1, a Staten Island Amazon facility, over the company’s response to coronavirus, told me about Amazon:

You have employees that have been [at Amazon] three, four, five years, and this is the respect that you pay them? Unpaid time? And meanwhile you’re hiring 100,000 people and paying them $17 an hour and double overtime pay? You’re forgetting the veterans who helped build the empire, and hiring people, putting more people at risk because these people are walking into buildings that are coronavirus-infested, double-digits of cases in a building. And, meanwhile, the people who helped you build this company up aren’t being paid at all. It’s disrespectful what [Bezos] is doing, and it’s a shame what he’s doing. He should be ashamed of himself. I don’t know how he sleeps at night.

In other words, Amazon is replacing its current workforce with a more desperate labor force, most likely some of the 22 million or so who have lost work during this past month. The hiring spree comes not from increased demand—though the company is likely enjoying an uptick in online orders as much of the population shelters in place—but from current employee’s absences from work as they stay home, unpaid, prioritizing their lives over the functioning of the online-ordering empire. As Smalls put it: “Right now, nobody’s at work. I hear it’s a ghost town in there. Nobody’s going to work, but they’re all unpaid. They’re just hiring people who want a job right now.” While Amazon’s current workers stay home, the company trawls the depths of the reserve army of labor for those willing to risk their lives for $17 an hour.

It should be noted that, while Smalls was one of only a few workers who have been fired after organizing against Amazon’s working conditions, the company has pioneered strategies for retaliation during the epidemic. Here’s what one worker who organized a picket at a Chicago-area Amazon facility told me,

The response [to the protest was] basic surveillance and intimidation, continual reminders about the six-feet-apart policy. Now, as we’ve seen with that Staten Island worker [Christian Smalls] who got fired, they obviously fired him for organizing, but one of the excuses Amazon provided was that he broke quarantine — he was violating the six-foot rule. On Monday night, someone from corporate was there and pulled out a phone to take a picture of us. We started to put it together that they were building their case for writing us up or firing us for violating the so-called CDC-recommended rule.

Never mind the fact that every single job function in our warehouse requires you being within six feet of each other. Everyone knows that including management. When we were turning in the petition towards the end of the Monday night action, we were inside the break room and management came in and told us we had to be six feet apart.

But they said it while literally standing shoulder to shoulder. I was just like, “the two of you are not six feet apart.” They look at each other and uncomfortably shuffle a couple of feet away.

Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, is innovating levels of disrespect for its workers, too.

As Business Insider reports today,

Whole Foods is keeping an eye on stores at risk of unionizing through an interactive heat map, according to five people with knowledge of the matter and internal documents viewed by Business Insider.

The heat map is powered by an elaborate scoring system, which assigns a rating to each of Whole Foods’ 510 stores based on the likelihood that their employees might form or join a union.

The stores’ individual risk scores are calculated from more than two dozen metrics, including employee “loyalty,” turnover, and racial diversity; “tipline” calls to human resources; geographic proximity to a union office; and violations recorded by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The map also tracks local economic and demographic factors such as the unemployment rate in a store’s locale and the percentage of families in the area that are living below the poverty line.

The company uses three sets of “risk factors” to calculate the score: external risks, store risks, and member sentiment.

External risks include “local union membership size; distance in miles between the store and the closest union; number of charges filed with the National Labor Relations Board alleging labor law violations; and a ‘labor incident tracker,’ which logs incidents related to organizing and union activity,” as well as “the percentage of families within the store’s zip code that fall below the poverty line and the local unemployment rate.”

Store risks include “average store compensation, average total store sales, and a “diversity index” that represents the racial and ethnic diversity of every store. Stores at higher risk of unionizing have lower diversity and lower employee compensation, as well as higher total store sales and higher rates of workers’ compensation claims, according to the documents.”

Member sentiment, the third set of factors, “include items like employee loyalty and engagement.”

As Business Insider notes, Whole Foods is taking the Walmart path of anti-unionism. Years ago, Walmart hired defense-contractor Lockheed Martin to do similar union-busting against OUR Walmart, a union-backed organizing effort. As Bloomberg reported on the Walmart effort at the time,

Internally, however, Walmart considered [OUR Walmart] enough of a threat that it hired an intelligence-gathering service from Lockheed Martin, contacted the FBI, staffed up its labor hotline, ranked stores by labor activity, and kept eyes on employees (and activists) prominent in the group. During that time, about 100 workers were actively involved in recruiting for OUR Walmart, but employees (or associates, as they’re called at Walmart) across the company were watched; the briefest conversations were reported to the “home office,” as Walmart calls its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.

Whereas Walmart was once the vanguard of union-busting, the Amazon empire may be overtaking it as the most anti-social company. Congratulations to Bezos.

At Home

My dad calls me and says, “two weeks.” He’s a respiratory therapist, and that’s how long until his hospital system expects to be overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases. He’s worried about me, in New York City, and calls most days to check in. I turn down his plan to rent me a room in mill-town-turned-hip-locale Millvale, just outside Pittsburgh, insisting that fleeing New York is anti-social behavior (“But you’re a Pittsburgher!” he responds incredulously). He insists on mailing me some gloves to wear when I go to the grocery store; they’ll arrive tomorrow morning.

He tells me about a gunshot-wound victim he has in his hospital unit today—”not a coronavirus case!” he jokes in the typically dark fashion of someone who has worked in the ER for years. I ask him if he’s heard that John Prine has coronavirus. He has—he was never much of a Prine fan, he says, but he once read a Rolling Stone story about Prine in the ‘70s that mentioned the songwriter’s days as a mailman, and that he’d occasionally squeeze into a mailbox along his route to practice songs, a tale that delighted my working-class artist dad.

Being in New York during the coronavirus crisis is getting a bit concerning. They’re building field hospitals in Central Park and in a stadium in Queens; they’ve turned the Empire State Building into a flashing red siren. People are dying trying to get into hospitals, dying in hospitals, dying at home because they were turned away from the hospital. If you get sick, the hospital no longer seems to be an option. The state’s governor holds press conferences where he says he won’t entertain a bill proposed by the state senate to suspend rent—tomorrow is the first of the month and even the New York Times estimates that 40 percent of New Yorkers may be unable to pay rent. Yesterday morning, as I was sitting on my stoop, a little girl walked up to me, an umbrella shielding her from the early-morning drizzle. “Do you have any money for sandwiches?” she asked. “My mom is out of work and me and my sisters are going hungry.” I handed her the money I had on me and weakly wished her good health.

Doctors say hundreds of the city’s inmates have coronavirus now. The jails are completely unprepared, and the authorities are taking their time releasing people. Construction workers text me several times a day about how filthy their job sites are—the governor finally shut down “nonessential” construction sites this week but, would you believe it, there are loopholes to the executive order. A reporter I follow online tweets that while 332 people died of coronavirus today in New York, the rate of increase has been steady, rather than rising, for the past couple days (I try to feel relieved?).

I walk to CVS to pick up Prozac. There’s a line of six or seven people, mostly older, all with masks, waiting to enter the store. Social distancing means a store can only let in a handful of people at a time. I walk to the back of the line and cover my face with a keffiyeh—I have no idea where people are getting masks.

We hold a staff meeting, via Zoom, a video-conferencing app. Coworkers call in from Istanbul, London, Dublin, Berlin, Toronto, and across the United States. Several of us live in buildings that are going on rent strike tomorrow. Most people don’t have the savings to cover a month of New York rent, so regardless of what the governor or anyone else says, people simply are not going to pay. I think about my laid-off roommate, a bartender. I take notes for a coworker who is quarantining in Australia and thus asleep at the meeting’s scheduled time. As my coworkers discuss the financial state of our publication and Tiger King, I stare at a photobooth set I’d picked up on the floor of a Manhattan karaoke bar last year which has now freed itself from a nearby pile of papers stacked in a milk crate. Two strangers look back at me, making silly faces, cocktails in hand.

Lately, books turn to ash in my hands. I inspect my bookshelves in hopes something will attract my attention. A biography of Paul Robeson that I didn’t know I owned? Dead Souls? The books crookedly pile up beside my bed in the room that I rarely leave. I take a break from work to force myself to read an essay I’ve had open on my computer for a while. In it, the author reflects on his failed efforts to evade commodification as a young writer. He writes: “I realize now that I was trying to undo by writing what could only be undone by action, not alone but with others—and through connections that incantation alone would not conjure.” I’ve been wondering why writing feels so meaningless during this pandemic, even emptier than usual. It isn’t totally useless, of course; the future is open, now more than ever, even if the forces of Left and Right that seek to shape it are on nowhere close to a level playing field. But action, right now, is hard to come by—I haven’t left my neighborhood in weeks. The emergent wave of walkouts and sickouts by essential workers—at Amazon, General Electric, Whole Foods, and so on—and the tenant organizing are actions needed to force the hands of the rich and powerful, who are very busy attending to their own our problems. When the system is so hostile to reform, much less radical changes, no amount of correct phrasing or clever proposals can really shape history.

In an essay on “not going home,” critic James Woods writes of a sort of secular homelessness—or “homelooseness,” as he grotesquely phrases it—the type of leaving home that is voluntarily chosen but nonetheless inflected with an “afterwardness,” a term he borrows from Freud. As he writes,

To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: it is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done.

Afterwardness saturates the present. We never knew we were entering a new era until it arrived. What was once unthinkable—30 percent unemployment—is now fact. Much of what came before feels irrevocably distant, or distorted; hazy. The past had a fog and we didn’t even know it. Only now, in the midst of the pandemic, is the fragility of our way of living clear. We face the facts, and in doing so, transform what came before. We can never go back.

My dad calls again. He’s decided to rent the room in Millvale himself, in case he needs to isolate away from my mom. He spent one night in a hotel last week after a coworker suspected they’d been exposed to the virus (it turned out to be an unnecessary precaution: the coworker tested negative for COVID-19), and he doesn’t want to rely on the hospital for housing next time. I tell him I wish he could stay home, and to have a safe rest of his shift.

sue

My aunt died today, apparently of neglect by a rehab facility in Florida. She was rushed to an ICU with infected bedsores, and the hospital was so shocked by the state they found her in that they’re initiating some kind of criminal investigation into the facility. Who knows what will happen. I imagine we’ll have to push for a thorough investigation, though it must’ve been pretty bad for the hospital to be taking action unbidden. She was no vision of health but I have to assume other patients are experiencing similar neglect.

There won’t be a funeral, so, that’s it. No condolences needed, we weren’t close. If we were, I’d write some memories of her here, but all the ones I have are no good (she did love her cats, so there’s something). I’m just noting that this happened because it feels like someone should, and I doubt anyone else will.

Case Study of 1

A red ticket-dispenser in the psychiatric department instructs me to take a number and wait until it’s called. So, I do.

I am trying one last time to get mental health treatment. At least, that’s what I said two months ago to trick myself into following through on it. Suppressing doubts about whether this latest attempt would work, I looked up my health insurance’s list of local mental health care providers. The first few weren’t taking new patients. The next two said they didn’t take my insurance, even when I said I was sure they did. The next one was a hospital. The receptionist said there was no room for new patients. I told her that I could wait if needed and no, I am not suicidal, but I need help. She found me an appointment in two months’ time.

So two months later, I’m here. Another hour and I’m called to the registration desk. The receptionist says she isn’t sure if they take my insurance, and to go to the financial counseling department and then come back. Her coworker disagrees, so she just calls the counseling department instead, who confirm the hospital takes the insurance. The receptionist hands me a yellow paper square with my new number—“We call people by numbers here, not names,” she says—and instructs me to wait. The paper has a big “1” written on it. A good sign, I think, looking at the overflowing waiting room.

A nurse calls out “1” an hour later and I pee in a cup and return to waiting. Thirty minutes later, a therapist appears, asking for “1.” She seems nice, though she doesn’t look up from her computer when she asks if I’ve ever tried to kill myself. But when I tell her I how I’m doing, she tells me she is sorry and I decide that she sounds like she means it. We schedule a follow-up and she walks me to the psychiatrist’s office.

I enter and begin repeating the answers I’ve just given the therapist to the standard mental health questions. No, I am not suicidal. I live with roommates. I do not have children. If I’m out with friends, I can definitely down a few drinks, but that happens maybe once a week. I work full-time. I have tried Wellbutrin and Effexor, but they did not work. I am desperate for something to work and willing to do what is needed to get better. I am trying to be responsible.

***

I blame the medical bills.

They pile up in a corner of my room, collecting cobwebs under the bed. Every few months, I gather them up, opening a few. There are doubles, triples, of the same bill, differing only in their dates. Others are solo, lone socks in the pile. I consider using them all as wallpaper.

After I was hospitalized with a particularly nasty skull fracture a few years ago, something snapped; suddenly, I could barely call a doctor. It might have something to do with the way the hospital treated me—a nurse said that they had all believed I was uninsured and had given me “different” treatment because of it—but I think it’s the bills’ fault. They started showing up mere weeks after I was discharged. They never slowed down, no matter how often I wrangled with my insurance company on day-long phone calls. I was broke, and the bills broke me.

So after the first hospitalization, hospitalization became my health care strategy. If you have a severe injury, the hospital will find you a primary care physician and force you to book an appointment. For the skull fracture, they did likewise for a psychiatrist, among other specialists to deal with the aftereffects of the injury.

It seemed great, but my enthusiasm waned when I left the hospital. Each doctor is a co-pay, and that’s if you’re insured. Without insurance, my first hospitalization would’ve cost $39,000 (I made $10 an hour at the time). With it, I was still on the hook for a few thousand dollars. Dizzying diagrams of future appointments and work schedules began to dot my notebooks alongside unworkable budgets. But I was unwell, so I lost track. Within months, I was missing appointments. Soon enough, I couldn’t remember the doctors’ names.

Eventually, I was without care again until being hospitalized in a new city, New York, where I’d just moved. I had no doctors here, and my mental health was declining precipitously. I chose to interpret this turn of events as a gift.

After a false start—I went to a hospital in my neighborhood, Bushwick, only to be discharged because the doctors “couldn’t figure out what was wrong”—I found a hospital rich people go to that accepted my insurance. My wish had been granted: I’d lock down future doctors. Thank god for my prematurely decomposing body.

It didn’t work out. The doctors were understandably focused on my physical ailments. When I mentioned other health problems, they told me to wait until I recovered to worry about the rest of it.

The night I was discharged, I was groggy, floating on morphine. I had complications that required the procurement of an ambulance to drive me home. Follow-ups were scheduled hastily as I was rushed out the door. Someone from the hospital called with the PCP’s information while I was horizontal, strapped to a stretcher. I scribbled the information on the back of my discharge papers. When I got home, I realized the pen had been out of ink.

Despite this, I found the doctor. I couldn’t remember any details about the appointment, but I returned to the upper-east-side hospital and spent a day asking administrative employees for help. Finally, a saintly woman in a tucked-away office, packed with precarious piles of papers, the Office of Historical Memories or something, tracked down the information.

As it turned out, the PCP was actually a clinic; I was seen by different doctors-in-training every time. It was rushed, and no one seemed to have notes. I asked for a psychiatry referral. They told me they couldn’t do that, and to find a psychiatrist myself. After further prodding, they offered the numbers of two psychiatrists. I again scribbled this information on the back of medical forms and left.

They remain in my room, a monument to the vast reserves of the human spirit—I, of course, never got an appointment. The first time around, it took me a year, maybe two, to disappear from the health care system post-hospitalization. This time, it took weeks.

I spent a year like this. I’m fortunate to have never had the type of depression that brings suicidal thoughts and extreme highs and lows; mine is the flat-line variety. Someone who takes days to respond to a text message does not have the ambition required to die—no thanks, sounds like work. But the depression got worse than I’d believed it could. And the bills kept arriving! The calls from unknown numbers multiplied. Once a month or so I answered one. Every time, it was a debt collector.

***

So I am here, making a good-faith shot of it, answering the psychiatrist’s questions.

We get through all of them. After a brief silence, she says she cannot prescribe me medication. When I ask why, she informs me that I am an alcoholic, and antidepressants do not work with alcohol. I say I am aware of the “don’t drink on meds” rule, and if it’s really the case that the medication will not work if I drink, then so be it, I’ll drink lemonade at parties. “I am desperate, and willing to do what it takes to get better,” I restate.

“You could not quit drinking if you tried, and you will not try,” she says. She has known me for twenty minutes at most. “I will likely recommend you get addiction treatment, which entails three appointments a week, and then you can get on an antidepressant.”

Perplexed, I tell her I do not need addiction treatment, that I sometimes go weeks without a drink, and besides, I work full-time and what with my whole exhausted-depressive thing, there is no way I could follow through on three appointments a week. I think about a family member who was court-ordered to attend AA meetings three times a week after an arrest, and how little the judge cared that he might lose his job for taking that much time off. This is criminal, I think.

She says that she will add to her notes that I am in denial about addiction, and if I’d like to get my blood work done so she can see the results and formally decide what treatment to recommend, I can do so. In the meantime, can I quantify my drinking for her notes on my alcoholism, she asks.

“Would you say you take like, ten shots?” She actually says this. I can’t speak, so I laugh. She is withholding medication I need as a perverse moral means-testing, because I mentioned I get drinks with friends once a week. The only possible outcome, should I refuse to go along with it, is that I will go untreated, or will lie about my drinking habits to a future psychiatrist if I ever get to see one. She must know this.

“It took me so long to get this appointment,” I say.

She stands and gestures to the door.

I get the blood work done. As I leave, I stare at the room of waiting patients, some of whom were here when I arrived six hours ago. This is a hospital for poor people. I can’t stop wondering how many of them this psychiatrist will also withhold medications from unless they, too, agree to whatever preconditions she chooses. How many other doctors like her are there? The rich and the poor use drugs at the same rate, but there is no doubt in my mind this woman sees everyone here as an addict or a criminal and is determined to punish us for it. There are no consequences for her, but some of us will die.

I think about last year, at the Bushwick hospital. I doubt there were any millionaires in that packed emergency room. They’d discharged me late at night, on a cocktail of painkillers but still pulsing with pain, to walk home.

These hospitals are located in the heart of the city’s gentrification but apparently those who can, avoid them. I’d never step foot inside one of those places, friends say when I describe my day. Everyone knows not to go to those hospitals. But I didn’t, and neither did the hundreds of other people who were in the psychiatric department this morning. “Why are these places packed if everyone knows this?” I think, to distract from other thoughts, about how, exactly, I will wait out the months it will take to get a new appointment, with a new psychiatrist, in Manhattan.

Anyone reading this likely knows health care is a gruesome, deadly separate-but-equal system in the United States. Anyone who can avoid these hollowed-out institutions on which so many working-class people rely is acting quite reasonably in doing so. They are carceral and dangerous—sometimes filled with literal toxins, as if this country needed more symbolism. They kill us, even if we kill ourselves. They tell us we are criminals, and we agree—a plea deal is the best anyone can get. They say we are addicts, and we wonder whether we must be addicts if we are to survive. None of this is news, it’s just another data point. These are hospitals in the richest city in the country, but the funneling of resources away from them reproduces segregation—it’s how they got this way in the first place. And it is worse elsewhere.

I don’t have any proscriptions beyond what many people are already doing: pushing for universal health care so at least we can get rid of the damn financial counseling department and all the co-pays (today’s experiment left me $45 poorer), funding long-term mental health care, and otherwise creating a world with less alienation, less poverty, shorter workweeks.

I’m just mad, and the stakes are so high. US life expectancy has dropped for the third straight year, in part because more people are killing themselves. If I were the suicidal type, this might be the end of my rope. (I cannot insist enough that I am not, please do not worry.) I just wish all of it would be classified correctly, as murder: the mistreatment, the abuse, the insurance mix-ups, the lack of access in the first place, the disdain, the bills, what that psychiatrist did today. It’s homicide, on a mass scale: take a number, wait until it’s called.

Why The Left Opposes Police Unions

I.

On June 10, 2016, in a small town just north of Savannah, Georgia, three Teamsters stood on the side of the road outside of a company called XPO Logistics, leafleting truck drivers about their rights as workers. As the truckers left the facility, the Teamsters offered them a flyer, chatting briefly and answering any questions the drivers had. While it’s illegal to leaflet on company property, the Teamsters were stationed on the roadside beyond the facility’s gates.

It was an unremarkable afternoon of outreach, until the local police arrived. Someone from XPO had called them. The officers claimed the trio was blocking the flow of traffic, even though the only drivers on the dead-end road were trucks driving in and out of the facility, and the Teamsters had made a point of standing on the side of the road, flagging drivers down and only approaching once they had stopped driving.

In a state as unfriendly to labor as Georgia, which has the fourth-lowest rate of union membership in the country, the encounter between these Teamsters and the local police was about more than just the actions of these three organizers. No need to believe me; here’s a transcript of the conversation captured by the officers’ body cameras:

“It ain’t like it was back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, with all those wildcat strikes and those riots and everything,” says one of the officers in the video.

“You smell that?” he continues. “You smell that?”

“The paper mill?” responds one of the organizers quizzically.

“No. Fresh air,” the officer caustically remarks. “We want to make sure everybody can continue to breathe the fresh air.”

A letter later sent to the town by a Teamsters lawyer, who is threatening a lawsuit over the incident if the city doesn’t drop the charges against the organizers, asserts that “there was no other reasonable interpretation” of the “fresh air” remark except that “the police department considers union activity pollution.”

“They wanted to make it seem like us dispersing content is illicit,” said Ben Speight, one of the Teamsters organizers. “The content, the union aspect, is what they were trying to stop.”

Speight speculated that the police citations would make some of the drivers feel uncomfortable talking to the Teamsters in the future for fear of drawing attention to themselves by association.

II.

The encounter between Teamsters and cops is a snapshot of the agonizing difficulty of organizing unions in the South, a place of hostile and organized anti-union machinations. The face of that hostility? The police officers who show up and antagonize union representatives, who ultimately brought charges against the three Teamsters when Speight asked for one of the officers’ badge number.

For the Left, supporting unions is a given. Whatever differences we may have — many, to be sure —we all agree that rebuilding the labor movement is central to achieving a more just society. While the labor movement is not limited to unions, these organizations, the primary place where working-class people are already organized, are a major locus of our attention.

At their best, unions are schools for workers’ democracy, vehicles through which the working class experiences the power of collective action and learns how to demand ownership over the value they produce. In the face of a decades-long organized backlash against unions and declining union membership — which, as a recent Economic Policy Institute study noted, hurts all workers, reducing weekly wages for non-union workers by $14 to $52 — supporting unions is more important than ever.

In the case of those Teamsters leafletting in Georgia, what that support looks like is clear: we’re on their side, against the cops. Sure, these officers were just doing their duty, responding to a call from XPO. But their visceral opposition to unions, analogizing union organizing to pollution and favorably contrasting the anti-union present to the “strikes and riots” of earlier decades, shows a propensity to go far beyond the call of duty.

It’s an easy case, save one complication: cops have unions too, or at least, cops have “unions,” union-like organizations such as the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), Patrolman’s Benevolent Association (PBA), and the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA), with the latter housed within the AFL-CIO.

For many progressives and some on the Left, these organizations throw a wrench into an otherwise coherent picture, leading some to engage in intellectual gymnastics to explain away the anti-union sentiment on display in the encounter between the cops and Teamsters in Georgia. But it shouldn’t.

Instead of forcing us into a corner, leaving us muttering that “cops are the 99% too” — a statement heard so often during the Occupy movement — the contradiction revealed by police unions should throw into relief an important distinction between liberals and the Left, namely, the reasons each of these groups support unions. This difference too often goes unacknowledged and in light of the anti-police-brutality movement and the recent uproar over the election of a police-union organizer to the National Political Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), it’s worth clarifying the distinction.

III.

The Left supports unions not because they’re an inherent good, but because they’re vehicles for building working-class power. If and when unions do not build that power, we should challenge and criticize them, pushing them to reform. And in the case of police unions, we stand against them as such, because no efforts for reform can change their very reason for existence, which is to undermine working-class interests in general, even as they increase the power of their limited membership.

A huge number of young people are entering left politics today, drawn in by the Sanders campaign, the anti-police-brutality movement, and their own experiences of growing up in an outrageously unequal country. Making explicit the Left’s reasons for supporting unions is critical to advancing the higher level of politics needed in these urgent times. An exploration of police unions provides a means to consider this matter concretely.

As Bill Fletcher Jr and Fernando Gapasin argue in Solidarity Divided, a key difference between liberal and left unionism — what they term “pragmatism” or “traditionalism,” and “leftism,” respectively — is who we consider the proper constituency of the union movement, and toward what end we’re struggling. While the traditionalist/pragmatist views union members as the movement’s constituency, with winning gains for the members (fighting for “bread and butter” as it’s often put) as the goal, the leftist takes all members of the working class to be the proper constituency of the union movement, with strengthening this class’s power our goal.

While these perspectives often align, allowing proponents of both views to work together, police unions drive a wedge between liberals and the Left. If police unions undermine working-class power, even as they achieve gains for their limited membership, the Left should call for their delegitimization wherever they operate, whether within the AFL-CIO or outside of it. But we in doing so, we should be prepared to debate otherwise allied forces — the traditionalists and pragmatists.

IV.

Before moving to the reasons for rejecting police unions, it’s important to consider the argument for them. Despite widespread (and justified) outrage this past weekend over a police union organizer gaining a position on the DSA’s National Political Committee, much of the labor movement includes police unions within its ranks. If we want to win the argument against this view, we must understand it.

At its left-most, this is an argument for the strategic value of engaging progressive dissenters within police departments as a means to splitting their constituents and building power. Those who advance this argument recognize the impossibility of unifying with the bigots who rise to the top of these unions — people like Patrick Lynch, the president of New York City’s largest police union, who blamed Mayor Bill de Blasio for the death of two NYPD officers in December 2014. Rather, left-wingers who hold to this view advocate critical support for those seeking to achieve progressive changes from within the police force.

For example, Cedric Johnson argues that the Left should engage “reformist elements within police unions and departments,” people such as “minority law enforcement professional organizations, whistleblowers and dissident officers, and other progressive elements,” all of whom we can unite with on a desire to build a more meaningful and less unpopular model of policing. While Johnson takes care to distinguish what he’s advocating from support for police unions as such, his argument rests on a flawed understanding of the dynamics at play within police unions.

In a rebuttal to Johnson, Shawn Gude argues that “Hoping for reform-minded police unions is delusional.” “If anything,” he adds, “reform groups would benefit from being able to organize without the influence of an overarching union. The same goes for individual officers.” Free of the stifling force of the union, “those of good conscience” — the elements with whom Johnson is concerned — could fight for a broader vision of social justice and radical changes in policing. By dismissing the possibility that police unions work against any reformist interests, Johnson advances a strategy of engagement that doesn’t match the landscape of contemporary US policing.

It’s from a consideration of the purpose of the police and the conditions on which their jobs rely that Gude arrives at his position. The livelihood of the police relies on perpetuating the most repressive aspects of the status quo — de facto race and class segregation in our cities, rising inequality, and what sociologist Loïc Wacquant terms the “carceral continuum,” a state in which the inner-city merges with the prison, with both coming to resemble each other in form and function. Under such conditions, empowered police organizations can only advocate for new weapons, less transparency, and murkier repercussions in the case of police wrongdoing, as these are the “reforms” that benefit their membership, the constituency of interest to their leadership, traditionalists in Fletcher and Gapasin’s schema.

This is not a moral argument about the goodness or badness of police. Rather, it’s a response to the propensity of the police, as Kristian Williams, author of Our Enemies in Blue argues, to “organize as police, not workers.” This perspective, rooted in a left unionism interested in strengthening the working class as a whole, cannot align with organizations pursuing policies that improve the conditions of their membership at the expense of the broader working class.

When we look at what police organizations have accomplished, the argument that they’re incompatible with a progressive labor movement looks like common sense. As detailed in an interview with the New Republic, University of Nebraska professor and criminal justice reform expert Samuel Walker explains one project these associations have successfully implemented: Law Enforcement Officers Bills of Rights. These are contract prescriptions “negotiated in the shadows” and codified into state law, and include investigative waiting periods, a stipulation that lacks “any evidentiary justification or legitimate labor interest.” With related aims of blocking efforts to install body cameras, as was recently attempted in Boston before a judge struck down the patrolman union’s request for an injunction against the cameras, police associations are incompatible with even the most broadly defined social-justice unionism.

V.

No union is perfect. To varying degrees, all our unions are run by bureaucrats with split interests. While these officials are concerned with furthering the power of their membership, they also maneuver to hold onto their positions within the union, which can lead them to weaken members’ power. When this happens — like when SEIU fires their staff organizers for daring to demand a union of their own, or when the Teamsters undercut the UFW’s organizing, or when the UAW yet again files for an election prematurely — we shouldn’t shy away from criticizing them.

But police unions will never rise to the level required for even this critical support from the Left. They cannot, for they function to repress working-class power.

The biggest objection to this argument is that criticism of police unions can be applied to other public-sector workers, such as teachers. Where this response fails is in grappling with the fact that teachers are already under attack, and that any and every argument against their unions is already in play right now.

We can return to Cedric Johnson’s article on police unions for an example of this objection. He writes, “like other public workers, [police] are increasingly expendable, and subject to the same pressures of fiscal austerity, expected to ‘do more with less’ especially in large urban jurisdictions.” However, the evidence doesn’t support this claim. The police aren’t suffering from austerity measures; rather, they’re more empowered than ever, particularly when it comes to their budgets for equipment, with many departments enjoying unprecedented military hand-me-downs.

What goes unconsidered by those who share Johnson’s concerns is the possibility that police occupy a structurally distinct role from their brothers and sisters in public-sector unions. But if we look at the ongoing backlash against public-sector workers, police aren’t subject to the same pressure as their peers.

Take Scott Walker’s historic attack on unions in 2011. His anti-union bill — which struck down collective-bargaining rights for public employees — included an exception for the police.

This did not go unnoticed within the house of labor. In 2015, UAW Local 2685, representing 13,000 graduate workers on University of California campuses, unanimously passed a resolution calling on the AFL-CIO to end its affiliation with the IUPA, the AFL-CIO’s largest police union.

“Historically and contemporarily, police unions serve the interests of police forces as an arm of the state, and not the interests of the police as laborers,” the resolution reads. It continues, “If the Black Lives Matter movement has taught us anything, it’s that cops are different than other public-sector employees.”

This complements resolutions from the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions also passed in 2015 in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and for the demilitarizing and disarming of campus police. These resolutions commit their supporters to pursuing strategies to strengthen the Black Lives Matter movement and disarm campus police.

Or consider the recent actions of teachers in Minneapolis. Gathered in the city for the AFT convention in 2016, the local teachers unions led a march to protest the police killing of Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, a suburb of St. Paul. Castile, who worked at a public school, was a member of Teamsters Local 320, a local that also represents law enforcement officers. Although the Teamsters wrote a letter mourning Castile’s death, the presidents of the St. Paul and Minneapolis police unions were “appalled” by the demonstration, suggesting the extent to which police organizations cannot resolve the contradictions at the heart of their involvement with the labor movement.

Within the anti-police-brutality movement, we see a similar distinction between solidarity with unions and rejection of alliance with police “unions” being made. July 2016 saw a coordinated set of demonstrations and sit-ins at FOP and PBA halls in Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Washington, D.C. by activists associated with the Movement for Black Lives.

Interviewed about these actions, Clarise McCants, an organizer with the Black Youth Project (BYP100), explained, “We’re definitely pro-labor union,” adding that the coalition’s message is “that the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) is not just like any union. They are a fraternity — and they are the most dangerous fraternity in America.” If McCants can distinguish between the function of the FOP and that of unions, rejecting their surface-level similarity, there’s no reason the rest of the Left can’t do the same. Protests like these should be supported by the labor movement, with organizations like BYP100 welcomed into its fold: after all, they’re composed overwhelmingly of workers, and particularly, workers of color.

What organizers like McCants are voicing is not a contradiction — although they recognize that some might see it that way — so much as Fletcher and Gapasin’s definition of a leftist unionism. From a perspective that states that we’re not fighting for unions as such, but for unions in so far as they’re a proxy for greater working-class power, there is no inconsistency in rejecting police unionism.

Police are not like other workers. It wouldn’t be misplaced to claim they are not workers, period, but rather, managers of class struggle. They belong outside the labor movement, which is where we already find them in instances of increased waves of struggle, repressing anti-racist activists, the Occupy-Wall-Street movement, Standing Rock water defenders, and anyone else who dares demand their rights.

VI.

Let’s not condescend to our boys in blue: very few of their organizations call themselves unions, and neither should we. An argument against engaging with police organizations can be incorporated to weaken other public-sector unions only if we don’t insist on the distinction between the two.

No one wants to shrink an already imperiled labor movement. But allowing police to remain present within the AFL-CIO, or to masquerade as if their fraternities or associations are progressive forces, discourages union growth. We shouldn’t hesitate on this point. Latinos are the fastest growing demographic in America, and African-Americans are emerging as the new face of organized labor. It would be a dismissal of the seriousness of racist police brutality to ignore the message it sends people of color to treat the police as legitimate partners in working-class struggle.

Racial justice has always been the leading edge of effective unions — whether it was the IWW’s multiracial organizing in the early years of the labor movement or the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), which fought both for union gains against the employer and against the racism of their white union brothers and sisters. In the face of a vibrant anti-racist movement today, one that consciously connects itself to the Fight for $15 and defines itself as pro-union, we should draw on and extend this legacy.

An anti-racist labor movement requires an end to collaboration with the police, and the police offer a critical example of what we on the Left mean when we say we’re pro-union. The beginnings of this conversation are visible in the actions of UAW Local 2685 and Minneapolis teachers, and it’s from these progressive elements within the labor movement that we should take our cues. In an age where company unions are taking advantage of the dearth of nuanced conversations about power to repress worker organizing, we must stop automatically defending any organization that presents itself as a union, and instead, begin rebuilding the power of the working class, as a class.

Left-Wing Language for Your Right-Wing Needs!

Because I hate myself, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately watching language created by the left get taken up by the right. Conservatives are wielding the language masterfully, leaving many well meaning progressives disoriented and asserting the righteousness of any cause that comes packaged in the correct words, forgetting that language is meant to advance our goals, to serve us, not the other way around.

I’m not the first to note that a lot of activists today are fixated on language and that with this comes a fear of saying the wrong thing and getting iced out of a movement. The flip side of this is that when someone speaks the right words, we assume it means they’re one of us. But there’s a problem: language can be learned by anyone, it can be taught in business seminars and in online forums. If we don’t subordinate language to the material changes we’re fighting for, we lose the ability to draw clear lines between us and them.

Who’s Doing This?

Zionists are the cutting edge when it comes to hitching progressive language to reactionary ends. For the past few years, the attention of the American Zionist movement has been focused on college campuses. Campuses are bellwethers of broader political trends, making what happens on campus important for those concerned with future societal developments. For Zionists, it’s the growth of pro-Palestine groups and the BDS (Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions) movement that’s the most worrying. Their response is a case study in the use of left-wing language by right-wing assholes.

Take the first #StopBDS Conference hosted by the Israeli mission to the UN and World Jewish Congress at the UN headquarters in New York this week (that’s right: a UN conference with a hashtag in the name – welcome to 2016). As Rania Khalek reported from this gathering of the trolls, the speakers struck a repetitive message: “Speak left,” said Frank Luntz. “Speak the language of the left,” reiterated Yosef Tarshish, chairperson of the World Union of Jewish Students.

What does a Zionist “speaking left” look like? On campus, it means yoking one’s Jewish identity to support for Israel and then claiming to feel “unsafe” in response to pro-Palestine organizing. The impulse to make this claim comes from the rise of progressive students demanding ‘safe spaces’ for members of oppressed identities. While I’m not opposed to this, as it comes from the long and ugly history of violence against the oppressed by those with privilege, as I’ve said before, this demand is becoming one of the prefered tactics of campus Zionists.

A letter sent out by the university chancellor to UC Santa Cruz students offers a great example. Here’s an excerpt:

“On our campus, which has a long and proud history of student engagement in critical issues of equity and social justice, I want to be sure we acknowledge differences of opinion and work to maintain civility in the midst of turmoil.

In student government, as is their right, the Student Union Assembly this week voted to reinstate a resolution urging the University of California to divest from Israel. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has generated passionate opinions on both sides.

I’m concerned this resolution will have a chilling effect on individuals within our campus community. However unintentional, its passage may create an environment in which some of our Jewish students feel alienated and less welcome on our campus.”

The chancellor invokes the campus history of social justice, positioning himself as a progressive. From there, he brings up the student union’s resolution in favor of BDS and insists this may make Jewish students feel “alienated” and “less welcome.”

More accurate would be to say the resolution could make Zionists feel unwelcome. But the chancellor’s conflation of Jewish identity with support for Israel allows him to invoke a discourse of safety for oppressed identities as the bludgeon that it often becomes; a human shield, as it were, against criticism. That this conflation inflames anti-Semitism is curiously not a concern of these douchebags, who are happy to pretend all Jews support Israel. Much better to take what power you can from the discourse of oppressed groups and use it to cover for support for an apartheid state. And that’s what makes black Zionists like Chloe Valdary doubly valuable for Israel, as they can make additional claims to the need for safety, cynically counterposing black and Palestinian struggles – a particularly coveted trait when these movements are forging stronger ties.

To take another egregious example, let’s look at Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

A while back, Clinton’s team produced a chart of “intersections.” Indecipherable, it invoked the necessary know-how of the language of intersectionality as a signal to voters: “Clinton’s with it,” it shouted. No matter that the chart was absurd and that Clinton’s policies have and will continue to reinforce, not undo, oppression. No matter that Clinton doesn’t even pay her interns, who more likely than not are overwhelmingly women.

As she asked at a campaign rally in February, “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow…would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make immigrants feel more welcome?”

“No!” her audience responded, but this cheeky remark was to a strawman – no one, not Bernie Sanders, not even weirdos on the internet, claims it will. But it’s enough to know the language for Clinton, to “speak left” as Luntz put it.

Fortunately, most working people aren’t fooled by this insincerity. We want redistribution. We want real feminist and antiracist gains: abortion on demand, universal health care, union protections and a $15 minimum wage for home care and fast food workers, defunding the police and an end to mass incarceration. Clinton won’t offer these but her cynical deployment of the language of the left is a feignt to pretend otherwise, and a quick look at the unbearable Clinton supporters penning articles about her radicalism is evidence that this is convincing a fair number of voters.

Why Does This Matter?

As usual, Adolph Reed Jr said it best: “[identity] politics is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism.” What he means by it is that rather than countering a strawmanned ‘class-first’ politics – the ‘break up the banks and stop there’ fantasy evoked by Clinton -the language of identity politics is elastic enough to incorporate the bourgeoisie along with the working class, particularly when it uncritically links identities to political ideologies.

It’s how we get the “black misleadership class” in Reed’s terms, bourgeois African Americans purportedly speaking on behalf of “the black community.” By pretending this community isn’t internally riven by class divides, this essentialized view of a definitionally progressive blackness lets the black bourgeoisie fill the symbolic role of a black voice, immune from criticism by their allies, who are told to shut up and listen, not question the political credentials of the speaker. This doesn’t just cause chaos at the level of institutional politics, though it does that too. It also opens up space for incoherence and misleadership in movements.

As Douglas Williams put it, “we have gotten to a point where any critique of tactics used by oppressed communities can result in being deemed “sexist/racist/insert oppression here-ist” and cast out of the Social Justice Magic Circle.” While Williams is writing of the need to build a broader, more effective movement, the phenomena he’s referring to – the belief that the oppressed shouldn’t be criticised – is not only linked to a condescending belief that oppressed groups can’t argue their views, it hands a cover to conservative projects as long as they’re led by members of an oppressed group.

Teach for America is one of the most prominent organizations to take advantage of this opening. As Drew Franklin detailed at Orchestrated Pulse, Teach for America faced a “race problem” in the wake of the devastation of the New Orleans public school system. In Franklin’s words, this led it to “re-brand itself as a Civil Rights organization. Selling such an image necessitated a new class of political operatives, one that was “majority-led by the oppressed group.”” Yet again switching out the substantive and often socialist demands of the civil rights movement for symbols, TFA could claim membership under the umbrella of social justice just as long as it had enough people of color on its payroll and knew the right words to use.

I can’t help but think that was the purpose of a recent event hosted by TFA Massachusetts. Titled “#StayWoke: Social Justice through Hashtag Activism,” the event promised to help attendees struggle for racial justice, even as the organization hosting it eviscerates black communities across the country. Want to know someone who looks like he attended one of these trainings? Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, pictured here wearing a shirt that reads #StayWoke while speaking with TFA alum and black misleader-par-excellence Deray McKesson despite the fact that Twitter has a severe diversity problem.

And that gets to the heart of the issue. Neoliberalism, capital, or university administrations have no problem accommodating symbols. New language can be learned by hiring a social justice consultant, new faces can coexist with old in high places, granted the majority remain shut out. It’s calls for redistribution that don’t jive with the status quo but these are ignored in favor of those demanding the easily assimilable.

Aviva Chomsky skillfully addresses this in the context of the university in a recent piece. “While schools have downplayed or ignored student demands for changes in admissions, tuition, union rights, pay scales, and management prerogatives,” she writes, they’ve incorporated the more symbolic and individualized demands “into increasingly depoliticized cultural studies programs and business-friendly, market-oriented academic ways of thinking.” Those demanding changes of language – apologies, inclusive rhetoric, an end to microaggressions – are recognized while those advocating for prison divestment  or an increase in material support for students from oppressed groups are shut out.

The critical stance I and the writers I’m quoting adhere to isn’t a condemnation of anti-racism or feminism as such – I support both the symbolic and redistributive demands of college students. Rather, as Ben Norton wrote in a post on Reed and identity politics, it’s “a condemnation of a politics that is centered on social constructs, like race or gender, rather than on material conditions.” If we focus our politics around achieving material changes, this necessarily entails fighting oppression wherever it appears. But to hitch this struggle to redistribution prevents those opposed to this project from claiming the mantle of social justice.

Where Does This Leave Us?

First and foremost, we shouldn’t blame those confused by this rhetoric – indeed, I was one of them until very recently. These are people who want progress but are being sucked into the morass of conflations of identity and politics. This is concerning not only because of its lack of strategic efficacy but also because it burns people out. To be always on, to have your identity, your cultural preferences, your social circle and your dating life all bound up with and signifying your politics is a recipe for exhaustion. And I’ve seen it happen: either these activists enter into non-profits and lose sight of radical movement work altogether, or they give up completely, shifting into a consumption or lifestyle politics. If we want stronger movements, we need to argue against these politics.

But for those in positions of power – people like Luntz or Clinton, groups like TFA – cynically emptying out the force of these anti-capitalist words, we should be merciless in denying them access to this cover. Where those in power seek to insulate themselves from criticism by invoking the language of the left, we need to insist on placing these words back in the context from which they came: the struggle against capital and for the oppressed. By refusing to bestow any magic on words, we can render them useless to the powerful and in doing so, make the sides in this fight unmistakably clear.