What are your thoughts on Police Unions and calls to have them thrown out of the AFL CIO?

The last time that police unions actually acted like unions was the Boston police strike of 1919 (that unfortunately catapulted Cal Coolidge into national political prominence). After that, the basic labor relations between the state and police unions began to change in ways that are not recognizable as standard trade unionism.

The shift really began in the 1930s, when the rise of industrial unionism and attendant strike activity scared the shit out of the employers and their allies in government, because the usual Pinkertons and American Legion thugs were not enough to keep a lid on the situation. Hence the need to keep the police unions on the side of the employers rather than allow any possibility of siding with the strikers - thus you start to see police unions getting easily recognized, wage increases getting thrown around like candy, anything to keep the strikebreakers sweet.

However, it particularly morphed during the Second Great Migration (1940s through 1970), when the sudden emergence or at least rapid expansion of black populations in Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western cities scared the shit out of the municipal establishment in similar, yet distinct ways than the earlier union uprising had. In this period, an informal understanding was reached that the elected officials would block, slow-walk, or otherwise frustrate attempts by activists to impose accountability on police through civilian complaint review boards and other mechanisms, in exchange for police making upholding the racial hierarchy one of their enforcement priorities.

The expansion of grievance and arbitration procedures to include shootings and other acts of police brutality, written reprimands and other punishments from management, civilian complaints of abuse of power, officers' misconduct records and the extent to which they could be made public or even shared with future employers - the whole intricate mechanism by which police union contracts were turned into a bulwark against accountability - was part of this quid-pro-quo alliance between the state and police in the face of the emergent civil rights movement.

That's part of what slightly gives me pause about the left critique of police union contracts, because I think this alliance would have been constructed, maintained, and expanded over the decades whether or not police were unionized. The means would have been different, probably exercised through city charters, local ordinances, judicial precedents (even more so), but the ends would be the same. And if activists actually managed to eliminate a police union contract today, I'm absolutely confident that municipal government would rebuild it the next day, because they're absolutely scared of police slowdowns.

As to chucking them out of the AFL-CIO, it's not a bad thing per se, but I do want people to understand that it would be purely symbolic. The AFL-CIO is a union federation, it doesn't really have much in the way of direct authority over member unions, or exclusive access to resources that outpace what the member unions have. To give a historical example, the AFL-CIO expelled the Teamsters back in the 50s for being mobbed-up and it didn't change the Teamsters one bit - they kept on being mobbed-up until the Teamsters for a Democratic Union challenged the Hoffaites in the 70s and the Justice Department went after them with RICO charges in the 80s.