POLICE UNION SMEARS WOMAN WHO POSTED VIDEO OF POLICE BEATING ON FACEBOOK

[Omaha Steve]

9. Truthout: Black Labor Organizers Urge AFL-CIO to Reexamine Its Ties to the Police

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32342-black-labor-organizers-urge-afl-cio-to-reexamine-its-ties-to-the-police




(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)

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The rise of the Movement for Black Lives got Brandon Buchanan and some of his fellow graduate student employees in the University of California system thinking. Many of them had taken part in the protests rippling across the country, and the movement had also inspired them to think about what they could do within their own union, United Auto Workers Local 2865, to deal with questions of racism and anti-Blackness close to home.

"To get our voices heard we realized that we needed to come together to form a committee that specifically addressed the needs of Black workers in the union," Buchanan, a graduate student in sociology at UC Davis, told Truthout.

The Black Interests Coordinating Committee was born out of this effort to "call out our fellow union members, and call them in to an anti-racist union," he added. But the committee's members also wanted to have an impact on the broader conversation in the labor movement around racism, police violence and the role of labor in a racial justice movement.

"We were seeing a number of police unions and associations criticizing Black activists for addressing the needs of their communities, and actively working to cover up and dismiss issues of police brutality in their departments," Buchanan said. Most of those police unions are already outside of the major labor federations, but the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA) is a member of the AFL-CIO, the nation's largest federation of labor unions. And when members of the Black Interests Coordinating Committee did some reading of IUPA leaders' statements on police killings and the union's website, they found what Buchanan describes as "articles in which questions of Black civilian life were downplayed to the benefit of the police officers' narrative."

FULL story at link.

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