With a few notable exceptions, organized labor has overwhelmingly refrained from offering concrete support for the present uprising against anti-Black police terror. Statements of solidarity have trickled in, but such statements fall short of labor leveraging its full power at this crucial moment. While there is a growing chorus within the labor movement to kick cop unions out of the AFL-CIO, even this important step would be insufficient for getting cops off our streets once and for all.
Police abolition will instead require a massive mobilization to break not only “the institutional power of police unions… and the capitalist city planners that support expanded policing,” but also the broader racial capitalist logics that pose prisons (and police) as “catchall solutions” to the social problems they generate. We don’t yet know what this massive mobilization will look like. But it is difficult to imagine its success in the absence not just of labor, but of the decision by unions to strike.