Unions: Not Entities That Can Make Their Members Radical

Ignore the anti-union bias in this linked story. New York teachers wearing pro-police shirts after the union told them not to is a useful window into the problems with those who say that unions should be radical and support all sorts of justice movements while also talking up a storm about union democracy. Unions are made up of individuals with a variety of political beliefs. Any sort of democratic union has to deal with this. Some of their members are going to be right-wingers. When it comes to police violence, some of those teachers are going to be racist. Some will come from a family of cops. Some will be dating cops. There are lots of reasons why workers might buck union leadership on an issue like this.

In other words, it may be an entirely democratic process that leads to a right-wing positions on issues like police violence. The “union,” by which people mean the bureaucratic union leadership they often denigrate, can’t do a whole lot about that. And if people want to say education campaigns are important here, they have to understand that given the limited resources unions have, using those scarce dollars and time on issues peripheral to the core mission of the union is a)not practical and b)would alienate a lot of members.