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Do Police Belong in Labor? A Panel Discussion

Join a discussion on Friday about the police and labor. Left Voice member Julia Wallace will speak about the need to get cops out of our unions.

Left Voice

April 5, 2022
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Image by Brookings.edu

Left Voice believes that cops have no place in the labor movement. As Left Voice explained,

At its rotten core, the police serve the rich by enforcing the conditions of capitalist accumulation and protecting private property at the expense of human life. It does this by unleashing racist brutality and terror, in conjunction with state-sponsored mass incarceration, on Black, Brown, and poor people.

In the United States, the nefarious origins of the police force can be traced back to slave patrols in the South and Night Watches in the North; these were the precursors to its institutionalized form. Historically and up to the present day, the overlap between the police and white supremacists groups like the KKK has been widely documented.

From its inception in the nineteenth century, the police has been the enemy of workers. Police have broken up labor strikes, violently suppressed mobilizations, and are used to dismantle every movement that fights for democratic rights. Despite the misnomer “union,” cop associations play a special role in upholding the police’s social function as the state’s primary tool of repression. 

Left Voice member and member of SEIU Drop the Cops, Julia Wallace will speak about this on a panel hosted by the CUNY Labor Coalition on Friday. She will be joined by Flint Taylor of the People’s law office , Jonathan Moore of Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP, and Facilitator Professor Frank Deale of CUNY Law.

Register here for the event.
Fri, April 8, 2022
5:00 PM – 7:00 PM EDT

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Left Voice

Militant journalism, revolutionary politics.

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