This is a silly argument. His assertion that the union isn't "interested in helping cops" is ludicrous, his actual points completely contradict this (e.g. their pension). Also his notion that "real unions" are about "public interest" is similarly nonsensical -- unions are primarily about benefiting their members, as they should be.
He also completely misses a much stronger point, which is that there is a crucial difference between private-sector unions and public-sector unions. Which is that private-sector unions are necessary because there's no other mechanism for employees to reach a collective agreement. But in the public sector, there is: the ballot box, i.e. all democratic policy ever. Collective decision-making takes place in the legislature.
In this sense, there's an argument to be made that police unions, teacher's unions, etc. are unnecessary and fundamentally anti-democratic. If Coca-Cola workers go on strike that's fine, we can just buy Pepsi. If police and teachers go on strike, the nation suffers -- government unions essentially break the democratic social contract by declaring "we disagree with the democratic decision of the people and will hold the city/country hostage". One could make the argument that in the private sector it's simply negotiation, while in the public sector it's extortion.
Now it's not actually that simple in practice -- after all, democratic representation and legislation often doesn't work as well as it's supposed to. But then again, police and teachers' unions seem to be arguably just as bad of a mess.
> But in the public sector, there is: the ballot box, i.e. all democratic policy ever. Collective decision-making takes place in the legislature.
Do not like this argument. I know you acknowledge it later but there are so many problems with this. It assumes that some 0.5% of the population can affect the results of elections in any consistent manner, that they would even vote consistently given that they probably would have diverse politics, that politicians would care about problems (which can be some bureaucratic minutia) that they have, etc.
If teacher's unions didn't exist, you would never even hear about complaints that teachers have in the political arena except some pity article written by a journalist about the troubles that teachers have.
There's a problem with public sector unions - they make a contract with 0.01% of the population, but the rest of the population gets to adhere to that contract.
If teachers want to have unions - they should be free.
If police officers want to go on a strike - they should be free to do so.
What I disagree with - is that police unions take hostage the whole legislative process and force their own interests without a broad debate.
Take police infraction reports in New York - police unions got their members infraction records sealed by law.
Any legal mandate for union or any legal mandate against a union is bad.
Yes, police unions need to be heavily regulated since they have so much power both politically and in terms of what kind of levers they can pull. For example, there was a story about Minnesota police slowing down their responses to areas in which their city council representative voted against the interests of the police union.
But the narrow question of whether the police need a union or not, I think they do because they need representation etc., the same reasons why any employee, public or otherwise, needs a union.
If police unions aren't "unions," why are some of them part of the AFL-CIO, the largest collection of unions in the nation?
Police unions are unions--according to other unions.
I think it would be more intellectually honest of Cory to admit that unions are not automatically or inherently contributors to social progress, but rather are forms of organization that must be available in order to create the potential for social progress.
Put another way, objecting to what police unions do is not proof of a flaw with unionization in general. It's just disagreement with what those specific union leaders choose to do with the power afforded to them by the union form.
Progressives are plenty comfortable making this kind of argument about nonprofit organizations. It's perfectly consistent to like the ACLU and dislike the NRA, for example, even though they're both nonprofits.
The call-to-action at the end of the thread is a call for the AFL-CIO to sever its ties with Police Unions.
Basically the entire thread is "Here are all the reasons, AFL-CIO, that you shouldn't associate with these unions anymore."
Using the fact that the AFL-CIO does support them is a bit of a tautological dead-end, because of course they do, otherwise this thread attempting to persuade them not to wouldn't exist.
Just in case anyone didn't get to the end of the twitter thread, the last tweet is as follows:
I just don't think anyone will get a sympathetic ear at the AFL-CIO if the lead is "I'm going to tell you what unions really are." The AFL-CIO undoubtedly thinks they are qualified to make that determination for themselves.
Honestly I doubt the AFL-CIO leadership will listen to anyone on this topic unless there is pressure from their membership, like if other unions start threatening to disaffiliate over policing issues.
> If police unions aren't "unions," why are some of them part of the AFL-CIO, the largest collection of unions in the nation?
Doctorow is calling for AFL-CIO to eject police unions. Police unions do not show solidarity with other unions, except when it benefits them. It's fine to call them a union, but it's high time for other unions to sever ties because solidarity is a two-way street.
Cory is known to be a big fan of the alternative to the AFL-CIO known as the IWW (or "Wobblies"), that attracted more radical unions. While they were far more relevant in the early 20th century, they still technically exist in a tiny sense today and have organized some Starbucks locations.
You left out “in the traditional sense”. Police unions are in fact unions, they’re just unlike the other unions, was what I perceived the argument to be, and it feels like you’re digging into a straw man by taking it intentionally very literally
Doctorow's arguments seems to fall into the categories of 1) police unions exist for the benefit of their members not for society at large, and 2) a list of things not to like about the police in general, not their unions.
It's a decent list if you just want to get someone hot under the collar about the police, but not for arguing that their unions are nontraditional in any sense other than the type of job their union represents.
I just see contortion to avoid admitting that it's both possible and reasonable for generally pro-union people to disagree with any specific union. That's ground he doesn't want to cede to people that might be less positive on unions overall.
But it's a crazy stance to take. For any goal it's possible for a group or organization to work towards, there is going to be a non-zero number of perfectly-typical groups doing it that people don't like.
There's a pizza shop downtown that I think makes retched pizza, but I also know people who think they're the best in town. Doesn't mean I go around saying they're "not a traditional pizza shop" because I'm afraid of looking anti-pizza when I say I'm not joining you for lunch if that's where you're going.
I believe a more accurate metaphor would be if the pizza shop was known for regularly stealing people’s money, or assaulting their patrons. In that case they would in fact not be a traditional pizza shop and there would be no confusion about you being anti pizza.
You’re the one using contortion here in my opinion.
>They should stop calling them unions and just call them "brotherhoods", which is more accurate.
Like "International Brotherhood of Teamsters", or "International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers", or "United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America" ?
They don't carry lunch buckets to mine adits or factory gates? I'm willing to hear such arguments for SAG-AFTRA or NFLPA. But the tweeter seems to use "in the traditional sense" as meaning "having a cool image among my friends".
Calvin Coolidge first attracted national attention when he helped to break the Boston police strike in 1919. There are a fair number of unions that can't trace their history back to 1919.
As a brit, it seems like there are dozens of causes of US police brutality. Everyone has a favourite cause which fits their wider political/social point of view. Then they just talks about that one, ignoring all the others and their respective solutions.
It's hard to build a coalition to end police brutality if you basically ignore the majority of cases in favor of focusing on the relative differences across races wrt population size (even ignoring the frequency of crimes in those populations).
You can cover an issue in breadth, or in depth in an article. To do the issue justice (lol) by drilling into all of the causes, would require a book. Those don't get covered on HN much, or consumed by the public in great quantities anymore -- I'd guess the people most likely to buy/read a book on the brutality of american policing are those who already understand the breadth and depth of the problem.
> Front-line workers' unions like teachers and nurses strike to improve conditions for the people they care for; police unions' main cause is reducing oversight and accountability, waging a decades-long war on civilian oversight boards.
Teachers also wage war on accountability. They resist every attempt to measure their performance (for example through standardized tests), never suggesting alternative approaches where they see a flaw in methodology. Most recently teacher unions have started mixing demands for safer reopening plans with a mix of other wholly unrelated demands - asking for charter schools/parental choice to be abolished, asking for police defunding, asking for Medicare for all, etc (https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/l-a-teachers-union-say...). These have nothing to do with safer reopening plans. The teacher unions want protection from accountability by squashing competition (charter schools) and they are bundling this ask with an ask for safer reopening plans and police defunding to garner public support. But make no mistake these are political games.
In Seattle earlier this year, nurses in one hospital system went on strike (https://apnews.com/106ced24f239ea09b709e8959c385e45). They marketed the strike as pushing for better nurse to patient ratios but it really was about pay. The hospital had offered a generous pay increase out of the gate that was better than what another medical group had recently offered its own workers, who accepted the new package. The increased pay at this other hospital was the motivation for these other nurses to strike, but the striking nurses rejected that generous offer and demanded double the increase. The strike resulted in numerous patients having procedures delayed by months (waiting for openings in schedule) and expecting mothers scrambling to deliver elsewhere and so forth. I don’t see how their strike served patients at all.
The reality is that all unions bring with them dynamics of power that they use to serve their own member’s interests. They often market benefits to the public or other parties to present their demands in a less offensive way, but their core purpose is to serve their own member’s interests. The lack of competition can cause many negative behaviors - that happens across the board whether we are taking about police or teachers or nurses. Cory Doctorow’s
Twitter defense, trying to separate out police unions from all other unions, makes no sense and just seems biased.
Teachers aren’t against measuring progress they’re against tests that have been shown to not help the children but instead detract from learning useful things and instead encourage memorization. I recall wasting entire quarters in school learning “meta” subjects about the FCAT. Utterly useless. And biased towards minorities
No nurses are unionizing for lack of oversight asking to “make hospitals great again”. Asking for a better nurse to patient ratio really isn’t comparable to asking to rollback reforms and oversights. Complete apples to oranges comparison there
Again, the nurses were simply asking for more pay, and when given a competitive package they asked for even more. The marketing of asking for better nurse to patient ratios is the same sort of bundling of concerns teacher unions perform, to gather support for their push.
A key part of conservative political philosophy is a set of arguments that the people in governmental bureaucracies are invariable incompetent and act against the welfare of the larger society.
There is, however, one simple way to cure this problem. That is to give them guns and the right to use them in circumstances where ordinary citizens can't.
of course police unions are unions. unions have always been self interested to the needs of the members of that union even if its add odds of health and well being of people dependent on those workers.
this is the whole anarcho-syndicalist fantasy in a nutshell. collective bargaining will inevitably put you at odds with other groups and their needs. its just collective selfishness instead of individual selfishness. nd usually its not even the whole group its the influential and charismatic leaders of the union who drag everyone in a certain direction. little stalins.
He also completely misses a much stronger point, which is that there is a crucial difference between private-sector unions and public-sector unions. Which is that private-sector unions are necessary because there's no other mechanism for employees to reach a collective agreement. But in the public sector, there is: the ballot box, i.e. all democratic policy ever. Collective decision-making takes place in the legislature.
In this sense, there's an argument to be made that police unions, teacher's unions, etc. are unnecessary and fundamentally anti-democratic. If Coca-Cola workers go on strike that's fine, we can just buy Pepsi. If police and teachers go on strike, the nation suffers -- government unions essentially break the democratic social contract by declaring "we disagree with the democratic decision of the people and will hold the city/country hostage". One could make the argument that in the private sector it's simply negotiation, while in the public sector it's extortion.
Now it's not actually that simple in practice -- after all, democratic representation and legislation often doesn't work as well as it's supposed to. But then again, police and teachers' unions seem to be arguably just as bad of a mess.