Nonprofit Professional Employees Union Calls for Disaffiliation of Police Unions and Defunding Police Departments
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Katie Barrows, NPEU, kbarrows@npeu.org, 360-624-6936
We, the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union (IFPTE Local 70), call upon the AFL-CIO Executive Council to suspend and revoke the charter of the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA) and other police unions. We urge other local and international unions to investigate their connections to police and police unions and cut those ties as well. We further endorse calls to defund police departments and reallocate those funds to social goods—such as food, clean air and water, housing, education, healthcare, child care, income assistance, and support for workers—in order to eliminate police violence and other systemic injustices that disproportionately harm Black, Brown, and Indigenous people; transgender, nonbinary, and other LGBTQ people; disabled people; immigrants; and sex workers.
Throughout this country’s history, police have been deployed as violent agents of white supremacy and capitalism. Modern police originated as slave patrols to re-enslave Black people seeking freedom, kidnap free Black people, and protect white enslavers’ interests in extracting free Black labor. As the country industrialized, police were consistently called upon by owners of capital to prevent workers from organizing, to break strikes, and even to kill workers. The basic rights that workers enjoy today exist because labor organizers persisted in the face of systemic police violence.
Reform has not worked. The vast majority of police departments already have in place the reforms that politicians are calling for today, such as banning chokeholds, requiring de-escalation, or requiring warnings before shooting. Still—one-third of all people killed by strangers in the U.S. are killed by police, and sexual violence is the second most common form of police misconduct, after excessive force. Marginalized communities in particular cannot rely on police to ameliorate these harms, only to exacerbate them.
More importantly, reform is not the answer. Police are not our comrades. Police are footsoldiers of the white supremacist and capitalist state. Their mission is incompatible with ours, and conflating the two not only undermines worker solidarity but also represents a betrayal of our neighbors and fellow workers who are disproportionately harmed by police violence.
Affiliation is complicity. The AFL-CIO cannot claim to unequivocally support all workers while associating with an institution that harms so many of us. Moreover, affiliation with the IUPA and other police unions severely compromises the AFL-CIO’s ability to advance policies that meaningfully protect workers from state violence.
Our calls today are consistent with the mission of the AFL-CIO “to vanquish oppression, privation and cruelty in all their forms.” We are proud to join other AFL-CIO members in seeking disaffiliation from police, and are honored to lend full support to the demands of Black community organizers and scholars to defund police. We urge our fellow workers to join us.
- NPEU Membership
About NPEU:
The Nonprofit Professional Employees Union (NPEU), a local of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, represents professionals employed at more than 25 nonprofit organizations, including employees at Economic Policy Institute, the Center for American Progress, and Community Change. With several hundred members, NPEU gives nonprofit workers a voice to strengthen their workplaces and continue to do work that makes a difference in people’s lives.