Well. Recently Ive been hating on police unions a lot, but Im pretty cool with unions. So what gives, eh? --- The friction with police is almost as old as the labor movement itself. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, police were often called in to break up strikes, sometimes violently. When police sought their own union representation, some other members of the labor movement didn’t want to include the very people who were “busting heading heads in strikes,” Slater said. The American Federation of Labor, which merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, in 1955 decade to become the AFL-CIO, started letting police into its ranks in 1919. In September of that year, police in Boston went on strike and demanded union recognition. The strike failed disastrously — newspapers reported that criminals looted the city — and the nearly 75 percent of police who didn’t report for duty were dismissed. It took another 46 years for the Boston police to unionize and the Boston police strike inspired a legislative backlash in many cities and states, according to Slater. Not until the middle of the 20th century did police unionism, and public sector unionism generally, became relatively commonplace. The largest police union in the United States, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), came about in 1915, but it chose not to identify itself as a union. To this day, it is not affiliated with either the AFL-CIO or its counterpart, the Change to Win Federation. The International Union of Police Associations didnt get its start until 1954, when it was known as the National Conference of Police Associations. It didnt enter the AFL-CIO until 1979. But by the 1950s and 1960s, organized labor in the United States evolved from being an insurgent protest movement to a state-sanctioned institution. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 had institutionalized the union formation and bargaining process, tamping down on the potential for violent confrontations between workers and management. Public sector unions were growing in influence. Yet the civil rights movement was also on the ascent, and racial tensions drove a wedge between law enforcement unions and other organized labor groups.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 20:31:00 +0000
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