cops don’t stop being workers just because you hate them
I might argue that cops are political apparatchiks and cronies. A lot of the work is functionally a sinecure. Police can and regularly do simply skip their shifts or stand around doing nothing of consequence, while collecting a paycheck. The stated role of the police - protecting human life and community property - routinely goes unfulfilled. The functional role they fill is to discipline labor - guarding the properties of the idle rich, harassing minority communities and the unemployed/unhoused, hunting and assaulting enemies of the state, surveilling political and social opposition.
I don’t think its fair to say that policing isn’t real labor, because there’s definitely a craft to it and even the most anti-cop society eventually recognizes the need for professionalized security. But the police as we know them today? Would you consider a pimp a member of the proletariat? What if he was a pimp-for-hire?
Do unionized Trump voters and racists and guys who beat their wives stop being workers, too?
I guess we get to have some discourse over whether Mark Janus is a member of the proletariat, next?
I would argue that when your job consists of propagandizing against worker solidarity or physically intimidating people seeking economic independence, you’re not doing productive work. Whether you’re voting for Trump or Harris or RFK doesn’t really matter. If you’re beating up your spouse in order to extort more free labor? Absolutely the fuck not. That’s textbook petite bourgeois behavior.
Police can and regularly do simply skip their shifts or stand around doing nothing of consequence, while collecting a paycheck
You’re mixing two things here. In a private firm unions are needed because they balance the power. (Simplifying) Employer wants to exploit workers, union keeps them in check. (ofc employers don’t need to be exploitative for unions to be needed etc etc etc)
But when the employer is completely dysfunctional the unions become dysfunctional too. I don’t really know how the US government justifies paying for police doing nothing, but it’s the core of the problem. If there’s no expectation to work then unions have nothing to do and become something weird.
The solution is not to take unions away, but rather to stop pouring money for no work and restore that employer-union power balance.
So defund the police, I guess?
But when the employer is completely dysfunctional the unions become dysfunctional too.
The purpose of the union is to operate as a check on the employer. If unions can’t rein in the worst impulses of their employers, they aren’t functioning in the interests of the people they supposedly represent.
A corrupt union leadership isn’t part of the proletariat, either. A corrupt union membership - particularly one that’s financially wedded to political insiders - isn’t operating as a bargaining unit for the benefit of itself. These organizations are extractionary. A union of loan sharks or extortionary arsonists isn’t part of the proletariat, either.
The solution is not to take unions away, but rather to stop pouring money for no work and restore that employer-union power balance.
The solution is to dissolve the corrupt institution and reincorporate it with a membership that represents the interests of the community at large. But a cop that’s spent their entire career in a corrupt bureaucracy can’t be trusted to guard the neighborhood any more than a fox can be trusted to guard the hen house. Once you’ve got a taste, you’re ruined. Nothing to do but sort you into a different profession.
So defund the police, I guess?
Call it restructuring.
