Notes

I would like to thank the group of students that put most of the work into this file.

Raymond Behnke

Gabi Cunningham

Kristian Ivanov

Ben Manens

Nimai Talur

Zach Willingham

Michelle Wu

There will be an updates file in the future.

1NC
 Shell
Police Unions maintain power now by blocking CJR – the plan is a strike against police
union power by pushing soft on crime reforms.
Barajas, 5/3/2019 (Michael, “The Big Blue Obstacle to Bipartisan Criminal Justice Reform”
https://www.texasobserver.org/the-big-blue-obstacle-to-bipartisan-criminal-justice-reform/)

While swift reform following an in-custody death is a refreshing change, the knee-jerk police union opposition is
predictable. Police groups have a long history of blocking reforms and pushing tough-on-crime
policies . However, in this new era of bipartisan efforts to curb mass incarceration, police associations have increasingly become a voice in
the wilderness.

While the state GOP platform calls for decriminalizing pot possession, groups representing rural and suburban
police officials appear to have helped kill marijuana reform at the Texas Legislature this year after spreading lies and half-truths
on the issue all session. Police unions have also opposed right-on-crime-backed bills to end the kind of “contempt of cop”
situation that led to Sandra Bland’s needless arrest and subsequent death.

Last month, one of the state’s largest police officers associations called for the removal of Dallas County DA John Creuzot for doing what he said
he’d do on the campaign trail: refusing to prosecute certain drug cases and changing how the office handles crimes related to poverty and
homelessness. In Bexar County, Gonzales won last year after making similar promises to end mass incarceration. San Antonio’s police union
backed Gonzales’ Republican opponent.

The San Antonio Police Officers Association is a case study in how police build and wield political power.
In the late 1980s, Harold Flammia, a police sergeant who studied Saul Alinsky, ascended to the top of the union and drove it
headfirst into local politics: phone banking before elections, publicly endorsing or opposing candidates and creating a political action
committee to bankroll the union’s picks. Candidates who wouldn’t commit to better pay and equipment for officers were labeled anti-police.
Within four years, San Antonio cops negotiated one of the best wage and benefits packages in the
country, becoming an example for other unions to follow.

In addition to safeguarding those perks, theunion has also fought against reforming how the department uses
force and tried to oust Chief William McManus after he fired an officer in 2016 for killing an unarmed man. Later that year, despite
protests by police accountability groups, San Antonio’s city council extended the union’s contract for another five
years, leaving in place archaic disciplinary rules that shield officers who commit misconduct from
scrutiny. (During the debate, Helle, the union’s president, compared Black Lives Matter activists to the KKK). In 2017, the union’s complaints
to the Texas Attorney General’s Office — over a human smuggling bust where police released a dozen immigrants from Guatemala rather than
turning them over to the feds — appear to have sparked a costly lawsuit against the city for allegedly violating Texas’ “sanctuary cities” ban.

Attacks against police unions endangers the collective bargaining rights of all public-
sector workers. Republicans will use an attack on police unions to destroy all other
unions in the process.
Cunningham-Cook 6-18 [Matthew Cunningham-Cook, 6-18-2020, "The AFL-CIO’s Police Union
Problem Is Bigger Than You Think," Intercept, https://theintercept.com/2020/06/18/afl-cio-police-labor-
union/

Setting police unions fully apart from the rest of organized labor would, some advocates hope, heighten the already
existing internal contradictions and hasten a reckoning. That reckoning, some unions worry and some conservative opponents of
labor hope, would boomerang onto other public sector workers , who are disproportionately African

American. And after a decade of nonstop attacks on public sector collective bargaining rights, union
leadership is concerned about changes to police union collective bargaining resulting in weakening
protections for all public sector workers, as has been proposed by numerous right-wing think tanks. Ben
Sachs, a labor and industry professor at Harvard Law who recently launched a project to reform police union collective bargaining to end police abuses, understands the concerns of union

leaders and others that a push to reform police union collective bargaining could endanger a broader subset of
workers. We can’t allow changes to police collective bargaining to become a stalking horse for those with a political agenda to undermine other public sector unions. “It is absolutely
critical that any reforms remain tightly focused on the actual problem here, which is police violence. Any changes to police collective bargaining law should apply only to collective bargaining

changes to police collective bargaining to become a stalking horse for

practices that directly implicate police violence. We can’t allow

those with a political agenda to undermine other public sector unions,” Sachs said. “At the same time, this is an immediate and
enormous crisis. That has to be dealt with in a robust way. If that means that being open to some changes to police collective bargaining laws, it’s incumbent on us to be open to that.” Veena
Dubal, a University of California, Hastings College of the Law professor who resigned from the Berkeley police oversight commission due to its toothlessness, argued that demands to defund or
abolish the police reflected the tension of attempting to address the ways that police collective bargaining agreements protect violent cops without infringing on public sector collective

bargaining rights. “Rather than open the door to the de-unionization of public sector workers, a much better strategy is a social movement strategy,” which would include the AFL-CIO saying it
didn’t want to be associated with cop unions, said Dubal. That strategy, Dubal argued, would recognize that “police aren’t workers even in the same way that firemen are workers. Police

defend property. They have historically defended white property. We’re not in a place where that is going to change.” The end goal, Dubal said, would be to “take the emphasis away from the
unions and refocus on defunding and abolition of police departments. As labor movement activists we have to push back against racism and the institutionalization of racism amongst and our
communities. That was the failure of labor in the 1960s. … We’re not going to achieve the racial equality and economic justice in the labor movement if we don’t continue to make these

strides.” Saladin Muhammad, a former organizer with the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America and current co-coordinator of the Southern Workers Assembly, meanwhile
believes the AFL-CIO should expel the IUPA unequivocally — and that mainstream unions should consider expulsion of their law enforcement units as well. “I believe if the Minnesota cops
would have come out — not just one or two but hundreds of them — come out and condemned what happened to George Floyd, that might have been an important statement. But they

didn’t. This blue wall of silence that exists as a part of police culture has stopped this kind of open challenge by police to police brutality.” “Expelling the police is one question but it doesn’t
stop them from functioning the way they function. But it is a step forward,” said Muhammad, who argued that the rank and file must also take action to address systemic racism. “Responding

to these kinds of acts has to begin to be seen as an obligation of the working class and of trade unions.” “As an African-American, this killing with impunity that exists really speaks to the
question of whether the working class is going to unite on a multinational, multiracial basis around conditions that affect a section of the working class. Responding to these kinds of acts has to

begin to be seen as an obligation of the working class and of trade unions,” said Muhammad. Steven Pitts, a professor at the UC Berkeley Labor Center who has led racial justice discussions for
many unions, argued that the behavior of cops is a bigger issue than the presence of their unions within the AFL-CIO. “What we need now is to stop cops from killing Black people. Sometimes
symbolic steps can be useful. But the final marker in the sand is to restrain the power of the police to kill Black people. We need to identify the concrete policies and procedures that allow cops
that we know have issues around race and brutality — it may be an issue of collective bargaining, arbitration, or disciplinary records — once we identify those things and then we make them a
condition of further acceptance in the AFL-CIO. Expelling cop unions would then become a tool to change those policies and procedures that lead to brutality. If we can’t draw a direct line from

expulsion to the elimination of bad practices, then I’d want to focus on the bad practices.” Unions should also focus on empowering Black workers to fight against anti-Black racism. “How do
you bring power to those that are powerless? How do you increase the power of Black workers, Asian workers, Latino workers and so forth? Otherwise we’re asking people, like the AFL-CIO
leadership, who have good hearts but they will behave imperfectly if workers of color lack power in society,” Pitts said, noting that AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka “makes a calculus to say

things in one context and differently in another and our job is to change the context. That’s a matter of power.” THERE ARE FEW historical examples of unions getting kicked out of the labor
movement. The UE, which Muhammad was formerly an organizer with, was one of the communist-led unions expelled from the CIO. After its expulsion, over 90 percent of its 700,000

members were pressured and red-baited into joining more conservative unions, all of whom were much less progressive on racial justice issues. “I think that SEIU, AFSCME, and the
Teamsters should consider expelling their cop locals,” said Muhammad. “There’s a real strong element of business unionism that is making some unions reluctant [to expel]. I haven’t really

seen any of the major unions that have cops really struggle with the cops and … expel members of their union who have committed these vicious acts and killings.” “Expelling a law
enforcement unit from an international union would depend if there was a violation of the constitution,” Fletcher said. Indeed, that’s the argument the WGAE made in its resolution on
expelling IUPA, which argued that “police unions are incompatible with the AFL-CIO’s stated goals: ‘to vanquish oppression, privation and cruelty in all their forms.’” The resolution went on:
“the policies or activities of [the IUPA] are consistently directed toward the achievement of the program or purposes of authoritarianism, totalitarianism, terrorism and other forces that

suppress individual liberties and freedom of association and oppose the basic principles of free and democratic trade unionism.” Fletcher said that if the AFL-CIO held a nationwide discussion,
one of the results may be that the police unions could choose to leave, noting that the AFL-CIO completed a racial justice commission in 2017 in response to the emergence of the Black Lives
Matter movement in 2014 and 2015. The IUPA did not participate in it. “The AFL could look into law enforcement and part of it would be about race and one of the consequences is that the
IUPA could decide to leave. There might be police units of AFL-CIO affiliates that would object to such a discussion. But there’s a big difference between them deciding to leave and them being

thrown out.” THE CONVERSATION AROUND police unions often centers around their collective bargaining agreements, which typically make it difficult to terminate an officer for misconduct.
Police unions also have a stable of friendly arbitrators jointly approved by management and union who typically issue decisions that are much friendlier to officers than arbitrators in typical
public sector collective bargaining. In states with public sector collective bargaining, such agreements are made possible by laws that are friendlier to police and fire unions than others,

allowing them “interest arbitration” to settle contracts, a process far friendlier to unions than typical collective bargaining. In major confrontations, police unions have already failed to show

efforts to reform the police collective bargaining process

solidarity with other public sector unions. Union leadership is concerned that

could backfire and endanger public sector labor rights more broadly. AFSCME President Lee Saunders, who is African American, spoke
to those concerns in an op-ed in USA Today, where he wrote, “Just as it was wrong when racists went out of their way to exclude black people from unions, it is wrong to deny this freedom to

Conservatives, ranging from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page to libertarian think tanks, have been making the argument
police officers today.”

that problems with police union collective bargaining justifies the elimination of public sector collective
bargaining rights altogether, in violation of international labor law.
Collective Bargaining is key to reducing income inequality and wages. The link is
reversal causal.
Bivens et al, 17 (Josh, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), “How today’s unions
help working people,” 8/24/17, Economic Policy Institute, https://www.epi.org/publication/how-todays-
unions-help-working-people-giving-workers-the-power-to-improve-their-jobs-and-unrig-the-economy/)

As union coverage has declined and the voice of workers has correspondingly diminished, many of the key workplace
standards past generations counted on have been eroded. For instance, there has been an erosion of
overtime pay protection, slashing of workers’ compensation programs, and a decline in the real value of
the minimum wage, which is lower now than it was in 1968.
Unions reduce inequality and are essential for low- and middle-wage workers’ ability to obtain a fair share of economic growth

The spread of collective bargaining that followed the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 led to decades of faster and fairer
economic growth that persisted until the late 1970s. But since the 1970s, declining
unionization has fueled rising inequality
and stalled economic progress for the broad American middle class. Figures A and B show that when unions are
weak, the highest incomes go up even more, but when unions are strong, middle incomes go up.

Research by EPI and other institutions shows this

correlation is no accident. First, unions have strong positive effects
not only on the wages of union workers but also on the wages of comparable nonunion workers, as
unions set standards for entire industries and occupations (these union and nonunion wage boosts are explored in detail
in the next section of this report). Second, unions make wages among occupations more equal because they give
a larger wage boost to low- and middle-wage occupations than to high-wage occupations. Third, unions
make wages of workers with similar characteristics more equal because of the standards unions set.
Fourth, unions have historically been more likely to organize middle-wage than high-wage workers,
which lowers inequality by closing gaps between, say, blue-collar and white-collar workers. Finally, the union wage
boost is largest for low-wage workers and larger at the middle than at the highest wage levels, larger for
black and Hispanic workers than for white workers, and larger for those with lower levels of education—
wage increases for these groups help narrow wage inequalities.16
We know how big a force for equality unions are by looking at how much their decline has contributed to inequality between middle- and high-
wage workers: union
decline can explain one-third of the rise in wage inequality among men and one-fifth of
the rise in wage inequality among women from 1973 to 2007. Among men, the erosion of collective
bargaining has been the largest single factor driving a wedge between middle- and high-wage
workers .17

Reducing income inequality is key to recover from the current recession and prevent
future ones.
Boushey and Park 19 [Heather Boushey and Somin Park, 5-15-2019, "Fighting inequality is key to
preparing for the next recession," Economic Policy Institute, https://www.epi.org/blog/fighting-
inequality-is-key-to-preparing-for-the-next-recession/

The failure to make a serious dent in high levels of economic inequality in recent years will make
responding effectively to the next inevitable recession more difficult, both economically and politically. Rising income
and wealth inequality, combined with financial deregulation and the expanding financialization of the U.S. economy, led to the credit boom and
crash that substantially deepened the resulting economic crisis in 2008. Fiscal stimulus during the Great Recession prevented the economy from
collapsing completely but was still insufficient and phased out too soon. What’s more, instead of taking lessons from our experiences a decade
ago and strengthening our recession-fighting tools, recent policies passed by Congress have focused on cutting taxes, reduced the perceived
space we have to increase spending in a downturn and exacerbated income and wealth disparities in the United States. First, let’s zoom out.
Recessions aren’t just one-offs. They are part of the economic cycle. Aggregate demand in the economy expands and contracts over time and
recessions occur during prolonged contractions, which are more likely when economic inequality distorts consumption and savings .
Inequality also affects the time it takes to recover from recessions because it subverts our institutions
and makes our political system ineffective. Lifting the economy out of a downturn requires decisive
government action to boost spending and aggregate demand, which often runs counter to the primary
interests of those with economic and political power. As entrenched interests continually hamstring the government’s
capacity to respond to a recession, policymakers should act now to prepare for the next one by addressing inequality in the United States.
Inequality makes recessions more likely The U.S. economy is amid what will be the longest recovery in history if it lasts past June
2019. While no one can predict the next recession, it will happen. And, evidence from around the world indicates that our high inequality
makes that even more likely. Economists are examining how higher inequality is associated with slower income gains among those lower down
the income and wealth ladder.1 The question has been most prominently explored by Jonathan Ostry and a group of his colleagues at the
International Monetary Fund. In a book released early in 2019, Ostry and fellow IMF economists Prakash Loungani and Andrew Berg showed
that inequality was associated with more frequent economic downturns.2 Growth may happen, but if inequality is high then the economic gains
are more likely to be destroyed by the recession—or depression—that follows, with the economic pain all-too-often compounded for those at
the lower end of the income spectrum. These findings represent a radical shift for researchers at the IMF and their longstanding view on a
trade-off between growth and equity. While many economists had asked the question about the role of inequality in the last global economic
crisis, the IMF’s research team provided the answer first seen widely to be credible. They conclude: “[Looking at a] diversity of experiences and
empirical analysis suggest that there is no systematic adverse trade-off between increasing growth and decreasing inequality.”3 They aren’t the
only ones. When Moody’s Analytics’ chief economist Mark Zandi integrated inequality into the Moodys.com macroeconomic forecasting model
for the United States, he found that adding inequality to the traditional models—ones that do not take into account economic inequality at all
—did not change the short-term forecasts very much. But when he looked at the long-term picture or considered the potential for the system
to spin out of control, he concluded that higher inequality increases the likelihood of instability in the financial system.4 One pathway through
which inequality contributes to economic fragility consists in the way it increases the supply of credit. There’s strong evidence that the financial
deregulation of the early 2000s led to a rise in the availability of credit. Lenders became less risk-adverse as the consequences of debt were
passed on to others—investors and families—and lending standards fell sharply. Many people left out of the gains from economic growth
turned to borrowing more to make up for that lost income. As the 2008 crisis demonstrated, a rise in the credit supply makes economic crises
more likely, especially when combined with looser regulations and political power conferred on the financial industry.5 In the United States,
inequality fuels long-term stagnation Recessions are bad—and so is long-term economic stagnation. Inequality distorts and reduces
total consumption while at the same time increasing the stock of savings. The combination of lots of
savings but too few attractive opportunities for profitable investments creates a long-term trajectory of slow growth. This
is not a short-term problem; it’s a medium- to long-term one tied to a well-documented decades-long lack of income
growth for the bottom half of the income distribution. The term economists use to describe this combination of trends is
“secular stagnation,” an especially fragile state when not in a recession. On the consumption side, we know from research that as income
and wealth inequality rise, less money makes its way through the economy as income that turns into consumption,
which implies that there’s less overall consumer demand. A 2004 paper by economists Karen Dynan at Harvard University, Jonathan Skinner at
Dartmouth University, and Stephen P. Zeldes at the Columbia Business School shows that while Americans on average spend about 80 cents of
every dollar they earn and save about 20 cents, this varies widely depending on age and whether a household is rich or poor. The
very
richest households—the top 1 percent—spend only 51 percent of their income, while those in the bottom 20
percent spend 99 percent.

Slow economic growth erodes international institutions – causes conflict

Haass 17 — Richard Haass (Ph.D. and M.A. from Oxford University, B.A. from Oberlin College, president of the Council on Foreign
Relations, former vice president and director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, the Sol M. Linowitz visiting professor of
international studies at Hamilton College, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a lecturer in public policy at
the Harvard Kennedy School, research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and State Department aide; Project
Syndicate),“A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order” published January 10, 2017, (Print) - MZhu

A large portion of the burden of creating and maintaining order at the regional or global level will fall on the
U nited S tates. This is inevitable for several reasons, only one of which is that the United States is and will likely remain the most powerful country in the world for decades to
no other country or group of countries has either the capacity or the mind-set to
come. The corollary to this point is that

build a global order. Nor can order ever be expected to emerge automatically; there is no invisible hand in the geopolitical
marketplace. Again, a large part of the burden (or, more positively, opportunity) falls on the principal power of the day. There is more than a little self-interest at stake. The United
States cannot remain aloof , much less unaffected by a world in disarray. Globalization is more reality than choice. At the regional
level, the United States actually faces the opposite problem, namely, that certain actors do have the mind-set and means to shape an

order. The problem is that their views of order are in part or in whole incompatible with U.S. interests. Examples would include Iran
and ISIS in the Middle East, China in Asia, and Russia in Europe. It will not be an easy time for the U nited S tates. The
sheer number and range of challenges is daunting. There are a large number of actors and forces to contend with. Alliances, normally
created in opposition to some country or countries, may not be as useful a vehicle in a world in which not all foes are always

foes and not all friends are always friendly. Diplomacy will count for a great deal; there will be a premium on dexterity. Consultations that aim to affect the
actions of other governments and their leaders are likely to matter more than negotiations that aim to solve problems. Another reality is that the United States for all its power cannot impose

no country can contend with global challenges on its own

order. Partially this reflects what might be called structural realities, namely, that

given the very nature of these challenges. The United States could reduce its carbon footprint
dramatically, but the effect on global climate would be modest if India and China failed to follow suit.
Similarly, on its own the United States cannot maintain a world trading system or successfully combat
terrorism or disease . Adding to these realities are resource limits. The United States cannot provide all the troops or dollars
to maintain order in the Middle East and Europe and Asia and South Asia . There is simply too much
capability in too many hands. Unilateralism is rarely a serious foreign policy option. Partners are
essential . That is one of the reasons why sovereign obligation is a desirable compass for U.S. foreign policy. Earlier I made the case that it represents realism for an era of
globalization. It also is a natural successor to containment, the doctrine that guided the United States for the four decades of the Cold War. There are basic differences, however. Containment
was about holding back more than bringing in and was designed for an era when rivals were almost always adversaries and in which the challenges were mostly related to classical geopolitical
competition.1 Sovereign obligation, by contrast, is designed for a world in which sometime rivals are sometime partners and in which collective efforts are required to meet common
challenges. Up to this point, we have focused on what the United States needs to do in the world to promote order. That is what one would expect from a book about international relations

and American foreign policy. But a focus on foreign policy is not enough. National security is a coin with two sides, and
what the United States does at home, what is normally thought of as belonging to the domestic realm, is
every bit as much a part of national security as foreign policy. It is best to understand the issue as guns and butter rather than guns versus
butter. When it comes to the domestic side, the argument is straightforward. In order to lead and compete and act effectively in the world,

the U nited S tates needs to put its house in order. I have written on what this entails in a book titled Foreign Policy Begins at Home.2 This was
sometimes interpreted as suggesting a turn away from foreign policy. It was nothing of the sort. Foreign policy begins at home, but it ends there

only at the country’s peril.3 Earlier I mentioned that the United States has few unilateral options, that there are few if any things it
can do better alone than with others. The counterpart to this claim is that the world cannot come up with the elements of

a working order absent the United States. The United States is not sufficient, but it is necessary. It is also true that
the U nited S tates cannot lead or act effectively in the world if it does not have a strong domestic
foundation . National security inevitably requires significant amounts of human, physical, and financial
resources to draw on. The better the U nited S tates is doing economically , the more it will have
available in the way of resources to devote to what it wants and needs to do abroad without igniting a
divisive and distracting domestic debate as to priorities. An additional benefit is that respect for the
U nited S tates and for the American political, social, and economic model (along with a desire to
emulate it) will increase only if it is seen as successful. The most basic test of the success of the model
will be economic growth . U.S. growth levels may appear all right when compared with what a good
many other countries are experiencing, but they are below what is needed and fall short of what is
possible. There is no reason why the United States is not growing in the range of 3 percent or even
higher other than what it is doing and, more important, not doing.4
2NC
Uniqueness
 UQ - Police Unions strong
Police Unions hold significant power over state and local politics now.
Cohen et al, 6/8/2020 (Marshall, Sara Murray, David Shortell, Katelyn Polantz and Mark Morales
“Police unions dig in as calls for reform grow” CNN https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/08/politics/police-
union-reform-protests/index.html)
A crowd of police officers in Philadelphia gathered outside their local union headquarters on Monday to show their support for one of their own
-- a staff inspector facing assault charges after allegedly beating a college student at an anti-racism protest last week.

Like all criminal defendants, Philadelphia Police Staff Inspector Joseph Bologna is innocent until proven guilty. But it seemed like the crowd of
more than 100 applauding officers already made up their minds, despite viral footage of Bologna hitting the student in the back of the head
with a metal baton, sending him to the hospital.

Following the rally, the union that represents Bologna issued a statement, saying it "will not stand-by and watch Inspector Bologna get
railroaded."

As public opinion shifts on issues of police violence and racial discrimination, and cities begin to rethink
their approach to law enforcement, powerful police unions across the country are digging in , and
preparing for a once-in-a-generation showdown over policing.

The flashpoint has been seemingly brewing for years and has flared in intensity with each high-profile
police killing involving an African American. Elected officials, facing more pressure than ever after last month's
police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, are pledging to take action.

"Let me be clear, we're going after the police union," Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said Monday on ABC's Good
Morning America, after members of the city council said they wanted to go even further and dismantle the local police department to pursue
other models of policing.

But that might be easier said than done . Police unions in the US wield significant power and enjoy higher
membership rates than many other unions, which have declined in recent years. Government officials and labor experts also
tell CNN that police union contracts often make it tougher to remove officers that have been flagged for misconduct -- a key
roadblock to reform .

"They'vebecome far too powerful. They form political action committees. They donate to district
attorneys' race or state attorneys' race, state senators and representatives and so forth," Charles Ramsey, a
former DC police chief and former Philadelphia police commissioner, said Sunday on CNN. "And then we wonder why you can't get anything
done."

For the first time, police unions will need to grapple with a skeptical public that doesn't automatically
support law enforcement. New polls indicate that most Americans now acknowledge that African Americans are more likely to be
mistreated or even killed by police.

"This is big," legendary GOP pollster Frank Luntz tweeted on Monday about a dramatic shift in how Americans are viewing police violence.
After Eric Garner died in police custody in 2014, 33% of Americans said they believed police were more likely to use excessive force against
African Americans. That figure now stands at 57%, according to a poll from last week.

Police Unions strong now – successfully prevent local reforms now.

Cohen et al, 6/8/2020 (Marshall, Sara Murray, David Shortell, Katelyn Polantz and Mark Morales
“Police unions dig in as calls for reform grow” CNN https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/08/politics/police-
union-reform-protests/index.html)
While union membership has declined nationally, membership among law enforcement remains high. Those
membership dues can be funneled toward litigation, support for political candidates or lobbying on
legislation that can impact police forces. Police unions also say they work to secure better pay and benefits for officers, and that
they have a duty to defend their members.

"Police unions have a tremendous amount of influence," said Jonathan Smith, executive director of the Washington
Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, and a former Justice Department official who worked on police issues. "There's
a lot
of police officers in this country and the dues accumulate a large war chest that can be used to enhance
their political agenda."

Local officials have also benefited from endorsements and donations from police unions, making it less
politically palatable for some officials to try to take on police unions or cases involving individual officers .
In an interview with the New York Times, one Minneapolis city councilman even recently compared the local police union to a "protection
racket" that slows down services in areas with unfriendly officials. A spokesman for the Minneapolis Police Department declined to comment
on the accusation to the Times.

To flex their political muscle, police unions have used aggressive and at-times threatening rhetoric to
attack elected officials who were trying to rein in their local police departments .
The head of a St. Louis police union said last year that the city's chief prosecutor, an African American woman, should be removed "by force or
by choice" because she was supposedly sowing distrust of law enforcement. And after an attempted assassination of NYPD officers in February,
a major police union in New York City said its members were "declaring war" on liberal-leaning Mayor Bill de Blasio because they blame him for
creating a dangerous climate for police officers.

In 2016, the Fraternal Order of Police threw its support behind then-candidate Trump. The organization
counts more than 300,000 members nationwide.

In an interview with the Washington Post last year, Pascos said, "I would say at least 80% of our membership nationwide
is solidly supportive of President Trump."
Across the country, the actual work of a police union can be much more mundane than it appears in this moment, when tensions are high after
a spate of high-profile incidents.

Police Unions hold the most power in the Status Quo – they create a barrier to reform
– reform kills their power
Matthews 6/24/20, (Dylan Matthews, 6-24-2020, accessed on 6-27-2020, Vox, "Police unions,
explained", https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21290981/police-union-contracts-minneapolis-
reform) ///Ivanov

In the wake of George Floyd’s killing by now-former Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officer Derek Chauvin, few have been inclined to
defend Chauvin or his colleagues who stood by and watched as he suffocated Floyd to death. Few, that is, except Bob Kroll. In a letter to
membership, Kroll — the president of the MPD’s police union — referred to protesters outraged by police brutality as a “terrorist movement”
and defended the officers who killed Floyd and were subsequently fired, arguing they were “terminated without due process” and lamenting,
“What is not being told is the violent criminal history of George Floyd.” (Floyd had a criminal record, but mostly for nonviolent drug and theft
charges.) Kroll’s statements illustrate a central challenge in American efforts to transform policing: Police unions, the groups that
represent police officers, are a powerful force that stands in the way of holding police accountable.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told the New York Times that Kroll and his union are a major reason it’s hard to bring order to
the Minneapolis Police Department, saying they create a “nearly impenetrable barrier” to reform. It’s not just in
Minneapolis. Around the country, as protesters take to the streets to condemn police violence and demand change, police unions have
emerged as the protesters’ most vocal and implacable foe. In Buffalo, the city’s Police Benevolent Association president
John Evans has actively defended officers who pushed 75-year-old protester Martin Gugino to the ground. When the officers who pushed
Gugino were seen leaving their arraignment on felony assault charges, a large crowd of police union members and sympathizers was seen
cheering them on. In New York State broadly, police
unions led opposition to newly signed legislation that prevents
police from hiding misconduct complaints and criminalizes chokeholds. These are hardly aberrations. Police
unions in general have become the most vocal interest group opposing criminal justice reforms and especially
reforms to police discipline and use of force. Historically, they have, unlike most unions, been profoundly conservative
institutions that uphold a particular white ethnic, “law and order”-focused variant of right-wing politics. They have been among Donald Trump’s
most fervent allies; Kroll spoke at a Trump rally in 2018, and the International Union of Police Associations has already endorsed Trump for
reelection. The foregrounding of police unions’ role in the warping of American law enforcement has also prompted some difficult
conversations on the left. The presence of a segment of a union movement that’s unapologetically right-wing and hostile to Black communities
has tested the limits of solidarity from more left-wing unionists. As long as police forces exist, police unions will exist in some form as well, even
if just as political pressure groups. It is therefore natural to think that reforming police unions in some way must be part of the broader agenda
of changing policing in America. They are among the biggest stakeholders in the way the system
works now; without addressing their power, other reforms may never get off the ground.
Police Unions Strong Now resistance to previous reforms proves
McCorkel 6-12-20, (Jill McCorkel, 6-12-2020, accessed on 6-27-2020, The Conversation, "Police unions
are one of the biggest obstacles to transforming policing", https://theconversation.com/police-unions-
are-one-of-the-biggest-obstacles-to-transforming-policing-140227) ///Ivanov

Protesters and community organizers are increasingly calling for defunding and disbanding the police as a way to end police violence.
Advocates argue that moderate reforms like enhanced training and greater community oversight have failed to curb police violence and
police unions. Research suggests that these unions
misconduct. But there’s a major, and usually insurmountable, obstacle to reform:
play a critical role in thwarting the transformation of police departments . Union officials like John McNesby in
Philadelphia, where I live and work as a scholar of law and the criminal justice system, do not deny this. Over the course of his 12-year career as
president of the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, he has derided the city’s civilian review board and predicted in 2010 that beefed-
up misconduct procedures would wind up “… at the bottom of the litter box.” He was right. The union has successfullypetitioned
the Pennsylvania State Labor
Relations board to overturn tougher disciplinary measures. Philadelphia’s police
union[‘s] is not alone in its power to maintain the status quo. In cities and states across the U.S., the benefits and
protections afforded police have been provided by public officials who have catered – and caved – to union
demands over many decades. Across the United States, police are shielded from both public and departmental accountability
by multiple layers of contractual and legislative protections. Nearly all of these measures reflect the political will
and political might of police unions. Measures that discourage accountability vary by jurisdiction, but typically include some
combination of collective bargaining agreements, civil service protections, a Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights and discrete legislative
statutes. Taken together, they afford police greater procedural safeguards than citizens suspected of a crime have and offer more employment
assurances than are available to other public servants. They also make efforts to deter brutality and corruption all but
impossible. Commissioners seeking to tighten disciplinary protocols in departments plagued by police violence and misconduct have
terminated officers only to see them reinstated in arbitration. So-called “purge clauses” require departments to remove all records of
disciplinary actions against officers after periods of time typically ranging from two to five years. This can stymie the ability of external
investigators to discover and analyze patterns of misconduct in a department. Following the police shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in
Cleveland, investigators from the Department of Justice had to obtain a consent decree to gain access to disciplinary records that were buried
behind purge clauses. Legislative protections and union contracts erode the ability of civilian review boards to operate as an external check on
police power. In Maryland, civilians are not allowed to participate in an investigation of a law enforcement officer. And in Newark, New
Jersey, the police union sued and won when the city attempted to give its civilian review board
disciplinary powers.

Police Unions have powerful sway over politicians – empirics prove

Chabria 20, (Anita Chabria, 6-22-2020, accessed on 6-27-2020, Los Angeles Times, "Police unions see
clout wane after George Floyd protests", https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-06-22/police-
unions-political-clout-wanes-in-california) ///Ivanov

For decades, law enforcement unions in California have held powerful sway over local and state
politicians, wielding the cash and clout to punish those who crossed them and to reward those who
didn’t. Their often pugnacious style of politics was on display in Los Angeles recently, when officers,
including a union board member, berated Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez over proposals to redirect
some law enforcement funding and threatened to take their anger to the ballot box . In San Francisco, a
union leader suggested that city bus drivers, who rely on police when safety issues arise, “lose our
number” after the transportation agency said it would no longer carry officers to protests against police
brutality.

retag
Perkins 6/23 “Revealed: police unions spend millions to influence policy in biggest US cities” by Tom
Perkins, published June 23rd, 2020. Tom Perkins is a Detroit-based freelance journalist.

In total, current members of the council’s two police oversight committees have received about $1.3m
from police unions. The LAPPL also spends on those who hold police department purse strings. The city council budget committee chair
Paul Krekorian this year helped advance a budget that included a 7% funding increase for the LAPD. In February, an independent committee
that supports him received a nearly $25,000 donation from the LAPPL. A demonstrator holds a sign reading ‘Defund the Police’ in New York.
Photograph: Brendan McDermid/ReutersSpending on a single race is rising to record levels this year as police
unions from around California have sent more than $2m to help the police-friendly incumbent district
attorney Jackie Lacey take on George Gascón, a police reform supporter, in Los Angeles county. Police
unions also flex their muscle on statewide ballot proposals. California police union money in 2016
helped block a proposed ban on the death penalty while unions successfully worked to pass a
counterproposal to speed up executions. The LAPPL has also given to hundreds of state legislators, and unions statewide have
donated more than $752,000 to members of the state assembly’s law enforcement committee. The activity is not restricted to the nation’s
largest departments. The Peace Officers Research Association of California, a statewide union with membership that includes small
departments, has spent at least $34m on campaign contributions and lobbying in recent decades. Still, the true extent of police spending and its
impact remains unknown. Some
lobbying records in Illinois and New York are shielded from the public, and
Samuel Walker, author of The Police in America, noted that the media, academics and civil liberties
groups haven’t closely scrutinized unions’ spending or other activities until very recently. “The unions
have been remarkably unopposed since the early 70s, and that began to change with Ferguson, and is
dramatically changing in the last two weeks,” Walker said. “We definitely need more sunlight on this
issue.”
 UQ- Unions have Strength
Unions exercise unique strength in the elections as the working class grows and
candidates have to respond
Ken Green 19, writer for uniontrack, 10/22/19, “How Unions Could Shape the 2020 Presidential
Election”, https://www.uniontrack.com/blog/unions-2020-presidential-election

Unions are poised to play an important role in a presidential election where “the stakes couldn’t be
higher, not only for the future of the labor movement but for the entire U.S. working class ,” say Rand Wilson,
president of the Center for Labor Education and Research, and Peter Olney, retired organizing director of the International Longshore and
Warehouse Union (ILWU). That’s why union endorsement and member votes are so crucial to this election. Union
endorsements and all the support that comes with them have the potential to drive a nominee forward
in the 2020 presidential election. “Contributions from labor groups continue to play a significant role in elections,” reporter Camille
Erickson writes at OpenSecrets.org. And in a way they haven’t done in decades, the 2020 presidential candidates (namely the
Democrats) are chasing the union/worker voting bloc. “I think labor is very important right now for the candidates,” says
Geoconda Argüello-Kline, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 in Las Vegas. That’s because these candidates
recognize the current administration’s efforts to weaken unions and the opportunity this presents for
winning the support of millions of voters. Danny Homan, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Employees (AFSCME) Council 61 in Des Moines, Iowa, explains that candidates are trying to capitalize on the power of the working people. They
“understand that this is a large block of folks they want on their side,” Homan says. Unions are courting this attention and using it to bring the
labor movement to the forefront of candidates’ agendas. Unions Are Pushing the Labor Conversation to the Front Unions are unapologetically
forcing presidential candidates to prioritize a labor-friendly platform. “We’re setting the bar high — higher than it’s ever been,” says AFL-CIO
President Richard Trumka. “If you want our endorsement, show us that you’re unambiguously pro-worker and
pro-union. Tell us about your plan to make it easier to form unions and harder to bust them.” Mark Trumbull at the Christian Science
Monitor reports that labor leaders believe union values such as economic security, inclusiveness and the
principle of democracy align with the values of the majority of Americans. The support that workers in
the teaching and media industries have been able to garner from the public as they strike and negotiate
for better working conditions is a testament to the growing political strength of unions. “The union message is
a powerful message,” says Paul Frymer, professor of politics at Princeton University in New Jersey. The union movement overall
may have declined over the past few decades, but the working class has not, Frymer says. This is why unions
are forcing presidential candidates to prioritize labor issues. And why candidates are responding.
 UQ- Unions strong - COVID
COVID Boosting unions attractiveness now
Plu, 5/1 (Benjamin, “Labor unions are on the front lines in battle over worker protections,” NBC News,
5/1/20, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/labor-unions-are-front-lines-battle-over-worker-
protections-n1197781)

As the coronavirus pandemic derails the nation's economy, workers bearing the brunt of the crisis are
banding together in levels not seen in a generation, striking and holding sickouts at meat processing
plants, fast-food restaurants and warehouses to demand better protection and safer working conditions.

For its part, organized

labor, which has seen its ranks decline in the U.S. for years, is suddenly and visibly at the helm of a
multifront battle — trying to preserve jobs amid the worst economic contraction in years, while
defending workers deemed “essential” but being given inadequate protection as the virus spreads.

At the same time, many

workers who may have never contemplated union membership or were ineligible
have begun organizing to demand better treatment and safer working conditions, prompting strikes
across the country.

Workers planned a nationwide strike on Friday targeting retailers like Amazon, Target, Whole Foods and
Instacart. Workers at those companies and others, mostly nonunionized, were expected to walk off the
job to protest inadequate safety conditions.
“We’re seeing workers fighting back when the companies are deciding that they want to go back to work and they’re willing to risk their
workers’ lives,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University. “It
seems like there’s no path
to turn to in government, so who will they turn to? So they’re turning to unions.”

While the pandemic has resulted in staggering job losses across the country, many union workers have
found various protections are afforded to them by their collective bargaining agreements, including
from outright firings. Many union contracts also have clauses that allow the “right to return” to a job,
making the job loss a furlough rather than a termination.

Even when furloughed, union workers are typically offered some relief by their collective bargaining
agreements.
Nearly 150,000 United Auto Workers members at Ford, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler have been laid off in the pandemic, but continue to
receive health insurance and supplemental unemployment benefits (SUB) payments from the automakers. The contract gives members at least
six months of extra pay on top of unemployment insurance that adds up to being 85 percent of their hourly wages.

In Las Vegas, where the gambling and entertainment strip has been closed since March 18, the politically influential Culinary Union Local 226
has offered strong protection. The Wynn Las Vegas resorts, which employ about 5,500 Local 226 workers, have continued to pay full salaries.
Union members also continue to receive generous health care coverage through the Culinary Union’s health care plan.

For workers deemed essential and still on the job, often in health care or customer service, unions have
fought for protective gear that could mean the difference between life and death.
Andrea Leach, a nursing assistant at a Pennsylvania nursing home where many residents have tested positive for COVID-19, said that at the
beginning of the pandemic, she and her colleagues were given only one disposable mask each at work.

“We put it on in the morning and we have to wear it all day long,” Leach said. “At the end of the day, we put this little mask in a baggie — that's
not even a Ziploc baggie — and they're tossed in a box.”
The lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) has been a vexing problem for workers across the country on the front lines of the crisis. But
Leach, a member of the executive board of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 199, said the union is now fighting to get her and
her staff better PPE, negotiating with both her nursing home and state officials.

“I think the only way we're going to get through this pandemic safely is because of our union,” said Leach.
“They're out there fighting every day while I'm in my nursing home. I don't see anybody else — no other
industries or corporations or federal government — nobody's out there pushing to get us help but our
union.”
Mary Kay Henry, international president of SEIU, told NBC News she believes that more than 75 percent of the union’s 2 million members
would be considered essential workers and have to go to a work site. Henry said that as the pandemic continues, furloughs would probably
occur in waves, starting with airline workers and janitorial staff, but that the union would help workers even if they lose their jobs.

“We're trying to use our political power to bargain with the federal government, city government and
state government to cover all service and care workers,” Henry said.
 UQ- Now Key
Unions on the brink- 3 SCOTUS rulings and declining membership
Russel, 20 (Lia, “Public sector workers continue to drive union participation,” FCW, 1/24/20,
https://fcw.com/articles/2020/01/24/bls-public-sector-unions-russell.aspx)

Public sector union membership continues to outpace the private sector, according to the latest data from the
Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The BLS report indicates that the percentage of unionized public sector employees dipped slightly from 2018 to 2019 as did the total number of
unionized feds and local workers, with the number of unionized state workers climbing slightly.

Overall, public sector union membership rate is 33.6%, compared to 6.2% for workers in the private sector. There are just over 7 million
unionized public sector workers, out of a total employee base of 21 million. By contrast, more than 120 million Americans are employed in the
private sector, and just 7.5 million of them are union members. The union membership rate in the U.S. declined by 0.2%
from 2018 to 2019, to 10.3%. The overall number of union members in the U.S. remained the same as it was in 2018, at 14.6 million.
"It is our experience that civil servants have an especially strong understanding of the power that comes with the ability to bargain collectively,
such as workplace fairness and being an active partner in providing taxpayers with high quality service from their government," Tony Reardon,
president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in a statement supplied to FCW. "Public employees, through their unions, have a long
history of defending the nonpartisan merit-based civil service system, which ensures government agencies are staffed by skilled professionals
who have dedicated their careers to public service."

The annual union membership report for 2019, comes as government employee unions are adjusting to
a Supreme Court ruling that restricted their ability to collect dues from non-members who benefit from
union contracts.

Additionally, public sector unions have faced headwinds at the federal level – many stemming from
three executive orders signed in May 2018 and are just now being put into effect after legal challenges.
Unions say the orders have restricted their abilities to conduct business such as collective bargaining,
pursue workplace grievances while on "official time," and access facilities for union business.
 UQ- Public Sector strong
Public Sector Unions are Strong Now – they lead in union participation
Russell 2020 “Public sector workers continue to drive union participation.” By Lia
Russell, published January 24th, 2020. Lia Russell is a staff writer reporting on the federal
workforce and information technology for FCW.

Public sector union membership continues to outpace the private sector , according to the latest data from the
Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS report indicates that the percentage of unionized public sector employees dipped slightly from 2018 to 2019
as did the total number of unionized feds and local workers, with the number of unionized state workers climbing slightly. Overall,public
sector union membership rate is 33.6%, compared to 6.2% for workers in the private sector . There are
just over 7 million unionized public sector workers, out of a total employee base of 21 million. By
contrast, more than 120 million Americans are employed in the private sector, and just 7.5 million of
them are union members. The union membership rate in the U.S. declined by 0.2% from 2018 to 2019,
to 10.3%. The overall number of union members in the U.S. remained the same as it was in 2018, at 14.6 million. "It is our experience that
civil servants have an especially strong understanding of the power that comes with the ability to
bargain collectively, such as workplace fairness and being an active partner in providing taxpayers with
high quality service from their government," Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in a
statement supplied to FCW. "Public employees, through their unions, have a long history of defending the nonpartisan
merit-based civil service system, which ensures government agencies are staffed by skilled professionals who have dedicated their
careers to public service."

Public Sector Unions are strong despite court decisions

Greenhouse 19 “How the Public Employee Unions Refused to Die.” By Steven
Greenhouse, published February 13th, 2020. Steven Greenhouse was a New York Times reporter
for 31 years, including 19 as its labor and workplace reporter. He is the author of the book Beaten Down,
Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor.

When the Supreme Court ruled last June in the Janus case that government employees can’t be required
to pay any fees to the unions that bargain for them, the common wisdom was the nation’s public-sector
unions would be thrown hugely on the defensive. Evidently, the leaders of those unions didn't get the
message. To the contrary, they have gone on the offensive. As leaders from the nation's four largest
public-sector unions made clear at a forum last weekend in Washington, not only are their unions
seeking to staunch the loss of fee-payers, they're pushing mightily to add members. Saying that Janus
was just one step in a 40-year assault on unions, Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees
International Union (SEIU), said, “One of the most important things, if not the most important thing we
should be working toward, is organizing workers. ... That has to be priority No. 1. We will always have to
fight defensively against the attacks that confront us, but we should always be organizing new workers
into the labor movement.” Henry, whose two-million-member union is the nation's second largest, was
speaking at Georgetown University on a panel about the future of labor alongside leaders from the
National Education Association (NEA), the nation's largest union, as well as the American Federation of
Teachers (AFT), the third largest, and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal
Employees (AFSCME), the fourth largest. Many experts predicted that the Supreme Court's 5-to-4 Janus
decision would cause public-sector unions to lose 10 percent to 30 percent of their membership and
revenues. “We didn’t bury our head in the sand. We didn’t run and hide” after Janus, said Lee Saunders,
AFSCME’s president. “We accepted the fact that we were under attack, and we took a good look at
ourselves. We looked at what we were doing right and what we were doing wrong.” After a series of
strategy sessions, AFSCME set out to re-engage its members and keep membership from falling. “There
was a disconnect between the union and some of our members and potential members,” Saunders said.
“We relied too much on social media, on Facebook and the iPhone.” The union set a goal of having local
union leaders hold one-on-one talks with more than one million members and fee payers. “Nothing
takes the place of talking one on one, looking them dead in the eye, but most importantly listening to
what they have to say,” Saunders said. As a result of Janus, about 100,000 non-member fee payers have
stopped paying union fees to AFSCME, but Saunders said his union has added seven members for every
member who quit the union after Janus to avoid paying dues. Becky Pringle, vice president of the NEA
and heir apparent to head that three-million-member union, said that in light of Janus and the Trump
presidency, “We are at a crossroads in this country. We are looking at this as an opportunity to
reinvigorate the labor movement.” At the NEA as well, Janus led to a rethinking and retrenchment. “We
began talking about changing from a service organization [one that serves members by bargaining for
them and handling their grievances] to a culture of organizing, getting back to our roots,” Pringle said.
“We also took a look at membership. … We had to let them know that the union was a place where they
could get their power and feel it is their place.” Pringle noted that the NEA’s membership, instead of
falling as many predicted, has actually risen by 4,000 over the past year. Randi Weingarten, the AFT's
president, said her union was also seeking to move away from the “service model.” But she said it
wasn't simply a matter of becoming an “organizing” union. Rather, she said the AFT should make clear
its focus is bringing a better life to educators and showing the value of belonging to the union. “We were
very conscious of the issues of how we become a community inside a union, talking to each other,
listening to each other” and “working with the creativity of our members,” Weingarten said. As a result
of the Janus decision, the AFT lost 84,600 fee payers, but it added 88,500 new members over the past
year, giving it a net gain of 4,900. Last year's wave of teacher strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona
and other states helped build a sense of community among teachers. Weingarten said AFT membership
in West Virginia rose by 1,200 after the strike there, while the Arizona Education Association added over
2,000 members after the Arizona strike. The four union leaders pointed to a surge of activism beyond
the teacher strikes.
 UQ – Teachers Unions strong
Teachers unions are powerful.
Ordway ’19 [Denise-Marie; “How teachers unions affect school district spending, student achievement”; 2/12/19; Journalist’s Resource;
https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/education/teachers-unions-salaries-students-research/; Accessed 7/7/20; NT]

Denver public school teachers went on strike Feb. 11, for the first time in 25 years, to push for better
pay. The teachers union in Oakland, California has announced plans to strike after failing to reach an
agreement with the school district on higher wages, smaller class sizes and other issues. In January,
teachers in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest school district, went on strike for the first time in 30
years to force district leaders to work with their union to address some of the same concerns.

While many educators credit their unions for helping them secure higher salaries and better working
conditions, union critics accuse these organizations of hurting students by shielding low-performing and
problematic teachers from disciplinary action or dismissal. At the national and state levels, teachers
unions have become a powerful force, influencing both legislation and elections.

The two main teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and National Education
Association, are among the biggest labor organizations in the United States. Together, they represent
about 5 million employees, officials from the two organizations told Journalist’s Resource.
Links
 L- CJR
Police Unions oppose CJR – its perceived as a loss of influence.
Morrison, 11/27/2019 (Aaron, senior staff reporter based in New York City. He has previously written
about criminal justice for Mic, The Guardian and The International Business Times, “THERE’S A PATTERN
OF POLICE UNIONS ATTACKING PEOPLE WHO CALL FOR CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM, ESPECIALLY WHEN
THEY ARE BLACK” The Appeal https://theappeal.org/malcolm-jenkins-fraternal-order-police/)

Nationally, the FOP represents 330,000 members across 2,200 lodges. Local unions often make political
endorsements of elected officials, as the South Bend, Indiana, FOP did in 2011 with then mayoral
candidate and now Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg. But most candidates in the
Democratic field have released criminal justice reform plans than include proposals to strengthen police
accountability for misconduct. In 2016, the national FOP endorsed President Trump, who has
championed federal prison and sentencing reforms, but has also advocated for nationwide expansion of
stop-and-frisk policing. The tactic led to disproportionate stops and arrests of Black and Latinx people in
Trump’s hometown of New York City.

Chris Harris, an activist with the Texas-based criminal justice reform advocacy group Just Liberty, said
other recent prominent examples of reform backlash “reveal how staunchly most police unions oppose
any reforms that might reduce incarceration or police violence, and subsequently chip away at the
bipartisan backing they’ve long enjoyed.”

CJR reforms police unions contracts massive loss of power, which they are preventing
in the squo.
Mathis, 8/20/2019 (Joel, “The unjust power of police unions” The Week
https://theweek.com/articles/860002/unjust-power-police-unions)

Police officers are like any other workers in the public and private sectors. They deserve to be protected
from the whims of their employers. Some of the first police unions were created a century ago because
officers were underpaid, overworked, and subject to terrible working conditions.

Over time, though, police unions have become powerful players in their local political scenes. Their
endorsements can make or break candidates for local government office, and their opposition can stop
criminal justice reform efforts in their tracks. In return, those candidates — once elected — are often
overly deferential in negotiating contracts with those unions. By one count, more than half of more than
600 contracts reviewed by scholars give police unions the power to select the arbitrators who will
decide if an officer firing sticks or not. That leaves even reform-minded municipal and departmental
leaders nearly powerless to clean house.

Reform is possible, however. Police unions are able to avoid accountability for their members thanks to
their political power. The answer, then, is also political. Communities have to generate grassroots
political movements that are just as capable of putting pressure on the municipal officials who,
ultimately, give their approval to police contracts.

That's what happened in Austin, Texas, where activists campaigned for more than a year to improve the
police disciplinary process. In November, the city council there approved the creation of a new Office of
Police Oversight with new and expanded investigative powers that advocates say could make Austin's
police department one of the most transparent in the country.

"Police union contracts are ripe for reform because so often accountability, transparency, and
oversight are tied up in them ," the Austin campaign's organizers wrote in an April op-ed in The New
York Times. "Yes, the process can be long and taxing, as we know. But the rewards are substantial."

Successful reforms requires fighting against police union power – it’s the only way the
reform would be passed in the first place.
Bies, 2017 (Katherine J., J.D. Candidate, Stanford Law School, 2017, “LET THE SUNSHINE IN:
ILLUMINATING THE POWERFUL ROLE POLICE UNIONS PLAY IN SHIELDING OFFICER MISCONDUCT”
Stanford Law & Policy Review https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/SLPR-Vol.-28-1-
Bies.pdf)

Since their rise in the 1970s, police unions have proven to be tough opponents of progressive reform in
both the state legislatures and courts. This Note demonstrates that the role of unions in encouraging
secrecy in police misconduct investigations is not a story of the past. Police unions continue to challenge
and deter progressive reform efforts that would foster accountability and transparency.

Recent efforts to increase access to police officer personnel files and instances of officer misconduct
have failed, largely due to the political clout of police unions. The New York and California case studies
illuminate the powerful influence of the police unions’ political agenda over state and local legislators. In
efforts to keep officer personnel files confidential, police unions have framed their proposals as
benefiting public safety and the public interest. Without consistent opposition to counter this narrative,
police unions have been very successful in pressuring policymakers to sign off on their agenda.

The political power of police unions is clear. The pathway to successfully implementing progressive
criminal justice reform is not. This Note explores the rhetorical strategy and political machinery used by
police unions to successfully implement their agenda. This Note also analyzes why police unions
continually oppose efforts to foster accountability and transparency in the processes and outcomes of
misconduct investigations. But in order for sunshine legislation to be successful in the future, scholars
and activists must organize and brainstorm concrete solutions to rebalance the distribution of political
power in the fight over criminal justice reform.

Police Unions hold the most power in the Status Quo – they create a barrier to reform
– reform kills their power
Matthews 6/24/20, (Dylan Matthews, 6-24-2020, accessed on 6-27-2020, Vox, "Police unions,
explained", https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21290981/police-union-contracts-minneapolis-
reform) ///Ivanov

In the wake of George Floyd’s killing by now-former Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officer Derek Chauvin, few have been inclined to
defend Chauvin or his colleagues who stood by and watched as he suffocated Floyd to death. Few, that is, except Bob Kroll. In a letter to
membership, Kroll — the president of the MPD’s police union — referred to protesters outraged by police brutality as a “terrorist movement”
and defended the officers who killed Floyd and were subsequently fired, arguing they were “terminated without due process” and lamenting,
“What is not being told is the violent criminal history of George Floyd.” (Floyd had a criminal record, but mostly for nonviolent drug and theft
charges.) Kroll’s statements illustrate a central challenge in American efforts to transform policing: Police unions, the groups that
represent police officers, are a powerful force that stands in the way of holding police accountable.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told the New York Times that Kroll and his union are a major reason it’s hard to bring order to
the Minneapolis Police Department, saying they create a “nearly impenetrable barrier” to reform. It’s not just in
Minneapolis. Around the country, as protesters take to the streets to condemn police violence and demand change, police unions have
emerged as the protesters’ most vocal and implacable foe. In Buffalo, the city’s Police Benevolent Association president
John Evans has actively defended officers who pushed 75-year-old protester Martin Gugino to the ground. When the officers who pushed
Gugino were seen leaving their arraignment on felony assault charges, a large crowd of police union members and sympathizers was seen
cheering them on. In New York State broadly, police
unions led opposition to newly signed legislation that prevents
police from hiding misconduct complaints and criminalizes chokeholds. These are hardly aberrations. Police
unions in general have become the most vocal interest group opposing criminal justice reforms and especially
reforms to police discipline and use of force. Historically, they have, unlike most unions, been profoundly conservative
institutions that uphold a particular white ethnic, “law and order”-focused variant of right-wing politics. They have been among Donald Trump’s
most fervent allies; Kroll spoke at a Trump rally in 2018, and the International Union of Police Associations has already endorsed Trump for
reelection. The foregrounding of police unions’ role in the warping of American law enforcement has also prompted some difficult
conversations on the left. The presence of a segment of a union movement that’s unapologetically right-wing and hostile to Black communities
has tested the limits of solidarity from more left-wing unionists. As long as police forces exist, police unions will exist in some form as well, even
if just as political pressure groups. It is therefore natural to think that reforming police unions in some way must be part of the broader agenda
of changing policing in America. They are among the biggest stakeholders in the way the system
works now; without addressing their power, other reforms may never get off the ground.
Criminal justice reform destroys police unions and reverses their crucial narrative of
criminality
Natasha Lennard, 12-11-2017, "Police Unions’ Opposition to Prison Reform Is About More Than Jobs
— It’s About Racism," Intercept, https://theintercept.com/2018/08/14/police-unions-prison-reform/ zw

The recent steps forward for advocates of prison reform — including limiting the use of solitary confinement for young people, increasing
the parole releases of people who pose low or no risk to public safety, and prohibiting the charging of young people as adults — represent,
as Whitehorn noted, “massive efforts by communities around New York state who have traditionally had little access
to the power wielded by the police unions.” NYSCOPBA cites Cuomo’s “radical agenda,” but the governor’s moderate and
reasonable criminal justice reforms have been the result of years of applied activism and pressure. CAMPAIGNS LIKE NYSCOdPBA’S — straight
from the playbook of law enforcement union lobbying — go far beyond advocacy for union members’ well-
being, wages, and job security. They seek to reinscribe the myth of the criminal “other” — people
deserving only of punishment and exclusion. It is the carceral logic through which law enforcement
continues to find justification for its authority. Correctional officer and police unions have an obvious interest
in opposing criminal justice reform when it comes to officer accountability and discipline — and with making sure that the criminal
justice system keeps catching people in its maw: When prisons close, prison guards lose jobs. Law enforcement
unions have for decades weaponized consistently racist narratives of criminal threats — threats that
require management and punishment — to support policies that uphold mass incarceration. The
California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which spends about $8 million per year on lobbying, poured
$100,000 into supporting the state’s 1994 “three strikes” laws and over $1 million to beat Prop 66 in 2016, which
would have reduced the number of crimes that carry mandatory life sentences . The union spent nearly $2 million
supporting Jerry Brown’s gubernatorial campaign, extracting support for prison expansions in return. In Illinois, the state’s largest public-sector
union waged a campaign with law-and-order politicians against the closure in 2013 of Tamms Correctional Center, a notorious Supermax prison.
The campaign described the people locked up in Tamms as “the worst of the worst” in an attempt to justify the prison’s existence and vindicate
its well-documented brutality. But often these campaigns — like NYSCOPBA’s — go beyond veiled appeals for continued job security to focus
squarely on opposing greater rights and better treatment for prisoners and former prisoners. Among the policies named by NYSCOPBA, for
example, is Cuomo’s decision this year to grant 35,000 parolees the right to vote. “NYSCOPBA remains concerned that this will allow murderers,
rapists, and sex offenders to enter polling sites in schools, community centers, and other places we designate as safe spaces for children,
families, and seniors,” said Matt Hamilton, the union’s director of public affairs, in a statement. Similarly, the union opposes the plan to supply
51,000 incarcerated people with computer tablets. “Concerns about whether inmates would be able to hack these devices to do things they are
not permitted must be taken seriously,” Hamilton said. The NYC Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association deployed a similar logic last week
to disavow a new law that would allow incarcerated people in New York City jails to use phones there for free. “Now the gangs will definitely be
able to continue to run their operations from inside the jails,” Elias Husamudeen, the union’s president, told the New York Times. “They will
definitely be able to continue to communicate free of charge with the other members of their gangs who may not be in jail.” IT’S NOT CLEAR
what the corrections officers’ union gains from its advocacy on issues like parolee enfranchisement and access to free technology. Suffice to say
these campaigns are not legitimate appeals for public safety: Claims about gang organizing, hacking, and predators in polling booths are offered
up without grounds and would only be believed by members of the public who already see prisoners as inherent dangers to society. In a
country that conflates blackness with criminality, law enforcement narratives that equate criminality with evil are intractably racist. Yet if law
enforcement unions are driven by economic concerns for their workers, this drive is couched in and shaped by an almost theodicean narrative
in which harsh criminal justice is vindicated as the management of evil. And, in a country that conflates blackness with criminality, law
enforcement narratives that equate criminality with evil are also intractably racist. When the New York City Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association
President Pat Lynch called Herman Bell an “animal” after the former Black Panther was granted parole after over four decades in prison, we
didn’t need to be dogs to hear that whistle. If
the conflict between law enforcement unions and prison reform
rested only on the threat posed to certain jobs by closing prisons, there could be an opening for
solidarity between prison workers, prisoners, and the broader labor movement . “Ultimately,” wrote historian and
labor organizer Austin McCoy in a 2016 New Labor Forum paper, “it is likely that ensuring economic justice for prisoners and
workers will require connecting advocacy for decarceration to the call for mass employment , or a universal
job guarantee, which in turn would necessitate connecting movements against mass incarceration to the
larger labor movement.”
 L- Body Cameras
Unilateral body camera implementation hurt unions.
LRIS ’16 [LRIS; Labor Relations Information System; “Body-Worn Cameras And Bargaining”; 8/29/16; LRIS;
https://lris.com/2016/08/29/body-worn-cameras-and-bargaining/; Accessed 6/25/20; NT]

The Arbitrator found that under a “maintenance of benefits” clause in the collective bargaining agreement, “if the
implementation of such a program were found to constitute more than a de minimis change in working conditions, it would have to
be negotiated.” The Arbitrator also noted that an exception to the negotiability requirement would exist if body
cameras “fell within the employer’s retained authority to plan, direct and control Police Department operations. Unless the
exception applied, bargaining and subsequent interest arbitration in the absence of agreement with the Union would have to occur before
implementation.

“I believe the
logical first step in deciding the controversy is to determine whether implementation of the body-worn
camera program constituted a change in working conditions sufficient to create a bargaining obligation. I simply have no

doubt that it did . In so deciding, I agree completely with the Union that the use of body-worn cameras constitutes an
enormous change in the working conditions of police officers.

“I also agree with the Union that, although the City clearly retained in the management rights clause of the contract the
authority to plan, direct and control Police Department operations, there is no evidence that retention
included the right to unilaterally implement a body-worn camera program containing the unrestricted
right of supervisors to randomly review the audio and video footage required to be recorded during the course of an
officer’s official activities. The mandated circumstances in which the camera must be activated here strikes me as a large body of an officer’s
work that the body-worn camera program opens up to a completely different kind of scrutiny that cannot be said to have been envisioned as
among the rights understood by the parties to have been retained by the City when the Agreement was signed.

“Nor does the record contain any evidence that the Union waived its right to negotiate over the program before it was
implemented. To the contrary, FOP was continuing to negotiate with the Employer when the Chief decided, based on his view of the
frequency with which officers’ use of authority is questioned as well as recent questions put to the City Council by members of the public as to
when the use of cameras would be implemented in Oklahoma City, that it was time to implement the program.”

Body cameras undermine collective bargaining rights.

Kitchen ’17 [F. Damon; Partner at Constangy, Brooks, Smith, Prophete, Recognized in the publication, Best Lawyers In America and
Florida Super Lawyers; “Are police-worn body cameras a mandatory subject of bargaining?”; 1/5/17; Constangy, Brooks, Smith, Prophete LLP;
https://www.constangy.com/employment-labor-insider/are-police-worn-body-cameras-a-mandatory-subject-of-bargaining; Accessed 6/25/20;
NT]

Although the issue is generally unsettled, we believe that most public

sector management clients will consider it better to be safe
than sorry and will choose to bargain over mandating law enforcement use of body cameras. Using Florida as an

example, public sector employers with unionized work forces are required by law to collectively bargain with
union representatives of police unions over “mandatory subjects of bargaining.” Mandatory subjects of bargaining consist of wages, hours,
terms and conditions of the police officers’ employment. Common examples of mandatory subjects of bargaining include work schedules, pay
scales, health insurance, seniority, sick and vacation leave, and dress codes. Police
unions have argued that the use of body
cameras is a mandatory subject of bargaining because use of the cameras is being made a term and
condition of employment.

Public sector law enforcement agencies have countered that employers have a management right to
require their employees to use body cameras. Typically, employers are permitted to unilaterally exercise certain management
rights pertaining to the control and direction of their business organizations. Although such rights are customarily set forth in management
rights clauses contained in collective bargaining agreements, in Florida, as well as some other jurisdictions, a public sector employer’s
management rights are established by statute . Historically, an employer’s selection of the kind of equipment that it uses in
the performance of its business has been viewed as a management right. Consequently, it is not surprising that law enforcement
agencies, both in Florida and other parts of the nation, have taken the position that they can unilaterally require their
police officers to wear body cameras without bargaining over the issue with the police unions.

Notwithstanding this "management rights" argument, it

is risky for a public sector employer to unilaterally require the
use of body cameras on an organized workforce without first bargaining with the police union. Doing so could
result in an unfair labor practice charge, as the police union is likely to argue that the use of body cameras is a
term and condition of employment.

Body cameras damage police unions’ power – they hurt collective bargaining.
Bruinius ’16 [Harry; Staff Writer for The Christian Science Monitor; “Why police are pushing back on body cameras”; The Christian
Science Monitor; 8/30/16; The Christian Science Monitor; https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2016/0830/Why-police-are-pushing-back-
on-body-cameras; Accessed 6/25/20; NT]

Last week, the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, representing 1,500 city cops, sued city administrators and sought to block
a pilot program that would have assigned body cameras to 100 officers. At first, the program asked officers to volunteer for the program.
When none did, however, the department said it would randomly assign officers to wear the clip-on cams, slated to start this week.

Like a number of unions over the past year, the Boston association said the city’s plan violated the collective bargaining
agreement. More significantly, perhaps, it also said body cameras put its officers at risk.

“[The] damage to the collectively-bargained arbitration process and the increased risk of harm to officers from the City’s
unilateral action constitute irreparable harm and that only injunctive relief can provide a remedy,” the union said in a
statement. Citing a Rand Corp. study, it also said that “officers wearing body cameras are no less likely to use force but are 15 percent more
likely to be assaulted than officers without cameras.”
 L- Death Penalty
Police Unions support the death penalty – they see it as the only possible retribution
against police officer killings
Johnson 15 “Donald Trump wants the death penalty for those who kill police officers” by Jenna Johnson,
published December 10th, 2015. Jenna Johnson is a national political correspondent for The Washington Post who
writes about the 2020 presidential election with a heavy focus on voters and political movements. She has also
covered the White House and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, interviewing thousands of Trump
supporters across the country. Jenna started at the Post in 2007 as a summer intern and has since written about
crime, county government and local elections, higher education and the Maryland statehouse.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/10/donald-trump-wants-the-death-
penalty-for-those-who-kill-police-officers/

Donald Trump said Thursday that as president he would issue an executive order containing the "strong,
strong statement" that he wants the death penalty for those found guilty of killing a police officer .
"One of the first things I'd do in terms of executive orders, if I win, will be to sign a strong, strong
statement that will go out to the country, out to the world, that anybody killing a policeman, a
policewoman, a police officer, anybody killing a police officer: Death penalty is going to happen, okay?"
Trump told members of the New England Police Benevolent Association in a hotel ballroom on Thursday
evening. Applause broke out, drowning out the Republican frontrunner. The idea came from the New
England Police Benevolent Association, a police union with members from New Hampshire and
Massachusetts that met with the Republican frontrunner on Thursday evening and then endorsed him.
During a private meeting with union leaders, Trump answered questions and agreed to push for the
death penalty and to find more funding for training, according to several people at the meeting. AD
Trump provided no details of how such an executive order would work or its legality, especially with a
growing number of states discontinuing use of the death penalty and with the federal government's
limited jurisdiction. His campaign manager and spokeswoman did not respond to a request for such
details. As Republican candidates have delicately tried to stake a position in the roiling debate over
alleged brutality between police officers and minorities, Trump has firmly planted himself on the side of
police. Trump has said in previous speeches that while every profession has its "bad apples," police
officers have been unfairly criticized at a time when they need to be supported. Trump often responds
to questions about the Black Lives Matter movement by saying that "all lives matter" and accusing
President Obama of stirring up racial unrest. [Trump’s proposal to keep out Muslims crosses a line for
many in both parties] AD This police union is the same one that in September urged police officers to
boycott a Labor Day breakfast attended by President Obama and union leaders in Boston. At the time,
the union head accused Obama of not being supportive enough of police officers. "The police and the
law enforcement in this country -- I will never ever let them down, just remember that," Trump said on
Thursday. "They've had a hard time. These forces throughout the country have had a hard time: A lot of
people killed; a lot of people killed really violently." It was a message that resonated with many officers,
including Sgt. Deborah Batista of Middleborough, Mass., who is vice president of the union. "He seems
to be a supporter of law enforcement which is something that we have not seen from the current
administration," said Batista, 53. "We are not popular of late, law enforcement."
Police Unions pour thousands into stopping proposals that ban the death penalty –
California proves
Perkins 6/23 “Revealed: police unions spend millions to influence policy in biggest US cities” by Tom
Perkins, published June 23rd, 2020. Tom Perkins is a Detroit-based freelance journalist.

In total, current members of the council’s two police oversight committees have received about $1.3m
from police unions. The LAPPL also spends on those who hold police department purse strings. The city council budget committee chair
Paul Krekorian this year helped advance a budget that included a 7% funding increase for the LAPD. In February, an independent committee
that supports him received a nearly $25,000 donation from the LAPPL. A demonstrator holds a sign reading ‘Defund the Police’ in New York.
Photograph: Brendan McDermid/ReutersSpending on a single race is rising to record levels this year as police
unions from around California have sent more than $2m to help the police-friendly incumbent district
attorney Jackie Lacey take on George Gascón, a police reform supporter, in Los Angeles county. Police
unions also flex their muscle on statewide ballot proposals. California police union money in 2016
helped block a proposed ban on the death penalty while unions successfully worked to pass a
counterproposal to speed up executions. The LAPPL has also given to hundreds of state legislators, and unions statewide have
donated more than $752,000 to members of the state assembly’s law enforcement committee. The activity is not restricted to the nation’s
largest departments. The Peace Officers Research Association of California, a statewide union with membership that includes small
departments, has spent at least $34m on campaign contributions and lobbying in recent decades. Still, the true extent of police spending and its
impact remains unknown. Some
lobbying records in Illinois and New York are shielded from the public, and
Samuel Walker, author of The Police in America, noted that the media, academics and civil liberties
groups haven’t closely scrutinized unions’ spending or other activities until very recently. “The unions
have been remarkably unopposed since the early 70s, and that began to change with Ferguson, and is
dramatically changing in the last two weeks,” Walker said. “We definitely need more sunlight on this
issue.”
 L- Mandatory Minimums
Abolishing mandatory minimums ends police impunity and wrecks police strength.
Hechinger 19 [Scott Hechinger, 09/25/19, “How Mandatory Minimums Enable Police Misconduct,”
The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/opinion/mandatory-minimum-
sentencing.html

But the near impossibility of getting fired is only part of the crisis of impunity. An overlooked but
significant culprit is mandatory minimum sentencing. In criminal courts throughout this country, victims of police
abuse — illegal stops and frisks, car stops and searches, home raids, manufactured charges and excessive force — routinely forgo
their constitutional right to challenge police abuse in a pretrial hearing in exchange for plea deals . They do
so because the alternative is to risk the steep mandatory minimum sentence they would face if they went to trial
and lost. Prosecutors use the fear of these mandatory minimums to their advantage by offering comparatively less harsh plea deals before
pretrial hearings and trials begin. The result is not only the virtual loss of the jury trial — today, 95 percent of convictions come
from guilty pleas instead of jury verdicts — but also the loss of the only opportunity to confront police misconduct in criminal
proceedings. In New York City, for example, less than 5 percent of all felony arrests that are prosecuted have hearings to contest police
misconduct. For misdemeanor arrests that are prosecuted — a third of which are initiated by the police — less than .5 percent of cases go to a
hearing. A
guilty plea also has the effect of insulating police from any civil rights lawsuit asserting false
arrest because a plea of guilty serves as an admission that the officers’ arrest was justified. A year before his
court appearance, Jacob was heading home when undercover detectives stopped a car he had borrowed. They ordered him and his three
friends out of the car, handcuffed them and searched the car without justification. The officers later claimed that he failed to signal and that
they smelled a strong odor of marijuana emanating from the vehicle when they approached, both common police lies used as pretexts to stop
and search predominately black and Latinx people. During the search, the officers recovered a handgun from inside the spare tire compartment
in the trunk. Jacob adamantly denied knowledge of the gun — it was not his car, other people used the vehicle, and there were multiple
passengers — but he was charged with possession of a loaded firearm, a “violent felony” under New York law. The stakes were significant for
this 21-year-old with no criminal record. At a pretrial hearing, where the legitimacy of the stop and search of the vehicle would be examined
and a judge would determine whether to suppress (preclude the prosecutor from using any evidence relating to the firearm at trial), it would be
his word against the officers’. And if he lost and went to trial, he would face the mandatory minimum of three and a half years in prison. On the
day of the hearing, the prosecutor in Jacob’s case offered a last-minute plea deal: a nonviolent felony with a sentence of probation. But if he
turned it down that day, the deal would forever be off the table. Prosecutors call this a “one-time offer,” a routine pressure tactic that
undermines a meaningful opportunity to make a truly voluntary decision. Most people take the deal. The framers of the Constitution
envisioned a far different system. They knew well from British rule that the government’s power to stop, search, detain, accuse, judge and
punish people suspected of committing crimes presented unique risks for abuse. While they did not envision plea bargaining or the kind of
policing we have today, three of 10 amendments in our Bill of Rights — the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth — when read together, collectively describe
the view that government power should be vigorously challenged, without fear of reprisal or punishment, at every turn when it threatens the
liberty of individuals. This original intent becomes meaningless if defendants cannot seek and receive judicial protection. As the United States
Supreme Court warned nearly 60 years ago in the landmark Mapp v. Ohio: “Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to
observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence.” Jacob got his public hearing. Two of the officers involved in his
stop, search and arrest were compelled to testify. I cross-examined them over three days. They were visibly uncomfortable, even upset at
times. It was clear that they never expected to testify. The judge found the officers’ testimony “implausible,” holding that the search violated
Jacob’s constitutional rights, and granted Jacob’s motion to suppress the firearm. Soon after, the prosecution dismissed all charges. A month
later, however, I learned that the same prosecutor was relying on the same team of officers to prosecute another man. He, too, was charged
with possession of a gun found under similar circumstances. A week after that, I passed by the officer whose testimony under oath the judge
had rejected as “implausible.” He was sitting in court, waiting for another judge to sign off on a search warrant — to enter and search
someone’s home — sworn out by him. The message that the system sent to this officer and continues to send to others is clear: You can do
anything and the system will not hold you accountable. In fact, the system will protect you. We must abolish mandatory
minimum
sentences. Aside from denying individualized justice and driving mass punishment, they usurp the role of the
jury, coerce guilty pleas and, yes, insulate police misconduct. But as Jacob’s case underscored, even in the rare cases
where officers are forced to testify and a judge finds them unbelievable, there is no mechanism to ensure that they are halted from being able
to contribute to future prosecutions.
 L- Marijuana
Legalizing marijuana weakens police unions.
Alice Salles, 2-7-2019, "Are NY Police Unions Worried Legal Marijuana Will Hurt Their Bottom Line?,"
Advocates for Self-Government, https://www.theadvocates.org/2019/02/are-ny-police-unions-worried-
legal-marijuana-will-hurt-their-bottom-line/

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has a plan to legalize recreational marijuana. But to New York cops, the
idea is rotten. After all, how will they justify arresting peaceful men and women going about their lives if
marijuana is all of a sudden legal? According to Cuomo’s plan, the goal is to create different licenses for
marijuana growers, distributors, and sellers, impose a hefty 20 percent state tax on the product, and
then wipe the record of those previously convicted of possessing the substance clean. In response, the
New York state association of police unions issued a statement through its head, Michael Palladino,
saying it unanimously opposes Cuomo’s vision. NYPD police marijuana legalization “We wanted to be on
the record that we oppose it because it’s an act of total irresponsibility,” he said. Adding that Cuomo
“and lawmakers are trading public safety for a money grab to plug a budget deficit arising from
mismanagement of taxpayer funds. Jeopardizing the public’s safety is not something cops support.”
While it’s true that taxing the product will bring in a great deal of revenue, it’s highly doubtful that these
public unions are concerned about the taxpayer. What may be truly bothering them is that legalized
recreational pot will make the police force less relevant . After all, the NYPD is already quite unpopular.
And as the city sees another wave of record-low crime rates, legalizing pot could add to the peace and
quiet and force government officials to think real hard about slashing law enforcement funds. After all,
New York is losing money, and fast. If there’s less crime, they might even consider sending some officers
packing. If there are fewer officers in the force, who’s gonna pay union dues?

Police unions are dependent on the millions earned from marijuana criminalization.
Lee Fang, 5-18-2016, "Police and Prison Guard Groups Fight Marijuana Legalization in California,"
Intercept, https://theintercept.com/2016/05/18/ca-marijuana-measure/

ROUGHLY HALF OF the money raised to oppose a ballot measure to legalize recreational marijuana in
California is coming from police and prison guard groups, terrified that they might lose the revenue
streams to which they have become so deeply addicted. Drug war money has become a notable source
of funding for law enforcement interests. Huge government grants and asset-seizure windfalls benefit
police departments, while the constant supply of prisoners keeps the prison business booming.
Opposition to the marijuana legalization initiative, slated to go before voters in November, has been
organized by John Lovell, a longtime Sacramento lobbyist for police chiefs and prison guard supervisors.
Lovell’s Coalition for Responsible Drug Policies, a committee he created to defeat the pot initiative,
raised $60,000 during the first three months of the year, according to a disclosure filed earlier this
month. The funds came from groups representing law enforcement, including the California Police
Chiefs Association, the Riverside Sheriffs’ Association, the Los Angeles Police Protective League’s Issues
PAC, and the California Correctional Supervisor’s Organization. Other donors include the California
Teamsters union and the California Hospital Association, as well as Sam Action, an anti-marijuana
advocacy group co-founded by former Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., and former George W. Bush
speechwriter David Frum. Law enforcement officials in Minnesota, Washington, and other states that
have debated relaxing the laws surrounding marijuana have said that they stand to lose money from
reform. Police receive federal grants from the Justice Department to help fund drug enforcement
efforts, including specific funding to focus on marijuana. Asset forfeiture is another way law
enforcement agencies have come to rely on marijuana as a funding source. Police departments, through
a process known as asset forfeiture, seize cash and property associated with drug busts, including raids
relating to marijuana. The proceeds from the seizures are often distributed to law enforcement
agencies. From 2002 to 2012, California agencies reaped $181.4 million from marijuana-related asset
seizures. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2014, pot legalization in Washington state led asset
forfeiture proceeds to go up in smoke.
 L- Qualified Immunity
Qualified immunity’s key to protect police officers from frivolous lawsuits
Callahan 6-8 (Mike; former NCIS and FBI agent, and Massachusetts Deputy Inspector General; 6-8-2020; “The attack on the police
officer’s qualified immunity defense“; PoliceOne; https://www.policeone.com/legal/articles/the-attack-on-the-police-officers-qualified-
immunity-defense-sgocV8c2TrJCvFrU/; Accessed 6-25-2020; BM)

Abolishing this defense will leave officers defenseless against a dramatic increase in excessive force
lawsuits On June 5, 2020, CBS News reported that the death of George Floyd has sparked calls for policing reforms. [1] Among items
allegedly in need of reform is the “qualified immunity” defense, which assists officers in defending alleged excessive force civil rights lawsuits.
This defense is now front and center in the crosshairs of certain groups who believe that it unfairly shields officers accused of excessive force
from facing justice and accountability. The CBS article reports that diverse groups, including the “libertarian Cato Institute, the conservative
Americans for Prosperity, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund,” have joined together to urge the United States Supreme Court
to revisit the qualified immunity doctrine. According to CBS, this group wrote in a brief filed with the Supreme Court that, “Qualified immunity
denies justice to victims of unconstitutional misconduct [and] … imposes cost prohibitive burdens on civil-rights litigants.” The article says that
the Supreme Court is considering whether to grant a review of several cases that involve the qualified immunity defense. It further observes
that “legal experts [are] calling on the Supreme Court to rethink qualified immunity” believing that the qualified immunity standard that victims
must meet to hold law enforcement accountable has become exceedingly difficult to reach. CBS also interviewed an ACLU senior staff attorney
who stated that “Qualified immunity has become a get-out-of-jail-free card” for the police. The news media reports that the Supreme Court is
considering whether to grant a review of several cases that involve the qualified immunity defense. (Photo/Pixabay) The news media reports
that the Supreme Court is considering whether to grant a review of several cases that involve the qualified immunity defense. (Photo/Pixabay)
In addition to the assault on qualified immunity at the highest level of the judiciary, there is a parallel move brewing in the United States
Congress. CBS News reports that Independent Congressman Justin Amash from Michigan and Democrat Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley of
Massachusetts have introduced a bill that would “end qualified immunity.” In a letter to colleagues they wrote, “This pattern [of police
misconduct] continues because police are legally, politically and culturally insulated from consequences for violating the rights of the people
whom they have sworn to serve.” Boston.com reported on 6/5/20 that Pressley’s bill, titled “The Ending Qualified Immunity Act,” would amend
Title 42 U.S.C. §1983 (The Civil Rights Act of 1871 that permits personal lawsuits against police officers) “to say it is not a sufficient defense [for
police officers] to say they were acting in good faith or reasonably believed their conduct was lawful … nor is it a defense that the rights violated
were not ‘clearly established’.” [2] BRIEF HISTORY AND SUMMARY OF QUALIFIED IMMUNITY In Harlow v. Fitzgerald, [3] the
Supreme
Court recognized the need for an objective qualified immunity defense to protect public officials, including law
enforcement officers, from the often-frivolous lawsuits that flow from their necessary official actions. The Court made clear that
the vast majority of public officials, including police officers, are not entitled to absolute immunity, which is reserved for a select few high-level
officials. The Court observed that the goal of the qualified immunity defense was to allow for the “dismissal of insubstantial lawsuits without
trial.” [4] The Court ruled “that government officials … generally are shielded from liability … insofar as their [objective] conduct does not
violate clearly established … constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” [5] The Court also ruled that denial of a
public official’s qualified immunity defense by a trial court judge ”is an appealable ‘final decision’….” [6] In so doing, the Court made clear that
when a law enforcement officer’s claim of qualified immunity is denied by a trial court judge, that denial is subject to an immediate appeal to
the appropriate court of appeals. In Anderson v. Creighton, [7] the Court observed that “qualified immunity protects, ‘all but the plainly
incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.’” [8] The Court stated, “We have recognized that it is inevitable that law enforcement
officials will in some cases reasonably but mistakenly conclude [for example] that probable cause is present, and we have indicated that, in such
cases, those officials … should not be held personally liable.” [9] This statement makes clear that law enforcement officers are entitled to
qualified immunity when they have a reasonable basis to believe that their conduct was constitutional, even if their actual conduct falls
somewhat short of the constitutional standard. The Supreme Court’s creation of a qualified immunity defense that benefits law
enforcement officers should come as no surprise to persons who study the court. The Court has made clear its respect
for the often extremely difficult, dangerous and challenging circumstances faced daily by officers across America. For example, in
Graham v. Connor, [10] the Court ruled that in deciding whether an officer has used excessive force, “The reasonableness of a particular use of
force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight” [11] and “The
calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments-in
circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving-about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.” [12]

They’ll get flooded by civil suits – they’re required to cover their members’ costs
Ali & Clark 6-20 (Amir H.; Supreme Court and appellate counsel at the MacArthur Justice Center; Emily; appellate research specialist
at the MacArthur Justice Center; 6-20-2019; “Qualified Immunity: Explained“; Appeal; https://theappeal.org/qualified-immunity-explained/;
Accessed 6-25-2020; Camp-BM)
Claim #1: Qualified immunity protects law enforcement officers from being bankrupted by civil lawsuits. One of the Supreme Court’s principal
justifications for qualified immunity has been that it protects individual officers from the
financial burdens of paying for lawyers
and damage awards. However, that justification ignores the reality that such costs are virtually always paid by the
officer’s municipality, insurance, or unions. A study of more than 80 state and local law enforcement agencies
across the country found that in instances of misconduct—including those involving truly egregious, clear-cut abuses of authority
—individual officers almost never paid such costs.

Qualified immunity is foundational to police unions – they believe it’s paramount to

protecting their members
Brune 6-22 (Tom; covers the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and the federal government from Washington, D.C., ; 6-22-
2020; “What is qualified immunity for police officers?“; Newsday; https://www.newsday.com/news/nation/qualified-immunity-congress-police-
floyd-1.45899746; Accessed 6-25-2020; Camp-BM)

Increasingly, appellate courts appear to have protected police in excessive force cases, a Reuters analysis last month
found, with the courts shifting from approving police immunity in 44% of those cases in 2005-07 to 57% of them in 2017-2019. An unusual
“cross-ideological” dozen-member collaboration that includes the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the libertarian Cato Institute, and the gun rights
Second Amendment Foundation have filed briefs in support of appeals to the Supreme Court. Those briefs back challenges in cases in which
immunity was granted to inept cop accidents, apparent police illegality and simply brutality, including: An appellate court panel protected a
Georgia deputy who aimed at an unthreatening dog but shot a 10-year-old child instead because no prior case matched those “unique” facts,
though one judge protested that no “competent” officer would shoot at a dog surrounded by kids. An appeals court ruled that officers might
have been “morally wrong” but didn’t have “clear notice” that theft violates the Fourth Amendment in blocking a California homeowner’s suit
against police for allegedly stealing $225,000 in cash and rare coins while executing a search warrant. An appellate court dismissed a homeless
man’s suit against police in Tennessee who sicced a dog on him after he surrendered while sitting with his hands in the air because raising his
hands wasn’t enough to put them on notice that releasing the dog on him was unlawful. But the Supreme Court continues to stand by its legal
doctrine, refusing on Monday to hear eight challenges to qualified immunity. That leaves the question up to Congress. Proposed limits The
House Democrats’ Justice in Policing Act effectively voids the Supreme Court’s qualified immunity doctrine for
police and correctional officers, removing defenses for acting in good faith and the “clearly established” law standard. The legislation, which
also includes a wide range of measures from ending chokeholds and no-knock warrants to toughening federal and state probes of police
misconduct, is co-sponsored by 225 Democrats, enough to pass it in the House. The
national Fraternal Order of Police did not
comment on qualified immunity in its statement pledging to work with Congress to improve policing. Sen.
Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) said they’re open to discussing a limit on qualified immunity, and Sen. Mike Braun
(R-Ind.) said he will introduce a bill to limit it but still protect police from “frivolous lawsuits.” The battle in Congress likely will be
fought on political, not ideological, lines. Potential effects of removal Advocates and legal scholars offer conflicting views of what will
happen if police lose qualified immunity. Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told Congress it would end the kind of
police impunity that allowed former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin to look with no fear at cameras recording him kneeling on the
neck of George Floyd. Police groups and unions, and many Republicans, say it would have a chilling effect on police
work, make them hesitant to act when they should be decisive in dicey situations, or lead to retirements and a smaller
pool of applicants for police jobs. “Qualified immunity is a foundational protection for the policing profession
and any modification to this legal standard will have a devastating impact on the police’s ability to fulfill its public safety mission,” the
International Association of Chiefs of Police said in a statement. Both sides say it could lead to more federal civil rights
lawsuits and more payouts by cities, counties and states for judgments and settlements as they indemnify their law enforcement officers.

Qualified immunity is a key part of police union collective bargaining agreements

Lonsdale 6-9 (Joe; founder and partner at 8VC, a venture capital firm, ; 6-9-2020; “Police unions: part of the problem“; New York Daily
News; https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-police-unions-part-of-the-problem-20200609-x223ok3mmbhnze4dv73yqdbbhy-
story.html; Accessed 6-25-2020; Camp-BM)

But police unions and the contracts they bargain make it extremely difficult to discipline officers for their crimes. A
2017 review found that in Minnesota, where Floyd was killed, more than 500 current or formerly licensed peace officers have been convicted of
at least one crime since 1995. Three-quarters of convicted officers have not been disciplined. The police union in Minnesota even covers legal
expenses for officers guilty of drunk driving. Derek Chauvin, who put his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, had been the subject of
18 prior complaints. Many police departments refuse to reveal officer misconduct when it occurs, claiming protection
under Marsy’s Law as “crime victims.” The doctrine of “qualified immunity” often shields police officers from being sued
for egregious behavior. Special relationships with district attorneys mean that when they do appear in court, police officers are rarely
convicted. According to data from the Cato Institute, only 36% of those convicted serve prison sentences — roughly half the rate at which
ordinary individuals are convicted and sentenced for similar crimes. Collective
bargaining agreements between police
unions and government are often the culprit. Many contain clauses that mandate the destruction of records of
prior misconduct complaints. Many limit officer interrogations after alleged misconduct, limit the length of internal investigations, ban civilian
oversight and protect officers in other ways. The result is obscurity and minimal accountability.

Curtailing qualified immunity prompts police union backlash – their primary goal is to
protect their members.
Adler 5-30 (Jonathan H.; Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, ; 5-30-2020;
“Police Unions and the Problem of Police Misconduct (Updated)“; Reason; https://reason.com/2020/05/30/police-unions-and-the-problem-of-
police-misconduct/; Accessed 6-25-2020; Camp-BM)

The Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd had a history of misconduct. According to news reports, he had previously been placed
on leave after using lethal force and was the subject of at least 17 complaints. Details of the complaints are sparse in the reports. This is not
surprising as police disciplinary records are often not maintained in publicly accessible form, if they are maintained
at all. Minneapolis also seems to have a history of not disciplining police. The New York Times editorialized this week that the killing of George
Floyd is yet another reason to reconsider the doctrine of qualified immunity. Under this doctrine, as currently applied by the Supreme Court,
police officers are often immune from civil suit for violent misconduct. I blogged about a recent Reuters report on this
problem, and the Cato Institute has created this resource on the problems with qualified immunity. Limiting (if not eliminating) qualified
immunity would certainly help (though there's a reasonable debate whether this is more properly done through legislative reform than through
the courts). On the other hand, the effects of eliminating qualified immunity may be limited if police departments indemnify their officers.
Should qualified immunity be limited, you can be sure such protection will immediately rise to the top of the
agenda for every police union in the country. If one wants to tackle the structural obstacles to holding rogue police officers
accountable, it seems to me one has to address the power of police unions. As a Reuters report from a few years back documented, police
union contracts in major cities routinely include provisions that erase disciplinary records and obstruct meaningful
discipline (let alone prosecution) of police officers who abuse their authority.

They’ll fight back – Senate testimonies prove

Yoes & Pasco 6-16 (Patrick; National President Fraternal Order of Police; Jim; Executive Director Fraternal Order of Police; 6-16-
2020; “TESTIMONY of Patrick Yoes National President Fraternal Order of Police at the Hearing on Police Use of Force and Community Relations
before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary“; Senate Committee on the Judiciary; https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Yoes
%20Testimony.pdf; Accessed 6-25-2020; Camp-BM)

With respect to legislative efforts to end qualified immunity, the FOP is strongly opposed. Police officers
need protection in order to perform discretionary functions fundamental to law enforcement. Every single factual scenario
an officer encounters is different and unknown. It is extremely difficult for an officer to determine how a legal doctrine will apply to a split-
second factual scenario that the officer confronts. Thus, unless there is existing precedent that squarely governs the facts before the officer, the
reasonable officer needs to be afforded a certain degree of discretion to make split-second decisions in situations that could put lives, including
their own, at risk. Officers should not be punished for doing so. The courts have been balanced in denying or granting qualified
immunity. A recent study of more than 200 lower court decisions where qualified immunity was raised as a defense, the court denied officers
qualified immunity 43% of the time. Only 5
cases have made it to the Supreme Court since 2015. In all 5 cases, officers
were granted qualified immunity, including 9-0 and 8-1 decisions. This suggests that there is very little dispute the
current doctrine is working.
 L- Police Militarization
Police unions have lobbied dozens of politicians to stop efforts to appeal 1033 – they
see it as key to keep police safe.
Karbal 6/2 “Renewed calls to demilitarize police set the stage for familiar union fight” by Ian Karbal, published June 2nd,
2020. Ian began his internship at the Center for Responsive Politics in May after graduating from Columbia Journalism School.
Before moving to New York, Ian worked as a reporter in Perry County, Illinois covering local government and courts. His
investigative series on racially biased and for-profit policing earned him a 2019 Freedom of Information Award from the
National Newspaper Association and a nomination for best data journalism for the Chicago Headline Club’s Peter Lisagor
Awards. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/06/police-set-the-stage-for-a-familiar-union-fight/?
utm_source=CRP+Mail+List&utm_campaign=32916f478f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_COPY_03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9df8578d78-
32916f478f-

Clashes between protesters and law enforcement around the country have led to a bipartisan call from
congressional lawmakers to demilitarize America’s police. Several lawmakers have focused that effort on
amending or repealing the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program, which allows local law enforcement
agencies to request military-grade surplus equipment from the federal government . That equipment ranges
from high-powered weapons to armored vehicles. The calls for demilitarization are familiar, but lobbying efforts by
police unions, most notably the National Fraternal Order of Police, appear to have hampered proposed
legislation in the past. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) has expressed support for an early return to session to address
police reforms. The National FOP’s PAC has contributed more to Hoyer between 2014 and 2020 than any other representative. The 1033
Program, which has been around for over two decades, has seen intense scrutiny in Washington since the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Mo.,
following the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black man, at the hands of police. Images from those protests showing local police with
military gear clashing with citizens are being evoked now as protests over the death of George Floyd have erupted in violence across the
country. Thedeaths of Brown and Floyd are two of many highly publicized killings of Black men by police
over the last decade that have sparked protests against systemic racism. The most recently available
data from the 1033 Program shows local law enforcement agencies country-wide currently hold over
$1.75 billion worth of surplus gear including mine resistant vehicles, grenade launchers and aircrafts. In
spite of the bipartisan introduction of multiple bills since 2014 aimed specifically at demilitarizing police,
as well as an executive order by President Barack Obama in 2015, the 1033 Program has seen no lasting
change. Seven bills introduced in the House and Senate, all titled the “Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement
Act” never saw a vote. A 2014 amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act to cut
funding for the transfer of military gear to local law enforcement was rejected 62-355 in the House.
Obama’s executive order curtailing 1033 was overturned by President Donald Trump in 2017. The FOP endorsed Trump in his 2016 campaign
with union president Jim Cantenbury declaring “he understands and supports our priorities and our members believe he will make America safe
again.” Help us keep government accountable by making a donation today. Pro-police lobbying groups have fought to keep
the 1033 Program in place in spite of bipartisan support for reform. Jim Pasco, the executive director of
the National FOP, one of the largest police lobbying groups in Washington, told The Hill in 2014 that “we
are the most vigorous law enforcement advocacy group, and we intend to be at our most vigorous on
this issue.” The statement was made shortly after lawmakers began calling for reforms in the wake of the Ferguson protests. The
National FOP has spent $220,000 a year in lobbying efforts since 2007, but its influence far outweighs its
spending. The Union represents more than 351,000 members nationwide. It also has vast influence over state and local chapters that
regularly endorse candidates running for elected office at all levels. Pasco, the FOP’s executive director who is also listed as a lobbyist, worked
on the Bush administration’s transition team while still with the FOP. Before that he handled congressional affairs for the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms. When
Trump overturned Obama’s executive order, the FOP released a statement
saying “the FOP has been working to roll back these restrictions since the day they were announced.”
That effort appears to have been focused on the Trump administration and his former Attorney General,
Jeff Sessions, who the FOP supported in his nomination. Lobbying records show the FOP focused its
lobbying efforts on the White House and the Department of Justice in 2017.
IL
 Police k2 to collective bargaining
Police unions are critical to the larger labor movement – attacks on them undermine
all unions.
McQuarrie ’6/11 [Michael; Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University; “Attacking police unions will hurt the whole
labor movement”; 6/11/20; The Washington Post; https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/06/11/attacking-police-unions-will-hurt-
whole-labor-movement/; Accessed 6/20/20; NT]

Police unions have successfully managed to make themselves important for politicians of both parties, but
they are not invulnerable . Indeed, the pairing of police unions with teachers unions has already spread from right-
wing Twitter into think tank position papers and blog posts, not least of all because they may provide a handy
scapegoat for elected officials who’ve failed to decisively intervene in the past. Crucially, going after
unions may hold bipartisan appeal for politicians, even if those on the left and right are otherwise unlikely to join hands. The
wave of protests has prompted many Democrats to lay the blame at police unions, and police unions have made that
easy with their behavior. Republicans, meanwhile, are likely to see the attack on police unions as an opening to get
rid of public-sector bargaining in general.

Eliminating collective bargaining rights of police may well materially affect the way communities of color
are policed for the better. But it also enables politicians to avoid their own responsibility for the policing crisis and
the general use of criminal justice policy as a tool for harvesting votes rather than protecting communities. Reforming
collective bargaining rather than eliminating it is also an option. A common proposal is to eliminate bargaining over disciplinary procedures. In
many places the disciplinary provisions in police contracts have created a distinct set of legal standards for police that are far more generous
than those provided to citizens in other professions, and this facilitates the circumstances for police violence to go unpunished. But
attacking disciplinary provisions in general is also likely to be used to fire workers without cause when it is
convenient for managers or budget cutters.

It may be possible to eliminate police unions with legislation, but doing so would probably mean eliminating the
collective bargaining rights of public-sector workers as a whole. The people who do the public’s work — teachers,

nurses, bus drivers, sanitation workers and many others — need collective bargaining rights. They need to defend
themselves from arbitrary managers, ensure their workplaces are safe, that patients and students have
the staff support they need and to provide for their families. If the police are to be defunded, which is what activists and
organizers want, the workers taking their place will need collective bargaining to do their jobs effectively .

Union federations follow police unions – they have superior leverage and other unions
fear losing them.
Cunningham-Cook 20 (Matthew; writes on pensions and the retirement crisis; 6-18-2020; “The AFL-CIO’s Police Union Problem Is
Bigger Than You Think“; Intercept; https://theintercept.com/2020/06/18/afl-cio-police-labor-union/; Accessed 6-20-2020; BM)

Police have a small but politically and ideologically influential presence in some of the country’s largest and
most progressive unions, like the United Food and Commercial Workers; the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal
Employees; the American Federation of Government Employees; and the Communications Workers of America. All are major members
of the AFL-CIO union federation. The Change to Win union federation, which broke away from the AFL-CIO in 2005, is home to the
Service Employees International Union, which has thousands of law enforcement members in its International Brotherhood of Police
Organizations/National Association of Government Employees chapter, as well as the Teamsters, which represents tens of thousands of police
and corrections officers. Police
unions, compared to others within organized labor, tend to be more rigidly ideological and are adept at
organizing. That combination means police unions can often pull their coalition partners — particularly in corrections,
probation, and the building trades — to the right on
issues that go beyond strict policing concerns. Bill Fletcher Jr., a former
education director at both the AFL-CIO and AFGE, and a leading expert on race and labor, said that he has
witnessed past efforts at major unions to address issues related to criminal justice reform or racism, and seen them
collapse in the face of internal police opposition. “The leadership of the overall union will cower in the face of
this” law enforcement opposition, he said, “in part because they are afraid that the law enforcement units
will leave. That has happened in every union that I’ve worked with and every union that I have observed.” And unlike other groups of union
members, police in particular will often vote with their feet to join other unions, a practice that is very uncommon in the
rest of labor — giving them additional leverage over internal union deliberations. “Having law enforcement units in other
unions, whether it is AFSCME, UFCW or the Teamsters, has a very conservative impact on the union,” Fletcher said. “The law
enforcement units tend to be very well organized and very conservative. They will intervene when there are union debates
on anything that has to do with law enforcement, the movement for black lives or issues of immigration and detention.” Indeed,
the AFL-CIO, which represents 12.5 million members in over 50 affiliated unions, swiftly rejected the WGAE’s resolution. “We believe the best
way to use our influence on the issue of police brutality is to engage our police affiliates rather than isolate them. Many of our unions have
adopted a code of excellence for their members and industries that could and should be applied to those who are sworn to protect and serve,”
the AFL-CIO’s board wrote in a June 9 statement. “We believe the labor movement must hold our own institutions accountable. A union must
never be a shield from criminal conduct.” ONE ORGANIZATION THAT is undoubtedly watching the controversy inside the AFL-CIO closely is the
Fraternal Order of Police, which is not affiliated with either the AFL-CIO or Change to Win federations and was one of only a few unions to
endorse Donald Trump in 2016. A vote by the AFL-CIO Executive Council to expel IUPA could be a boon to the FOP, if other police union
members walked out the door with them. With union density lower than at any time in the last 80 years, unions often
feel that they cannot afford to lose any more members. Setting police unions fully apart from the rest of
organized labor would, some advocates hope, heighten the already existing internal contradictions and hasten a
reckoning. That reckoning, some unions worry and some conservative opponents of labor hope, would boomerang onto other
public sector workers, who are disproportionately African American. And after a decade of nonstop attacks on
public sector collective bargaining rights, union leadership is concerned about changes to police union
collective bargaining resulting in weakening protections for all public sector workers , as has been proposed by
numerous right-wing think tanks. Ben Sachs, a labor and industry professor at Harvard Law who recently launched a project to reform police
union collective bargaining to end police abuses, understands the concerns of union leaders and others that a push to reform police union
collective bargaining could endanger a broader subset of workers. We
can’t allow changes to police collective bargaining to become
a stalking horse for those with a political agenda to undermine other public sector unions.”

Conservatives will pounce on criticism of Police Unions and collective bargaining by

attempting to weaken all public sector unions.
Chen 15 “Police Unions Don’t Serve the People. Can the Labor Movement Force Them To?” by Michelle Chen,
published January 9th, 2020. Michelle Chen is a contributing writer for The Nation. She is also a contributing editor
at Dissent magazine and a contributing writer at In These Times. She is also a co-producer of “Asia Pacific Forum”
on Pacifica’s WBAI and Dissent’s “Belabored” podcast, and studies history at the City University of New York
Graduate Center. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/police-unions-dont-serve-people-can-labor-
movement-force-them/

If this is indeed a coordinated rulebook labor action, it may prove oddly popular with the public: as long
as their everyday lives aren’t too disrupted, some people may feel relieved by fewer encounters with law enforcement and
“quality of life” penalties (though if we aren’t missing their presence, the defiant cops may fail to make us value them more by withholding
their labor). And the inflammatory speechifying of Pat Lynch, head of the NYPD’s largest union, the
Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA), hasn’t quite charmed the masses into rallying around the
cops. Whether the police slowdown marks an organized insurgency or just individual expressions of frustration, the “depolicing”
phenomenon raises tricky questions about the role of the police in society and in the labor movement.
Cops are workers. They’re employed to do a job, albeit one that sometimes involves racially profiling or shooting our
neighbors, or squandering our tax dollars on paramilitary swag. It’s difficult to argue against police unionization in theory,
if you adhere to the principle that everyone who works has a right to organize. But what to make of a union of
workers who have historically been charged with breaking strikes and protecting the property of corporations? As pivotal cogs in the machine,
cops may suffer from poor working conditions or job insecurity. But when they’re arbitrarily arresting kids or tear-gassing protesters, they are
complicit, and instrumental, in a system that’s in many ways inherently corrupt and anti-democratic. The boys in blue, as historian Sam Mitrani
puts it, have throughout the modern era been designed to “use violence to deal with the social problems that accompanied the development of
a wage-labor economy.” Policing in practice is politically complex; public opinion remains ambivalent on the
overall value of police, often depending on your background. In a segregated urban landscape, views of the cops may be colored by
whether your community is white and affluent, or a “high-crime,” “broken windows” area patrolled by cops from Long Island. And individual
police can’t be seen as the principal actors of a hegemonic social order they enforce. Our militarized “civilian” police force can’t be “reformed”
until we move toward a society that ultimately demands less (and is hence less dependent on) policing. So should the labor actions of recent
weeks alarm New Yorkers? If PBA members go beyond passive de-policing and escalate to a confrontational “coup” against the Mayor, the cops
could shift from patriarchal enforcers to a rogue agency. But New Yorkers should not buy the conservative line that
these events are a reason to weaken public sector unions across the board. Labor actions and strikes are
an effective—and often the only—way for civil servants to leverage their limited economic power. When
teachers go on strike, they’re generally making a legitimate case that “their working conditions are your kid’s learning conditions.” This is
materially and ideologically different from the kinds of thuggish, conspiratorial abuses of power that
may arise in unions as they do in any other mass organization—despite the conservative canard that
government workers “hold the public hostage” when they organize . Historian Joseph Slater of University
of Toledo points to the 1919 Boston police strike as a case study of public sector unionism clashing with the interests of the
state and industry. The police uprising, driven by issues of basic wage and labor conditions, triggered a fierce
military crackdown from Governor Calvin Coolidge’s administration, and a nationwide trend followed of banning
police agencies from affiliating with the AFL and CIO. This was driven, Slater argues, by fears of “divided loyalty,” under
which police might “no longer be a force dedicated to defending the interests of capitalists and busting the heads of those who challenged
those interests.” The current federal and state bans on public sector strikes reflect the government’s interest
in controlling and containing the labor actions of its workforce. Labor can counterbalance institutions of power, but the
state still insists on being the boss, despite purporting to be the people’s servant. So the current police-community divide in
part grows out of historical restraints on police unionization, Slater argues: the largest police unions
(e.g., the Fraternal Order of Police) have always been outside the “house of labor .” This combines with an “us
against them” attitude that is often common within police departments, and a sense of being a disciplined, paramilitary group that helps
produce what one sees in NYC now. But Slater adds via e-mail that “police have a constitutional right to be in unions and will act politically no
matter what.” That is, they may have bad politics regardless of whether they have collective bargaining
rights. Grappling with these contradictions might actually foster a more democratic labor movement. Ari Paul argues that police unions
deserve not solidarity from other city unions, but rather, healthy antagonism—public sector workers like teachers should take a forceful stance
against police brutality. The point of labor organizing isn’t necessarily promoting ideological purity among the proletariat; it is to take the power
structure of waged labor that forces the exploited to be complicit in their oppression, and empower them to resist to the greatest extent
possible. It’s
too late for the NYPD in its current form to untether itself from the power structure that feeds
it. And the apparent ad-hoc labor action probably won’t fix the many problems within the force. But
against the backdrop of community outrage and frustration with law enforcement, the slowdown may
perhaps give residents some space to imagine what life in the city could be, if the people—including a
real mass labor movement with a democratically managed civil service—had the power to redefine
public security.

Police unions are necessary – otherwise all unions come under attack.
Spross ’16 [Jeff; Economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He was previously a reporter at ThinkProgress.; “In defense of
police unions”; 7/14/16; The Week; https://theweek.com/articles/635690/defense-police-unions; Accessed 6/20/20; NT]

While many conservatives love police, and many liberals love unions, you won't find many people on either end
of the political spectrum who proclaim their love for police unions.
On the left, police unions are often seen as the rotten app les in the labor movement — capitalism's enforcers of class and
racial oppression. And heterodox conservatives often argue that police unions are just as bad as other public-sector
unions, defending sclerosis and incompetent workers at great taxpayer expense and to the detriment of reform and the greater social good.

But this odd

convergence of the hard left and the reformist right might be a hint that they've just stumbled into the
same blind spot.

Cops are workers, too. They are workers put in an almost impossible position. And they need a union to stand
up for them.

Go down the standard list of proposed police reforms — more accountability for bad cops, body cameras, demilitarization, more federal
monitoring, civilian oversight, transparency, and so on. They're all worthy, but what they all have in common is getting police to behave
better within the role of "police" as we already conceive of it; namely, as the state's enforcers of law and
order , whose primary tools are the threat of violence and the ability to throw people into cages.

What these reforms don't deal with is the possibility that our society has rendered this role an impossible one
to pull off in any sort of successful, functional, or healthy manner.

Cops must deal with everything from gang violence to drug addiction to mental illness to domestic abuse to
helping single parents to broken taillights and speeding cars. They respond so often with violence and
incarceration because those are the tools we train them to use. They are no more immune to racism
than any other human institution in American society. And of course the well-being of cops themselves often
resembles what you'd find in veterans from a war zone .

Meanwhile, America's long history

of racism has left many black American communities deeply damaged. And poverty
and crime go hand in hand. So
when cops are shoved into the role of what is often privileged white society's sole
institutional interaction with black Americans' world, and left with nothing but violence and incarceration as their tools, of
course racism still permeates the way they operate.

Our society has pulled out of supplying the resources, the institutions, and the personnel that could support cops in
handling this societal breakdown. "We're asking cops to do too much in this country," said an exhausted David Brown, Dallas'
police chief, in the aftermath of the killing of five cops at a protest march. "Policing was never meant to solve all of those problems."

Can anyone be surprised when police unions bristle and revolt at reforms aimed at drawing even greater virtue
out of cops in the course of performing very difficult tasks? Cops wield an immense amount of power in our society. But
that abstract privilege does not change the lived experience of being a cop, which is what the police and
the unions that represent them draw upon when deciding how to defend themselves. We can't just keep trying to
make the police better-armed saints in the very places where the injustices of U.S. society collide the hardest .
Nor can we assume that combating racism is merely a matter of enlightening individual cops or their
departmental culture.

There are plenty of necessary reforms that police unions will oppose . But other reforms are possible, too: There's nonviolent
neighborhood mediation, forms of restorative justice, and of course building our society's ability to help and aid the mentally ill, not just ignore
them or lock them up. Support for decriminalization is not unheard of among cops, as well. The unions could be amenable to reforms that
relieve them of burdens, and that lessen the contradiction that it's extremely easy to both under- and over-police poor minority communities at
the same time.
And remember: The purpose of any union is ultimately to collectively agitate for the interests of the specific
workers they represent, precisely because no one else will do it. Those interests are not just purely material, but are also a
matter of how those workers understand their place in the American social fabric . In the absence of that agitation,
there is a power imbalance at the bargaining table of employment. And that is a problem, because at the end of the day,
cops are workers, too .

If some workers seem to be a pernicious force in society when they organize to make their fears and concerns and interests
heard, we
should stop to ask ourselves if that says something about the nature of the labor we ask those
workers to do. That's as true for cops as it is for anyone.

Labor Unions ally with Police Unions on CJR reform – Police Unions too powerful for
Labor movement to combat
Campbell 20, (Alexia Fernández Campbell, 6-5-2020, accessed on 6-20-2020, Center for Public
Integrity, "As protests grow, big labor sides with police unions – Center for Public Integrity",
https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/as-protests-grow-big-labor-sides-with-police-
unions/) ///Ivanov

Labor unions exist to protect workers, but most workers aren’t authorized to use deadly force as part of their jobs. Police
unions have
written labor contracts that bar law enforcement agencies across the country from immediately
interrogating or firing officers after egregious acts of misconduct. Leaders of the country’s other labor
unions are tiptoeing around the subject as their members join protests in hundreds of U.S. cities this week over the killing of
George Floyd. Labor leaders have strongly denounced police officers’ actions in that case and called on lawmakers to address
systemic racism. But they’re suggesting that collective bargaining agreements shouldn’t be on the table.
They’ve been careful not to blame police unions for the problem, choosing to embrace them instead. Police
union contracts are not normal collective bargaining agreements. Police unions have crafted a complex web of disciplinary rules that critics say
makes it impossible to hold police accountable for killing unarmed Black citizens. After a Minneapolis police officer pinned Floyd’s neck to the
ground for more than 8 minutes while fellow officers stood by and watched, many want to see these union contract rules reformed or
dismantled. “The short answer is not to disengage and just condemn,” Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO labor
federation, said Wednesday on a press call about racial justice. “The answer is to totally re-engage and educate.” Public Integrity
reached out to leaders of 10 major unions and labor groups. None were willing to talk about police
unions. Trumka, of the AFL-CIO, was too busy to chat. The president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union couldn’t fit a call
into his schedule. Teamsters President James Hoffa declined to comment. Silence from the Service Employees International
Union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, United Auto Workers,
Communication Workers of America, Unite Here and the American Federation of Teachers. Labor
leaders briefly talked about police unions in response to a reporter’s question Wednesday. They seemed
uncomfortable. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said no union contracts should shield employee
misconduct, but that focusing on collective bargaining is a “false choice.” “I think we have to do something nationally about the demilitarization
of policing,” she said. Joshua Freeman, a labor historian at City University of New York, said he’s not surprised that the
labor movement
doesn’t want to focus on police unions. It wasn’t until the police killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014 that the
labor movement began to acknowledge racism in policing, he said. But more existential questions about
reforming police unions are still taboo. “It’s a very delicate subject, it’s rarely discussed openly and out
loud,” Freeman said. The labor movement’s quiet support for police unions comes at a critical moment. News outlets
have described how Derek Chauvin, the officer who tackled Floyd, had at least 17 complaints filed against him but never got more than a
written reprimand. That has led some criminal
justice reform [CJR] advocates to call for changes that would curtail — or
outright abolish— the power of police unions. The labor movement’s silence on the subject so far suggests
that it won’t be an ally in that fight. Police unions have a fraught relationship with the wider U.S. labor movement. Labor historians
trace the tension back to the late 1800s, before police unions even existed. City officials would dispatch cops to break up frequent labor strikes,
and they often arrested union leaders and beat workers with batons. “Police were seen as tools for repressing unions,” Freeman said. Read
Read Read The most infamous example is the Haymarket massacre of 1886. Chicago police officers killed a worker, and injured seven others,
who were on strike to demand an eight-hour work day. At the time, only workers in the private sector would organize. It wasn’t until the 1920s
when that started to change. Government employees, such as schoolteachers and sanitation workers, began organizing to demand better pay
and benefits. Police officers wanted that, too. The American Federation of Labor, which later would become the AFL-CIO, started letting police
into its ranks in 1919. By the 1950s and 60s, police unions were common. While the power of public-sector unions was growing, so was the civil
rights movement, and racial tensions ended up driving a wedge between police unions and organized labor. Newspapers across the U.S.
shocked readers with images of police violence against Black protestors in the South during the 1960s. Instead of siding with police, the labor
movement aligned itself with the civil rights movement (though Martin Luther King Jr. would describe that support as “conditional”). For
example, the Los Angeles labor council fought for justice for the family of 17-year-old Augustín Salcido, who was shot and killed when a LAPD
officer was trying to arrest him for allegedly selling stolen watches. The council immediately put out a statement, according to Jacobin
magazine. “Mexican-American members of our union in the thousands can testify to the beatings, intimidations, shake-downs, uncalled for
arrests and terrorism carried on by the police in the Mexican-American community in Los Angeles,” they wrote. The police officer was charged
with murder and later acquitted. That was a rare rebuke of police by labor unions. To this day, the
national labor movement
works hard to avoid angering police unions. The police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri., in 2014 of an unarmed
Black teenager, Michael Brown, shifted the conversation. Street riots highlighted the strain between Black communities and
militarized police. The AFL-CIO began to talk more openly about racism in the police force. But Trumka, head of the powerful
labor federation, still took care not to alienate the police union that represented the police officer, Darren
Wilson. “Lesley McSpadden, Michael Brown’s mother who works in a grocery store, is our sister, an AFL-CIO union member, and Darren
Wilson, the officer who killed Michael Brown, is a union member, too, and he is our brother,” Trumka said at the time. “Our brother killed our
sister’s son and we do not have to wait for the judgment of prosecutors or courts to tell us how terrible this is.” The AFL-CIO was fielding calls
and emails from local union leaders about how to support Black members and take part in the fight for racial justice. So that same year, the
AFL-CIO created the Commission on Racial and Economic Justice, to address what the federation called “police-on-
black crime,” among other problems facing Black communities. In 2017, the commission published a report with a long list of
recommendations for unions, such as urging lawmakers to mandate racial bias training for cops and to abolish
the for-profit prison system. Yet the report barely mentioned the role of police unions in the racial justice
movement, merely noting that “police unions resent when outsiders question their judgment or
actions in the line of duty.” The report suggested that local unions and labor councils should host forums between police unions and
community members. Nowhere did the report mention how police union contracts typically include language
to hide complaints against police officers from the public. It didn’t describe the arbitration clauses that often
force police departments to rehire fire, misbehaving cops. Or how police unions have successfully lobbied
for state laws granting police officers far more job security than the average U.S. worker. “These are armed, trained
people who are totally not accountable to the community they are policing,” said Sam Mitrani, a labor historian at College of DuPage in Ilinois.
Labor leaders are probably hesitant to take on police unions because many of them represent law
enforcement officers through their local affiliates. SEIU, CWA and AFSCME all do.

Diminishing police unions harms the broader labor movement.

Fisk and Richardson ’17 [Catherine Fisk, Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley -
School of Law; L. Song Richardson, Professor of Law, University of California, Irvine School of Law; “Police Unions”; May 2017; George
Washington Law Review, Vol. 85, No. 3, 2017; http://www.gwlr.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/85-Geo.-Wash.-L.-Rev.-712.pdf; Accessed
6/25/20; NT]

The debates over police unions are part of a larger legal and policy debate over whether public employee
unions are agents of or obstacles to government reform, particularly because local government employees
(including police) are among the most densely unionized in the country.15 A standard criticism of government
employee unions is that they exercise disproportionate influence in setting government policy .16 Until the passing
of Justice Scalia, the Supreme Court appeared to be on the path to reduce union power,17 and the Court with Justice Gorsuch is expected to
continue down that path.18 Moreover, legislatures in many states have eliminated the ability of some government employees to bargain
collectively and narrowed the permissible subjects of bargaining for those employees who retain union rights at all, and these reductions in the
power of public employee unions are often described as being necessary to reduce the cost and improve the quality of government service.19
Concern about the influence of public employee unions is not confined to the political right, as activists and
scholars have focused criticism on union contractual provisions protecting officers investigated for excessive use of
force.20

Weakening police unions opens the door to unchecked attacks on all unions.
Levin ’20 [Benjamin; Associate Professor of Law, University of Colorado Law School; “What's Wrong with Police Unions?”; Written 1/2/20;
Posted 1/24/20; Last Revised 4/7/20; Columbia Law Review, Forthcoming; U of Colorado Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 20-1;
http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3469958; Accessed 6/25/20; NT)

One of the primary goals of this Essay is to stress

the ways in which common critiques of police unions sound
uncomfortably like anti-union arguments in other sectors.160 This section identifies those parallels. Despite their strength
relative to private-sector unions,161 public-sector unions have been under increasing attack over the course of the
past decade.162 States have passed “right to work” laws that prevent unions from requiring that all represented workers pay dues.163 Union
opponents have pursued a range of creative litigation strategies geared at diminishing the power of public-sector unions.164 Many of these
attacks have come from the political right.165 Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Ohio Governor John Kasich, and a range of other Republican
politicians pushed “right to work” laws and other regulations that they identified as both addressing state budget crises and protecting the
rights of anti-union workers.166

These recent moves are far from unprecedented. “Civil

service reform” and fights between public-sector employers
and their workers have recurred historically as defining features of public discourse regarding unions and their social function.167
The specter of highly compensated or powerful workers thwarting the public interest has long made public-sector unions both controversial
and distinct from private-sector unions. As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt argued in a 1937 letter, “A strike of public employees manifests
nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward
the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable.” 168 To what extent Roosevelt actually
opposed public-sector organizing remains a point of historical debate,169 but skepticism
about public-sector unions has
remained widespread.170 Given that “[p]ublic sector unionism had become the vibrant component of the American labor movement,” 171
this skepticism takes on a major role in the discourse surrounding contemporary labor policy.
 Police k2 teachers
Going After Police Unions spills over to all public sector unions specifically _________
(you can add any union here, card specifically mentions teachers, bus drivers, and
nurses but the best stuff is said for teacher’s unions)
Lynch 6/21/20, (Patrick J. Lynch, 6-21-2020, accessed on 7-10-2020, Nycpba, "Police unions protect
us all", http://nycpba.org/news-items/daily-news/2020/police-unions-protect-us-all/#:~:text=Police
%20unions%20have%20the%20same,have%20involved%20pay%20and%20benefits.) ///Ivanov

“If we want to eliminate violent police misconduct, then we need to eliminate collective-bargaining protections that shield bad cops.” If I asked
you to guess the author of that sentence, you would probably name any of the dozens of Democratic politicians or left-leaning academics and
commentators who have publicly adopted this position in recent weeks. It’s the latest fashion among the anti-cop crowd: Police unions are the
problem. Police unions have too much power, and police officers have too many union-backed protections. That drumbeat has become so loud
and consistent that it might seem safe to assume that any attack on police unions or police officers’ rights would originate on the progressive
left. You would be wrong. The author was conservative think-tanker and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, an ally and sometime-
collaborator of Wisconsin’s union-busting former governor, Scott Walker. Thiessen’s attack, along with similar pieces by the editorial boards of
the New York Post and Wall Street Journal, are evidence of a trend that should give every union member pause: Anti-labor activists are looking
to capitalize on the current anti-police atmosphere to continue their assault on workers’ rights, especially civil servants’ rights. Our brothers and
If they support a successful campaign to strip police officers of our union
sisters in the labor movement should be very careful.
rights, they will see those same tactics repeated against teachers, bus drivers, nurses and other public
sector workers across this country. You don’t have to take our word for it. Thiessen and Walker were explicit about their plan.
They pointed to the “model” of Wisconsin’s notorious Act 10, which they claimed “reformed collective bargaining for
teachers unions and other public worker unions” in the state. In fact, what Act 10 did was effectively end[ed] public
sector collective bargaining in Wisconsin by prohibiting bargaining over anything but wages and imposing such enormous
overhead burdens on unions (e.g. denying unions the right to automatically collect dues from employees’ paychecks, and requiring union
members to vote to recertify their union[s] every single year) that they couldn’t bargain effectively over wages, either. In
the first five years after Act 10 passed, median teacher salaries in the state fell by 2.6% and median benefits were slashed by
18.6%. That’s the model Thiessen, Walker, Rupert Murdoch et al. are looking to [be] export[ed] nationwide, using
now-unpopular police officers as a stepping stone to impose it on public sector employees in general.
Despite this clearly stated end game, we still have AFL-CIO affiliates and other liberals parroting the same talking points as
conservative union-busters. How did this happen? Much of it is rooted in ignorance — or in some cases, willful distortion — of what
police unions do, especially here in New York City.
 Public sector k2 others
Public sector, most of which are police, are keeping union numbers up
Putchinski, 7 (Laurence, Professor in the Social Science department at University of Central Florida,
“Union Influence and Police Expenditures,” New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC,
http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/login.aspx?
direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=201625&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Acesso em: 20 jun. 2020.)

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (2004c), public sector employees
represented by unions constituted 41.5% of total government employment in the year 2003. No other
major private sector occupational category or subcategory exceeds the union representation density
(percentage of workforce unionized) of the public sector. While union membership has declined in the
private sector, unionization in the public sector has grown or remained stable in the last fifty years
(Carrell & Heavrin, 2004). Public sector employees boast the greatest rate of union growth in the entire
labor market of private and public sector employees. Since 1956, the ranks of public sector union
members increased almost nine fold, even though total government employment just slightly more than
doubled (Sloane & Witney, 2004).

Political instrument ability of unions in one sector spillover to others

Putchinski, 7 (Laurence, Professor in the Social Science department at University of Central Florida,
“Union Influence and Police Expenditures,” New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC,
http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/login.aspx?
direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=201625&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Acesso em: 20 jun. 2020.)

Recent studies (Fiorito, Stepina, & Bozeman, 1996; Freeman, 1996) provide additional evidence that
public sector employees demonstrate a stronger preference for unionization than their private sector
counterparts. One study in particular (Fiorito, Stepina, & Bozeman, 1996) determined that the cause for
the greater preference for unionization on the part of public sector workers can be attributed to a union
role perception on the part of public sector employees. The role of public sector unions, employees
believe, is mainly that of a protector of traditional government benefits, most notably job security
(Fiorito, Stepina, & Bozeman, 1996: 476). Fiorito et al also concluded that public sector employees
assigned greater political instrumentality to their unions than did private sector employees (1996: 474).
Political instrumentality of unions, which refers to perceptions of union influence in politics, might thus
provide an added attraction of union membership for public sector employees. Fiorito, Stepina, &
Bozeman (2001: 474), using data from the Union Image Survey, also concluded that public sector
employees were much less likely to perceive a threat of retaliation from management as a result of
unionization than were private sector employees.

Public sector unions face less threat of retaliation from management as a result of
unionization. Relying of private unionization risks no unions at all.
Putchinski, 7 (Laurence, Professor in the Social Science department at University of Central Florida,
“Union Influence and Police Expenditures,” New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC,
http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/login.aspx?
direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=201625&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Acesso em: 20 jun. 2020.)
Recent studies (Fiorito, Stepina, & Bozeman, 1996; Freeman, 1996) provide additional evidence that
public sector employees demonstrate a stronger preference for unionization than their private sector
counterparts. One study in particular (Fiorito, Stepina, & Bozeman, 1996) determined that the cause for
the greater preference for unionization on the part of public sector workers can be attributed to a union
role perception on the part of public sector employees. The role of public sector unions, employees
believe, is mainly that of a protector of traditional government benefits, most notably job security
(Fiorito, Stepina, & Bozeman, 1996: 476). Fiorito et al also concluded that public sector employees
assigned greater political instrumentality to their unions than did private sector employees (1996: 474).
Political instrumentality of unions, which refers to perceptions of union influence in politics, might thus
provide an added attraction of union membership for public sector employees. Fiorito, Stepina, &
Bozeman (2001: 474), using data from the Union Image Survey, also concluded that public sector
employees were much less likely to perceive a threat of retaliation from management as a result of
unionization than were private sector employees.
A study by Hills (1985) indicates that public sector unions tend to retain their favorable image among
members. Hills’ data showed that in public administration, 92 percent of unionized respondents would
vote for the union again in a certification election. Such a high affirmative percentage among public
sector employees ensures the continued existence of these unions and a reduced likelihood that these
unions would be replaced by other unions or cease their role as collective bargaining agents. This
demonstrates that public sector unions are neither ephemeral nor transitory
Impact
 ---Ext. Unions Increase Wages
Strong unions are key to broad wage growth for all workers which is the best tool for
reducing poverty and inequality.
Elise Gould, 6-18-2014, "Increasing Wages is an Effective Poverty Reduction Tool, Even for Kids,"
Economic Policy Institute, https://www.epi.org/publication/increasing-wages-effective-poverty-
reduction/

Broad-based wage
growth—if we can figure out how to achieve it—would dwarf the impact of nearly every other
economic trend or policy in reducing poverty. Even in 2010, the bottom fifth of working age American households relied on
wages for the majority (56%) of their income. When you add in all work-based income including wage-based tax credits, nearly 70% of income
for low-income Americans is work-related. Yes, the targeted efforts to strengthen the safety net are well deserved. Programs such as food
stamps (SNAP), unemployment insurance, and Social Security have helped reduce poverty over the last four decades. But market based
poverty (or poverty measured using only income from wages) has been on the rise and the safety net has to work even harder to
counterbalance the growing inequalities of the labor market. There
was once a strong statistical link between economic
growth and poverty reduction, but rising inequality has severed it, and the results are deeply dispiriting. If the
statistical link between economic growth and falling poverty that held before the mid-1970s had not been broken by rising inequality, then
poverty, as the government measures it, would be virtually eradicated today. Furthermore, the impact of rising inequality is nearly five times
more important in explaining poverty trends than family structure. As the Economic Policy Institute has documented in our paper launching the
Raise America’s Pay project, this rise in inequality is simply the flip side of nearly stagnant hourly wage growth for the vast majority of the
American workforce in the three decades before the Great Recession. So how to reverse this wage-stagnation, especially for low-wage
workers? Below is a list of proposals, all linked in their attempt to rebuild institutions that provide bargaining power to workers who have had it
taken from them in recent decades. The minimum wage is currently more than 25% below its real value in the late 1960s. The Congressional
Budget Office (CBO) reports that the Harkin-Miller bill to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 would cumulatively boost incomes of people below
the federal poverty line by $5 billion. And this is probably too conservative; other academic research finds that the same bill would lift more
than 4 million people out of poverty. Among those who would see a raise from the Harkin-Miller bill, 55% are women and 25% are women of
color. Nearly one-in-five kids would see at least one parent get a raise. Another
key policy priority should be efforts to level
the playing field for workers to organize and form unions. The decline in unionization over the last
several decades has led to increases in wage inequality and a loss of bargaining power for workers . And
this bargaining power loss is not confined to union members themselves—unions often set wage-
standards for entire sectors. Importantly, the decline in unionization is not a natural, inevitable phenomenon or a result of workers
no longer wanting unions. It is the result of a policy decision to allow growing employer aggressiveness to tilt the playing field against organizing
drives. This policy choice is clear when one looks at the evidence. First, unionization has held up much better in the public sector where
employers have less ability to fight organizing drives. Second, in 2007, the share of non-union workers who said they wanted to be represented
by a union or similar organization reached an all-time high at over 50%. There is a growing wedge between the desire to organize and bargain
collectively and workers’ ability to do so. And, third, even the most obvious form of employer aggressiveness—the firing of workers who are
trying to organize—hasrisen sharply in recent decades, according to the National Labor Relations Board. The fact is that the decline of unions
can explain approximately one-third of the growth of wage inequality among men and approximately one-fifth among women since the 1970s.
This rising wage inequality is the key driver behind stagnant wages for workers at the bottom. When low-wage workers have been able to
organize, unionization is associated with higher wages and benefits for many, including: food preparation workers,
cashiers, cafeteria workers, child-care workers, cooks, housekeepers, and home-care aides

unionization has empirically decreased racial income inequality and increased

healthcare and retirement plans for african americans
Natalie Spievack 19, research assistant in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban
Institute, BA in political science and economics from the University of Wisconsin, 2/1/19, “Can labor
unions help close the black-white wage gap?”, https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/can-labor-unions-
help-close-black-white-wage-gap

After nearly half a century of declining union membership, collective bargaining may be primed for a comeback. Given the convergence of
four factors—rising income inequality, favorable public perceptions of unions, a new Democratic House
majority, and likely presidential runs by several progressive candidates—legislation to ease barriers
against union organization may soon gain traction. This growing interest in strong unions is
understandable in light of the well-documented link between declining union membership and rising income
inequality. Less emphasized, however, is the relationship between unions and racial inequality. A 2012 study found that
if unionization rates remained at their 1970s level—when African American workers were more likely
than white workers to be union members—black-white weekly wage gaps would be nearly 30 percent
lower among women and 3 to 4 percent lower among men. Research also consistently finds that racial wage gaps
are smaller among union members than among nonunion members. This evidence shows that a rebound in union
membership could reduce the racial wage gap that has been growing since 1979. How unions transitioned from excluding African Americans to
elevating their wages Unions weren’t always a positive force for black workers. In 1935, when the National Labor Relations Act gave workers
the legal right to engage in collective bargaining, less than 1 percent of all union workers were black. Union formation excluded agricultural and
domestic workers, occupations predominantly held by black workers, and largely left black workers unable to organize. By the late 1960s and
early 1970s, unions began to integrate. The manufacturing boom brought large numbers of black workers north to factories, the civil rights
movement focused increasingly on economic issues, and the more liberal Congress of Industrial Organizations organized black workers. In 1973,
unionization rates among black men were over 40 percent, while rates among white men were between 30 and 40 percent. And by the late
1970s, almost one in four black women —nearly double the share of white women—belonged to a union. As unions declined, the racial wage
gap expanded The steep decline in unionization rates among workers of all racial and ethnic groups over the past four decades has occurred in
tandem with rising racial wage inequality. In 1983, 31.7 percent of black workers and 23.3 percent of the entire workforce were unionized. In
2017, those numbers had fallen to 12.6 percent and 10.7 percent, respectively (largely because of global competition, deindustrialization, and
the passage of right-to-work laws in several states). Meanwhile, from 1979 to 2016, average hourly earnings of black men in the US fell from 80
percent of white male earnings to 70 percent of white male earnings. For black women, average earnings fell from near parity with white
women to 82 percent of white female earnings. Strong unions play a role in the racial wage gap largely because of
black workers’ overrepresentation in labor market sectors that have higher rates of union membership.
Union jobs pay, on average, 16.4 percent higher wages than do nonunion jobs because of workers’
ability to bargain collectively for higher pay, more transparent hiring and promotion policies, and
heavier regulation of grievance procedures. Recent research also finds that union membership delivers a larger
wage premium to black workers than to white workers. Hourly wages for black union workers are 14.7
percent higher than those of their nonunion counterparts, while white unionized workers make 9.6
percent higher hourly wages than do nonunionized white workers. The impact of increased unionization on racial
equality could extend beyond hourly wage increases. A 2016 study found that black union workers are 17.4 percentage points
more likely than nonunion workers to have employer-provided health insurance and 18.3 percentage
points more likely to have an employer-sponsored retirement plan, advantages that are even greater among workers
with no high school degree. Higher union membership also narrows the racial wealth gap by supplying a larger
wealth dividend to nonwhite workers than to white workers . The increase in earnings, benefits, and employment
stability afforded by union membership translates to a higher likelihood of homeownership and larger contributions to 401(k) plans. Between
2010 and 2016, the median wealth of nonwhite union members was nearly five times greater than that of their nonunion counterparts, while
the median wealth of white union members was only 39 percent greater than that of white nonunion workers. Research and history provide a
compelling case for the role of strong
unions in furthering economic progress for African Americans and in
reducing economic inequality among all Americans. That’s why conversations about the importance of unions should be not
only class based but racially conscious.

Unions prevent wage theft and families from following below the poverty line
Bivens et al, 17 (Josh, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), “How today’s unions
help working people,” 8/24/17, Economic Policy Institute, https://www.epi.org/publication/how-todays-
unions-help-working-people-giving-workers-the-power-to-improve-their-jobs-and-unrig-the-economy/)

Unions also raise pay for workers by helping to enforce labor standards, like guarding against wage
theft. Union workers are more knowledgeable about their rights, and union representatives
communicate when needed with government enforcement agencies, which enhances enforcement of
wage violations. For example, workers covered by a union are half as likely to be the victims of minimum
wage violations (i.e., to be paid an effective hourly rate that is below the minimum wage). This form of
wage theft is costing workers over $15 billion a year, causing many families to fall below the poverty
line.22

When union density is high, nonunion workers benefit from higher wages. When the share of workers
who are union members is relatively high, as it was in 1979, wages of nonunion workers are higher. For
example, had union density remained at its 1979 level, weekly wages of nonunion men in the private
sector would be 5 percent higher (that’s an additional $2,704 in earnings for year-round workers), while
wages for nonunion men in the private sector without a college education would be 8 percent, or $3,016
per year, higher. (These estimates look at what wages would have been in 2013 had union density
remained at its 1979 levels).23
 ---Ext. Wages Key to Growth
High wages are key to durable growth
Wolfers 15 – PhD in economics, professor of economics and professor of public policy at the
University of Michigan (Justin and Jan Zilinsky, “Higher Wages for Low-Income Workers Lead to Higher
Productivity,” PIIE, https://piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/higher-wages-low-income-
workers-lead-higher-productivity)

Economists have long argued that increases in worker pay can lead to improvements in productivity—
indeed, that it can actually be profitable to pay workers higher wages. As Alfred Marshall, the father of modern economics, argued almost
125 years ago, "any change in the distribution of wealth which gives more to the wage receivers and less to the
capitalists is likely, other things being equal, to hasten the increase of material production." Since then, economists have
compiled rich data validating Marshall's hypothesis that paying higher wages generates savings: Higher wages
motivate employees to work harder. Janet Yellen (1984) [pdf] suggested that higher wages create the conditions for
workers to be more productive, pointing to "reduced shirking by employees due to a higher cost of job loss; lower turnover; an
improvement in the average quality of job applicants and improved morale." Among the studies documenting this point are Levine (1992), [pdf]
which analyzed a sample of large (mostly Fortune 500) manufacturing companies, and Holzer (1990), [pdf] which used data from a national
sample of firms finding that "high-wage firms can sometimes offset more than half of their higher wage costs through improved productivity
and lower hiring and turnover cost." Reich et al. (2003) [pdf] surveyed employers at the San Francisco airport after a broad-based increase in
wages and found that the employers of the majority of affected workers reported that their overall performance had improved. Mas (2006)
[pdf] analyzed the case of New Jersey police officers who were granted a wage increase of 17 percent, and who were 12 percent more
productive in clearing cases than those who were refused the increase. Higher wages attract more capable and productive
workers. The evidence that higher wages attract more high quality applicants for new jobs is voluminous. Dal Bó et al. (2013) show that
offering higher salaries yielded an applicant pool with a higher IQ and with personality scores and
motivation that made them a better fit for the advertised jobs. Moreover, the first firm to offer higher wages is more
likely to attract and retain more productive workers. Higher wages lead to lower turnover, reducing the costs of hiring and
training new workers. Reich et al (2003) [pdf] calculated that typical turnover costs exceed $4,000 for each worker and that an increase in
wages at the San Francisco airport led to a decline in turnover of 34 percent, yielding turnover-related savings of $6.6 million per year. Dube et
al. (2007) [pdf] found that when a San Francisco living wage ordinance raised wages among low-paid workers, those workers were more likely
to stay with their employers. Reich and his coauthors also documented a stunning turnover rate of nearly 95 percent per year among security
screeners in mid-2000, which fell to 18.7 percent when pay improved. Fairris et al. (2005) [pdf] examined evidence from Los Angeles, finding
that when employers were directed to offer higher wages, the decline in worker turnover yielded savings equal to around one-sixth of the cost
incurred. Higher wages enhance quality and customer service. The Reich et al. (2003) [pdf] study also found that almost half of
employers reported improvements in customer service following a wage rise for low-wage workers, and indeed, higher wages at the San
Francisco airport led to shorter airport lines. Cowherd and Levine (1992) found that an increase in the pay of lower-level employees relative to
management increased the quality of production. Using data from more than 500 retail stores, Fisher et al. (2006) [pdf] found a positive
relationship between customer satisfaction and the payroll level of associates and managers in the store. Higher wages were also associated
with employers having more knowledge about the inventory. Higher wages reduce disciplinary problems and
absenteeism. Cappelli and Chauvin (1991) [pdf] documented that in plants where pay was higher relative to the local labor market, fewer
disciplinary actions were required. Likewise, nearly half of those employers surveyed by Reich et al. (2003) [pdf] reported a decrease in
disciplinary issues following a wage rise. Zhang et al. [pdf] (2013) showed in a survey of Canadian firms that absenteeism was less likely when
wages were higher. Pfeifer (2010) found a similar result in a large German survey. Firms
with higher wages need to devote
fewer resources to monitoring. High-paying firms have been found to create a culture of hard work in
which employees monitor their coworkers, reducing the need to hire supervisors. Rebitzer (1995) found that low-wage
maintenance workers needed more supervision in the petrochemical industry. Groshen and Krueger (1990) showed that more highly paid
nurses were also supervised less. Georgiadis (2008) found that in residential care homes in the United Kingdom "higher
wage costs
were more than offset by lower monitoring costs." Workers excessively concerned about income security
perform less well at work. A variety of recent experiments have demonstrated this proposition. Mani et al.
(2013) recruited buyers in a shopping mall and asked them to think about their finances. Researchers observed that the performance of poor
subjects on a cognitive test deteriorated if they were asked to imagine a large emergency expenditure (a $1,500 car repair), but no such
deterioration was observed for well-off subjects. Mullainathan and Shafir (2013) assessed a range of related experiments, finding that mental
tasks that simulate the constant stress of poverty led people to act in compulsive and improper ways .
Indeed, the World Bank Development Report (2015), [pdf] citing numerous field studies, recognizes that poverty taxes people's
mental capacities and self-control. Other mechanisms by which higher wages can yield offsetting benefits include: Higher
wages are associated with better health—less illness and more stamina, which enhance worker
productivity. Greater job satisfaction can result in less conflict between employers and labor groups .
Enhanced reputation with consumers (compare the reputations of Costco and Walmart). All of these positive effects may
interact to yield even larger aggregate effects, as the productivity of one worker often raises the productivity of their
coworkers. Mas and Moretti (2009) [pdf] offer persuasive data on this point, showing that productive cashiers motivate their coworkers to work
faster.

Wage growth is key to the economy

Manyika 18 – PhD @ Oxford, senior partner at McKinsey & Company and chairman and director of the
McKinsey Global Institute (James, et al, “The U.S. Economy Is Suffering from Low Demand. Higher Wages
Would Help,” Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2018/02/the-u-s-economy-is-suffering-from-
low-demand-higher-wages-would-help)//BB

A little over a century ago, Henry Ford doubled the minimum pay of his workers to $5 a day. When other employers
followed suit, it became clear that Ford had sparked a chain reaction. Higher pay throughout the industry helped lead to more
sales, creating a virtuous cycle of growth and prosperity. Could we be at another Henry Ford moment?
Some major companies have announced plans to boost employee pay. Target raised its minimum wage to
$11 this past fall and committed to $15 by 2020. More recently, Walmart announced plans to match that increase to $11. In
banking, Wells Fargo and Fifth Third Bancorp also announced pay increases for minimum wage employees.
These pay increases have occurred against a backdrop of weak economic growth and rising income inequality. Economic growth has
been stuck in low gear for almost a decade now, averaging around 2% a year since 2010 while productivity growth, the key to
increasing living standards, has been languishing near historic lows since the financial crisis. But more recently
there has been a glimmer of hope. After stagnating for years, wages have begun picking up slightly, as has
productivity growth, while corporate profits remain near record highs. Are these recent wage increases merely necessary in light of a
tightening labor market, or could they start a broader trend that may change our economic growth trajectory? After a year-long analysis of
seven developed countries and six sectors, we have concluded that demand matters for productivity growth and that increasing demand is key
to restarting growth across advanced economies. The impact of demand on productivity growth is often underappreciated. Looking closer at
the period following the financial crisis, 2010 to 2014, we find that weak demand played a key role in the recent productivity growth decline to
historic lows. In fact, about half of the slowdown in productivity growth — from an average of 2.4% in the United States and Western Europe in
2000 to 2004 to 0.5% a decade later — was due to weak demand and uncertainty. For example, in the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, rising
consumer purchasing power boosted productivity growth in both the retail and the auto sector, by encouraging a shift to higher-value goods
that can be supplied at higher productivity levels. In the auto sector, as customers in the early 2000s purchased higher value-added SUVs and
premium vehicles in both the United States and Germany, they spurred incremental productivity growth of 0.4 to 0.5 percentage points. Today,
that trend has slowed slightly in both countries, contributing only 0.3 percentage points to productivity growth in the period 2010 to 2014.
Similarly, in retail, we estimate that consumers shifting to higher-value goods, for example higher-value wines or premium yogurts, contributed
45% to the 1995-2000 retail productivity acceleration in the United States. This subsequently waned, dragging down productivity growth. To
put it simply, when consumers have more to spend, they buy more sophisticated things. That’s good not just for consumers and producers, but
for the overall economy, because making more sophisticated, higher-value things makes everyone involve more productive, and therefore
helps increase overall standards of living. In addition, we found two other ways weak demand hurt productivity growth in the aftermath of the
financial crisis: a reduction in economies of scale and weak investment. First, the economies of scale effect. In finance, productivity growth
declined particularly in the United States, United Kingdom, and Spain due to contractions in lending volumes that banks were unable to fully
offset with staff cuts due to the need for fixed labor (for example to support branch networks and IT infrastructure or to deal with existing loans
and bad debt). The utilities sector, which has seen flattening demand growth due to both energy efficiency policies as well as a decline in
economic activity during the crisis, was similarly not able to downsize labor due to the need for labor to support electricity distribution and the
grid infrastructure, and here, too, productivity growth fell. Second, the effect of weak investment. We have found from our global surveys of
businesses that almost half of companies that are increasing their investment budgets are doing so because of an increase in demand. Demand
is the single most important factor driving corporate investment decisions. Investment, in turn, is critical for productivity growth, as it equips
workers with more – and with more recent and innovative – equipment, software, and structures. But we have seen capital intensity growth fall
to the lowest levels in post-WWII history. Weaker demand leads to weaker investment and creates a vicious cycle for productivity and income
growth. Of course, the financial crisis is long since over, and the economy has recovered, at least by some measures. So what’s
to worry about? Won’t demand return to pre-recession levels, and thereby increase productivity? Unfortunately, there is reason to
believe that some of the drags on demand for goods and services may be more structural than crises-related. Slowing
population growth means less rapid expansion of the pool of consumers. And rising income inequality is shifting purchasing
power from those most likely to spend to those more likely to save. This is reflected in slowing growth
expectations in many markets. For example, across our sectors and countries studied, in the decade from 1995 to 2004, growth in demand
for goods and services averaged 4.6%, slowed to 2.3% in 2010 to 2014, and is forecast to slightly increase to 2.8% in 2014 to 2020. Today,
there is concern about where the next wave of growth will come from . Some prominent economists worry that we
may be stuck in a vicious cycle of economic underperformance for some time. Our analyses strongly suggest that supporting sustained demand
growth needs to be part of the answer. Demand may deserve attention to help boost productivity growth not only during the recovery from the
financial crisis but also in terms of longer-term structural leakages and their impact on productivity. Suitable
tools for this longer-
term situation include: focusing on productive investment as a fiscal priority, growing the purchasing power of low-
income consumers with the highest propensity to consume, unlocking private business and residential investment, and
supporting worker training and transition programs to ensure that periods of transition do not disrupt incomes. Companies play a key role in
promoting growth through investment and innovation as well as supporting their workforce through training programs. Yet companies may also
want to consider the words of Ford when he said: “The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless
an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the
number of its customers. One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers .” While this is certainly not true
for individual companies, it is true for the broader economy, and we might be at a rare point where the representatives of
employees and employers alike share a common interest in healthy wage growth.
 ---Ext. Slow Growth Bad
Slow growth increases nationalism, collapses the global economy, and increases the
risk of war
O’Reilly 15 – Brendan P. O’Reilly is China-based writer and educator. His specialty is Chinese foreign
policy. (Brendan, “The Implications of China’s Growth Slowdown” The Diplomat, 2/26,
http://thediplomat.com/2015/02/the-implications-of-chinas-growth-slowdown/)

A decelerating Chinese economy, coming at a time of global economic uncertainty (especially in the eurozone), could have dramatic
economic implications throughout the world. However, the repercussions of a Chinese economic slowdown
would not be limited to the economic sphere. Given the incredible importance of economic growth to
political stability – both within China itself and East Asia in general – adapting to a dampened Chinese economy will be a pivotal
challenge in the Asia-Pacific. While an official GDP growth rate of 7.4 percent would be the envy of most major economies, this figure represents China’s lowest
economic growth since 1991. And of course, economic data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics is not completely trusted by all observers. Local officials (and the central government
itself) have a vested interest in exaggerating their economic performance. Capital Economics, a London-based research group, monitors the Chinese economy by looking at the five factors of
electricity output, freight shipmen, construction, passenger travel, and cargo volume. According to this China Activity Proxy, recent annual growth is closer to 5.7 percent. Regardless of the
statistical specifics of the Chinese slowdown, this development poses some degree of political risk for the Chinese state. For more than two decades economic growth has been the major
factor in ensuring political stability in China. Many Westerners forget that the massive protests that rocked Beijing and other Chinese cities in 1989 coincided with the biggest economic crisis of
the post-Mao era, with annual inflation of 30 percent leading to panic buying throughout the country. Since 1990, China has been governed by a social contract in which the material lives of
ordinary citizens improve dramatically while the Party keeps a monopoly on political power. Rising wages and standards of living helped ensure political stability. Historically most revolutions,
including the recent upheavals in the Middle East, only reached critical mass when a majority of a country’s people lost hope in the economic capabilities of the governing political structure.
Recent initiatives by the Chinese state can be understood in light of these economic concerns. Since coming in to power in 2013, the administration of President Xi Jinping has launched several
populist measures. Posters throughout the country combine traditional Chinese themes with Communist Party slogans to promote the “Chinese Dream.” Xi’s campaigns against lavish banquets
and other government waste led to a significant drop in the price of high-end liquor soon after his rise to power. Perhaps most important has been a massive anti-corruption campaign, which
has netted thousands of corrupt officials, from minor bureaucrats to the massively powerful former head of internal security. The anti-corruption campaign in China has been so far-reaching
that it is now having negative effects on the Chinese economy. These effects create something of a contradiction in the Chinese polity, because although the anti-corruption campaign enjoys
widespread support, it appears to be having some detrimental effects on the main economic pillar of Chinese political stability. Besides dampening the high-end liquor market, the anti-graft
and ant-waste campaigns have had deleterious effects on industries from tourism and gambling to real estate. Mao Daqing, deputy chief executive officer of the largest property developer in
China, openly warned of the economic impacts of the political campaign: “For us developers, the impact of the anti-corruption campaign on the sales of high-end property is very serious.”
China’s once-booming housing market is now deflating, with prices falling in a majority of cities. Prices appear to be dropping because the rapid increase in housing supply in recent years has
outstripped demand. Problems in the real estate market are mirrored by other macroeconomic troubles. Much of the low-hanging economic fruit in China has been plucked. Rising wages in
China have led many manufacturers to relocate to countries such as Vietnam or the Philippines. China’s historically strong international trade is also taking a hit, with exports down 3.3 percent
from a year ago and imports dropping nearly 20 percent. In June 2014, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang pledged to maintain a robust growth rate: “China’s economy needs to grow at a proper rate,
expected to be around 7.5 per cent this year… Despite considerable downward pressure, China’s economy is moving on a steady course. We will continue to make anticipatory and moderate
adjustments when necessary. We are well prepared to defuse various risks.” Indeed, since this pledge and the subsequent slowdown, the central government has used macroeconomic tools to
boost growth. The People’s Bank of China cut interest rates in November, and more recently lowered the reserve requirement ratio, freeing up $100 billion for lending. China has weathered
previous economic predicaments, for example the 2008 global financial crisis, and emerged stronger. A hard landing is by no means a foregone conclusion, and China still has many
macroeconomic advantages. However, for all the policy tools at Beijing’s disposal, China’s leaders cannot guarantee rapid economic growth forever. It may be necessary to lower economic
expectations, while shoring up the state’s popular legitimacy through non-economic means. Back in 2013, Xi criticized the myopic focus on economic growth, saying “We should never judge a
cadre simply by the growth of gross domestic product.” More recently an article in China’s NetEase quoted Fudan University Department of Finance professor Kong Aiguo as saying, “Since we
are entering what is called the ‘new normal’, we should not worry about the speed of GDP, bur rather we should focus on livelihood issues, public welfare issues, entrepreneurship issues, and

China does
financial transparency issues.” Adapting to China’s “new normal” of lowered GDP growth will be an important challenge for leaders in China and around the world.

more international trade than any other country on earth. Besides issues of trade, any problems in the Chinese
financial system could have serious global impacts, especially coming at a time of relative global
economic uncertainty. If China does face a prolonged period of economic difficulty, the political
repercussions could be volatile. The Chinese state might be forced to look for alternative sources of
popular support. China’s leaders could implement additional populist measures. It is also possible that increased nationalism could come in to
play, especially in the unresolved territorial disputes in the East China Sea and the South China Sea. Regional and global
powers would be wise to monitor China’s economic situation closely.

Strong growth stops war with Russia and China, solves dangerous tech, and prevents
protectionism
Burrows 16 (Mathew BURROWS. Director, Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative; 28-year career in the CIA and State
Department; PhD in European History, Cambridge. “Global Risks 2035.” Atlantic Council. September.
http://espas.eu/orbis/sites/default/files/generated/document/en/Global_Risks_2035_web_0922.pdf)

The multilateralist global system that the United States and the West built after the end of the Second World War was premised on
an economically strong United States and West. In 1945, the United States was the only victor that was not completely devastated. World War II had brought the
country out of the Great Depression, and the US GDP constituted more than 50 percent of the world’s total. Into the twenty-first century, the members of the Group of Seven (G7) were the
world’s political and economic heavyweights. It has only been in the past several years that the collective GDP of the developing world—led by China—has surpassed the developed world’s.
Even as non-Western powers grow, it is psychologically hard for the West to think about relinquishing its reins.¶ Demographically, the West has, for a long time, been in the minority. What’s

the aging of the Western population (analyzed in chapter 2), which is already occurring in Japan and Europe, beginning to
more recent is

squeeze the availability of resources for anything but health, social security, and interest payments on debt. Unless
healthcare becomes far more efficient, the US economy will be overburdened with healthcare and
pension costs as the “baby boomer” generation ages. Healthcare constitutes a whopping 18 percent of the
US GDP —significantly more than is the case for other industrialized countries—without necessarily
providing better results.¶ With more going to health and pensions, there will be less capacity for defense
and military spending. The United States is the biggest military spender, but China is increasing its portion of worldwide military spending,
while the worldwide share of European NATO members is diminishing.¶ China’s military probably will not rival the United
States’ power-projection capabilities even by 2035, but it will have greater anti-access and denial powers . In a military contest, China may never be
able to deliver a knockout blow, but it could tarnish the US image of military invincibility in a conventional state-on-state contest held in its region. Equally, a confrontation
that results in a Chinese humiliation could set back China’s aspirations for regional leadership, if not trigger a domestic legitimacy
crisis for the Communist Party leadership .¶ Biggest Problem Is Domestic¶ The biggest psychological blow to ordinary Western citizens has been their sagging standard of living (more analysis in chapter 1). Despite a much better record of overall growth in the United

States since the 2008 financial crisis, those with median incomes have taken a hit¶ Worrisome for future US growth potential has been the drop in the labor-participation rate, from the 67 percent range before the 2008 financial crisis to 62-63 percent in the years since. The labor-participation rate was destined to drop due to a growing numbers of retirees, but much of the current
sharp decrease comes from unskilled males in their prime working years—forties and early fifties—dropping out. Additionally, many younger women are not entering or staying in the job market. Global Trends 2030 looked at two scenarios for future US growth—one in which the United States maintained or slightly increased its average 2.5 percent pre-2008 growth rate, or one in

which growth would slow to an average of 1.5 percent a year. In the first, there would still be the global economic shift to China. On the other hand, the 2.5 percent average growth would help boost average living standards, engendering a “feel-good” factor, which would make more Americans interested in reengaging with world issues.91 ¶ Given the
record of slower growth , the likelihood of the second scenario is increasing . That
and labor-force decline since the 2008 financial crisis

scenario anticipated lower growth rates—which accelerated declines in average living standards—
making it harder to continue trade-liberalization efforts. Indeed, the IMF warned in June 2016 that the United States faces potentially significant longer-term challenges to strong and sustained growth, saying, “concerted policy

actions are warranted, sooner rather than later… focusing on the causes and consequences of falling labor force participation, an increasingly polarized income distribution, high levels of poverty, and weak productivity.”92¶ Moreover, it is not as if traditional US partners—Europe and Japan—are doing much better. Japan and many European countries are aging faster than the
United States, eliminating labor-force growth as a driver of future economic growth. Europe’s and Japan’s economic performances have been declining since the 1990s.¶ In Europe, the public discontent with high unemployment and declining incomes has helped to spur the rise of antiestablishment far-right and populist parties that want to weaken the EU and transatlantic ties. Even
in richer European countries, such as Germany, a backlash has been growing against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), out of fear that Europe’s rewards would be meager and European standards would be diluted. McKinsey Global Institute, for example, believes a “return to sustained growth of 2-to-3 percent” is possible for Europe, but would require many
politically difficult reforms.93 These include: reducing dependence on imports (much coming from Russia) for crude oil and natural gas; fostering a more vibrant digital economy; increasing workforce participation by the elderly, women, and migrants; and promoting flexibility in labor markets. China now spends a greater share of its GDP on research and development than does
Europe. The latest OECD figures show that Europe now spends even less than the rest of the OECD.94¶ In both the United States and Europe, there is increasing anti-immigrant sentiment despite documented economic benefits from immigration. According to EU Commission Employment Analyst Dr. Jorg Peschner, productivity, by itself, will not be enough to reverse the negative
employment trend absent more immigration: “EU’s productivity growth would have to double in order to keep the EU’s economy growing at the same pace as it did before the crisis started.” For employment growth to remain positive as long as possible, improving the labor participation of women, low-educated people, and migrants will also have to be a priority. In the United

States, many of the new businesses started every year are started by first- or second-generation immigrants.95 ¶ Politically, there has been a large rise in support for right-wing and
populist parties in the United States and Europe, undermining traditional parties. The gaps, for example, between the leadership and supporters in the US Republican and UK
Tory and Labor Parties have been particularly evident in the selection of Donald Trump as presidential candidate and the June 2016 victory of the “Leave” vote in

Britain. Unfortunately, there is no end of economic disruption. The job churn will continue as more and more skills and professions

are automated, also increasing the potential for more “losers” from globalization, greater political
polarization, and inequality. The increased competitiveness of the developing world with the West is a
particular morale buster for Western middle classes who got used to ever-increasing prosperity for
themselves and succeeding generations. Adapting to a new norm of economic turbulence—more
prevalent in other eras—may be one of the biggest mental hurdles for Westerners . The West is used to thinking of the
“Third World,” not home, as the place where economic turmoil happens.¶ And a Multipolar Financial Architecture, Too¶ Historically, US and Western power

has rested on having a monopoly on reserve currencies and a Western-dominated financial system. In
2035, the dollar will be the biggest reserve currency, but its share of global financial transactions is expected to drop from 60 percent today to 45 percent. The euro will probably remain the
second reserve currency, while the Chinese yuan or RMB—which became a part of the IMF benchmark-currency basket in 2015—will become a third reserve currency, accounting for 10 to 15

percent of global finance in two decades’ time.96¶ The financial architecture will also become more regionalized. The central role played by the financial centers of New York
and London will also diminish, and a multitiered financial architecture will develop. Following the UK Brexit, those centers’ share in financial intermediation will decrease, as a second pole of global finance forms in the Eurozone. A third pole will develop in East Asia and Southeast Asia.¶ Gradually, a growing share of global financial resources will be concentrated in those regional
clusters. As with the growth of regional trade, the regional clusters will be more self-encapsulated, spurred by rising domestic demand in China and other developing countries with growing middle classes. With the role of electronic money likely to grow, the traditional banking system will probably also undergo major revision, with potential impacts on governmental powers.¶ A
more multipolar reserve system and regionalized financial architecture should lessen risks and contribute to greater stability. But the large-scale technological innovations—some of which contributed to the 2008 breakdown—will continue, making global finance still volatile. Emerging-market countries with fragmentary regulatory regimes will be particularly prone to suffering
financial crises. The aging-population factor also increases risks to public finances. This report anticipates modestly increased volatility, lower than what occurred in the global economy during the 1890s through the 1940s, but higher than in the 1950s and 1960s—more of a continuation of what has been the trend line since the mid-1980s.¶ Are There Alternative Visions to Western
Order?¶ Four years ago, when Global Trends 2030 was published, the answer was largely no.97 Increasingly, the facts on the ground would suggest otherwise. They do not add up to a cohesive plan to substitute wholesale all Western institutions and practices. However, they clearly indicate that there are some no-go areas, particularly those connected to regime change, democracy

Russia and China, in particular, see themselves as great powers and, as such, believe they have
promotion, state control over NGOs, and maintaining sovereignty .

special rights to dominance in their regions. However, as other powers like India develop, it is likely that they
will see themselves as regional powers with inherent prerogatives .

**Why does fast growth stop a US china war?

It is worth recalling the United States’ expansive Manifest Destiny and nineteenth-century Monroe Doctrine, claiming special rights to determine the future of the Western Hemisphere.¶ The Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) has been closely following Beijing’s efforts to build a network of parallel structures to existing international organizations. It has concluded that
China “is not seeking to demolish or exit from current international organizations…It is constructing supplementary— in part complementary, in part competitive—channels for shaping the international order beyond Western claims to leadership.”98¶ As the accompanying chart indicates, China’s shadow network of alternative international structures encompasses everything from
financial and economic partnerships (the Silk Road Economic Belt and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank) to full-blown political groupings like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA), and the BRICS association of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.99¶ Moreover, there is increasing
cooperation among many of the emerging powers—beyond just authoritarians—to not just limit what they see as Western meddling in domestic affairs, but to go on the attack globally. According to a recent academic study, the “Big Five” authoritarian states of China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela “have taken more coordinated and decisive action to contain democracy
on the global level.” They have sought to “alter the democracy and human-rights mechanisms of key rules-based institutions, including the Organization of American States, the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and international bodies concerned with the governance of the Internet.”100¶ How durable are these preferences for
nondemocracy and state control? By 2035, if not sooner (in the case of Venezuela), some of the now-authoritarian states could be liberalized, and the perceived threat posed by Western civil-society NGOs may ease. However, China and Russia are more likely than not to want to dominate their regions. Nationalism and democracy have been shown to be highly compatible. It is not

clear that an even more powerful China or India would defer to Western leadership of the global order, even if both sides’ values in other areas begin to converge.¶ What Kind of Post-Western World?¶ Clearly, there is a need to plan for a world that will not have the West as
its big economic powerhouse —a prospect hard for Western elites and publics to conceive of, despite a decade or more of publicity about the “rise of the rest.” According to a recent survey, Europeans and Americans are more comfortable with each other than they are with anybody else. Although a

majority of Europeans said, in the most recent German Marshall Fund transatlantic-trends polling, that they would like to see their country take an approach more independent from the United States, both Americans and Europeans still prefer each other over more Russian or Chinese leadership in the world.¶ The Obama administration—considered among the most multilateralist
of recent administrations— campaigned hard in 2015 to convince Europeans not to join China’s proposed Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB). It was as if the United States was against any governance structure not “made in the USA,” even when those running the AIIB have made clear their intentions of operating with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.¶
More and more, the talk among Western elites is about locking in as much as possible the status quo, which favors the West, so that it will be harder for the newcomers to overcome. The TPP was sold as a way to set the rules before China gains much more power. A former Obama administration official advised that now might be the best time to undertake UN Security Council

reform, before China and other uncooperative powers become more powerful. “A new US administration may be able to advance a proposal to address the Security Council’s anachronistic makeup while perpetuating a council that Washington can work with.”101¶ For Westerners , the challenge will be to
plan for a future that will not be solely run by them, but which they can live with . Handovers have been
historically difficult and fraught—more often than not, decided by bloody contests . One could envisage
different scenarios, some already described in the earlier chapter on conflict, of military contests between the United States and China , or the
United States and China with Russia , or the United States with NATO against Russia. Without delivering a knockout blow by one side or the
these contests would most likely pit West against East , creating something akin to a new Cold War .
other,

Even if there were a knockout blow by the United States against China, it is hard to imagine a defeated China
deferring permanently to the West. Its population has been imbued with such a narrative about the injustices by the West against China that any defeat or setback
would be confirmation that the United States and West are dead set against a rising China.¶ Perhaps the most harmful effect of such a contest would be to convince both sides that neither is

trustworthy. For the non-West, it would confirm the suspicion that the West does not want to relinquish its leadership position. For the West, it would make it harder to
ever reach out and help establish a truly global system .¶ Need for a Second-Generation US and
Western Leadership Model ¶ War is not, and should not be, inevitable as the West struggles with the growing clout of China and other developing
Unlike during other transitions, the tools exist for ensuring more peaceful outcomes . They
states on the world stage.

will require Western acquiescence to greater roles for the developing world to set and implement new
rules of the road for the international order. A key feature of the post-1945 US design for the world order is its multilateralist structures. Many of these
operate below most people’s radar. This plumbing of the international system has enabled the daily functioning of globalization. To keep it viable, China, as well as other developing countries,
must be accorded more representation. There are too many long-term risks involved, for example, in China having only the equivalent of France’s voting rights in the IMF, when it is the first or

second economic power in the world. This is how resentments are nurtured—all the more dangerous in China’s case because of its underlying “century of humiliation” mental complex.¶ As
emerging technologies come online, the lack of a truly global institutional framework could be
particularly dangerous . Assuring the future security of the Internet is particularly important in this
regard, because all the new emerging technologies—bio, 3D printing, robotics, big data—take for
granted a secure, global Internet. Everyone loses if cyber crime and cyber terrorism undermine the Internet. In the worstcase scenarios, in
which cyber crime proliferates or strong national borders fragment the Internet, an Atlantic Council study, as mentioned,
found that the economic costs could be as much as $ 90 trillion out to 2030, in addition to the risk of open
conflict .102¶ Besides bringing the emerging powers into leadership roles in the panoply of multilateral institutions, the United States will need to temper its often “exemptionalist”
stance to ensure the survival of the multilateralist order. According to the Council on Foreign Relations’ Patrick Stewart, a prominent scholar of global governance, one of the persistent
paradoxes of the post-1945 decades has been that the “United States is at once the world’s most vocal champion of a rules-based international order and the power most insistent on opting

No country has the networks and connections that the United States
out of the constraints that it hopes to see binding on others.”103

does, but the system is now polycentric, rather than unipolar, and others resent the “exceptional” privileges that the United States claims.
The Global Trends works have talked about the need for a new model of US global leadership. The United States needs to be guiding the international system as a “first among equals,” and

willing to play by its own rules. Paradoxically, there is likely to be no vibrant global-governance system without US and Western
leadership, but too much domineering behavior could doom it.¶ Even if the United States adapted its global role, this is not to say that the tensions and differences with many
emerging powers would all disappear, or that the governance system would function seamlessly. In addition to the growing number of new state actors, the increasing

importance of nonstate actors adds a new complexity to the functioning of global institutions . Moreover, there
are clear-cut differences between the West and emerging powers on values-based issues, such as democracy promotion and the responsibility to protect. Many developing-country publics still
resent Western colonialism and equate any intrusion with past historical wrong. They point to the 2011 humanitarian intervention in Libya, for example, as cover for the Western goal of
regime change. Hence, the UN Security Council failure to stop the fighting in Syria, with more than two hundred thousand killed and 7.6 million displaced. Russia and China want to make a

the lack of a solution smacks more of

stand against the United States and the West getting their way and ousting the Assad regime. On the other hand,

anarchy than global governance. Certainly, it shows one of the gaps that remains, and likely will remain, limiting global governance because of differences in values.
 2nc Democracy Mpx
Unions are key to democracy- increased voter turnout, economic security, reduced
economic inequality, and collective bargaining to check against powerful actors
Levitz, 19 (Eric, “Democracy Dies When Labor Unions Do,” New York: Intelligencer, 9/18/19,
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/democracy-dies-when-labor-unions-do.html)
But these facts say less about the deficiencies of democracy than they do about about the insufficiency of elections — by themselves — to
produce popular self-rule. The alternative to naive faith in the omnicompetence of the individual voter need not be an equally naive faith in
that of unelected technocrats. The most vital mediating institutions in a liberal democracy are not those formed by
elites to check the irrational appetites of ordinary voters, but rather, those formed by ordinary voters to check the avarice
of elites. Democracy asks too much of the individual. But if individuals organize collectively, they can force democracy
to give them a better deal.

Which is a fancy way of saying: To repair American democracy — and fortify it against future threats —
Democrats must not only bring more Americans into the electorate, but also, more American workers
into labor unions.
Democracy begins at work.

There’s a strong argument that giving

ordinary Americans a say over how their workplaces are governed is just as
fundamental to democracy as giving them the ballot.
These days, political liberty is often defined narrowly as the freedom to vote in fair elections. But in earlier eras of American history, genuine
political freedom was thought to have a material component: To
truly participate in self-government, one needed not
only a voice in public affairs, but also a modicum of power in one’s economic life. Franklin Roosevelt articulated
this principle when introducing his economic bill of rights in 1944, telling Congress, “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true
individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” This sentiment might have struck some of FDR’s fellow
“economic royalists” as un-American. But the notion that self-government is impossible without a degree of economic autonomy was common
among our republic’s founding generation. The historian Terry Bouton writes of America’s original grassroots revolutionaries:

[M]any Pennsylvanians believed that economic equality was what made political equality possible. They were convinced that “the people”
would never have political liberty until citizens had the economic wherewithal to protect their rights. To them, concentrations of wealth and
power led to corruption and tyrannical rulers, while widely dispersed political and economic power promoted good government.

… Farmers and artisans declared that the Revolution was about “the freemen of this Country” stating that “they do not esteem it the sole end
of Government to protect the rich & powerful.” … [G]overnment should promote the interests of “the mechanicks and farmers [who] constitute
ninety-nine out of a hundred of the people of America.” In short, the objective of the Revolution was bringing “gentlemen men … down to our
level” and ensuring that “all ranks and conditions would come in for their just share of the wealth.”

The revolution’s elite architects had other objectives. But while they typically did not believe that all white men (let alone, all people) were
entitled to political liberty, they agreed that one needed economic power to exercise such freedom. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in the
Federalist Papers, “A power over man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.”

If we accept our founders’ premises, then the true measure of a democracy — which is to say, a system of government in which all citizens
enjoy political liberty — cannot merely be how many offices its people get to vote on. Rather, to
gauge how democratic a society
is, one must examine how much power ordinary citizens have over the terms of their own subsistence,
and how evenly economic resources are dispersed across the demos. Judged on these terms, it is clear that the
contemporary United States is the opposite of “excessively democratic” — and that it will remain so, absent a revival of its labor movement.
In the founding era, classical republicans imagined that the great masses of ordinary (white male) Americans could attain the economic
autonomy necessary for political liberty by becoming small landholders, or independent artisans. But the industrial revolution rendered that
vision obsolete. Today,
the vast majority of Americans are not self-employed, and spend the bulk of their
waking hours answering to bosses who have power over their subsistence. In this context, most workers
can only secure a degree of control over their economic lives by organizing collectively to check the
power of their employers. Which is to say, they can only do so by forming unions.
That trade unions do, in fact, increase their members’ power over their own working lives is confirmed by the wage and benefits premiums that
unionized workforces enjoy. But organized labor does not merely democratize individual firms; it also democratizes economic power
throughout the economy. As America’s private-sector unionization rate collapsed over the past half century, the middle-class’ share of
productivity gains went down with it. And a large body of economic research confirms that this is no mere correlation. When
workers
organize, they secure a voice within the “private governments” that rule their economic lives, and they
(typically) use that voice to rationally advance their own material interests — which, most of the time,
also advances the self-interest of most Americans (a.k.a. the public interest). In other words, by forming trade unions,
ordinary citizens achieve much of what critics of democracy insist it can’t deliver.

Thus, even if organized labor did nothing to increase voter participation, or the responsiveness of elected
officials to popular demands, it would still serve an indispensable democratic function by fostering the
material preconditions for popular self-government.

Unions make electorates more representative.

Many items on the Democratic Party’s democracy reform agenda are aimed at making the American electorate look more like the American
people. Automatic voter registration, a federal Election Day holiday, and felon enfranchisement are all aimed at reducing class and racial
disparities in voter participation. And such reforms are laudable. But no plan for lifting America’s low voter turnout rates is complete without a
plan for boosting its piddling rate of unionization.

As the Center for American Progress (CAP) has noted, the U.S.
states with the highest unionization rates also have the
highest rates of voter turnout, and the same correlation holds between nations. And the political science
literature suggests this is not coincidental. As David Madland and Nick Bunker wrote for CAP in 2012:

A 1 percentage point increase in union density in a state increases voter turnout rates by 0.2 to 0.25 percentage points according to analysis by
Benjamin Radcliff and Patricia Davis, political scientists at the University of Notre Dame and the State Department, respectively. In other words ,
if unionization were 10 percentage points higher during the 2008 presidential election, 2.6 million to 3.2
million more Americans would have voted.

Similarly, research by Roland Zullo, a labor studies professor at the University of Michigan, shows that self-described working-class citizens —
whether unionized or not — are just as likely to vote as other citizens are when unions run campaigns in their congressional district. Yet when
unions don’t run campaigns, working-class citizens are 10.4 percent less likely to vote than other
citizens.

A similar pattern holds for communities of color. Voters of color are just as likely to vote as white voters in districts with union campaigns but
are 9.3 percent less likely to vote in districts without campaigns.

A 2018 study of the electoral impacts of so-called “right to work” (RTW) laws lend credence to these findings. Such laws undermine organized
labor by allowing workers who join a unionized workplace to enjoy the benefits of a collective bargaining agreement without paying dues to the
union that negotiated it. This encourages other workers to skirt their dues, which can then drain a union of the funds it needs to survive. On the
plus side, such state-level right to work laws provided political scientists at Boston University, Columbia, and the Brookings Institution with a
natural experiment to test the relationship between unionization and electoral outcomes. By examining how voter turnout changed before and
after the passage of RTW in a given state’s border counties — and comparing those shifts to the control group of adjacent counties in non-RTW
states — researchers found that right to work laws are associated with 2 to 3 percent reduction in voter participation.
Separately, unions also appear to facilitate the kind of cross-racial civic solidarity that scholars like Rosenberg fear our species may be
evolutionarily ill-equipped to achieve. Although the American labor movement has often been a bastion of white supremacy — one that
channeled the “economic anxiety” of white male workers into causes like the Chinese Exclusion Act — it was also at the forefront of the Civil
Rights Movement, and helped to keep the bulk of white workers in the Midwest in a partisan coalition with African-Americans for decades after
backlash politics painted the non-union South red. According to that 2018 study, the
passage of right to work laws is
associated with a 3.5 percent drop in the Democratic Party’s share of the presidential vote. Which is to say:
Had tea party governments not passed such measures in Wisconsin and Michigan, it’s plausible that the
union movements in those states would have kept a critical mass of white non-college voters from
chasing the siren song of white identity politics in 2016.
The proletariat needs lobbyists, too.

One testament to American democracy’s dysfunction is the cartoonish incompetence of its commander-in-chief. A less conspicuous — but
more consequential — one is the chasm between popular preferences and public policy. The Trump administration’s decision to prioritize tax
relief for corporate shareholders over new spending on infrastructure, public education, health-insurance subsidies, or addiction treatment in
the middle of a historic drug overdose epidemic didn’t merely buck majoritarian opinion among Americans writ large, but also, among self-
identified Republicans. And the same can be said of the White House’s prioritization of various polluters’ profit margins over the cleanliness of
America’s air and water, or Congress’ perennial prioritization of the pharmaceutical industry’s profitability over the affordability of prescription
drugs, or the myriad other ways that well-heeled interest groups overrule the bipartisan consensus of ordinary Americans in opinion polls.

One could attribute such policy outcomes to the median voter’s failure to meet democracy’s heavy demands; her struggle to sift through large
amounts of information, and refusal to sacrifice her limited free time to the obligations of civic engagement. But the average American worker
— and typical American CEO — are each working with the same archaic evolutionary hardware. The fact that the latter has proven so much
more adept at using democratic freedoms to advance her interest is a function of resources, not psychobiology.

Influencing elections and legislative processes requires investments of time, money, and attention. Wealthy individuals and corporations can
easily shoulder such expenses; ordinary voters can’t. For this reason, if the average House member betrays the interests of the oil company
based in her district, she will see her voice-mail box fill up, and campaign coffers empty out; if she betrays her median constituent’s avowed
desire to see carbon pollution more tightly regulated, by contrast, said voter probably won’t even notice.

This simple reality — that economic

power is easily converted into the political variety — is an inherent
constraint on popular sovereignty in all capitalist democracies. But trade unions help to mitigate it, both
by reducing inequalities in economic power (as we’ve already seen), and by enabling working-class voters to
collectivize the costs of political engagement.

Effective democracy promotion is crucial to global stability — it solves the root cause
of major impacts.
Miller 12 — Paul D. Miller, Assistant Professor in the Department of Regional and Analytical Studies at
the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University, serves as an Officer in
the U.S. Army Reserve and was deployed to Afghanistan in 2002, served as Director for Afghanistan on
the National Security Council from 2007 to 2009, served as a political analyst for the Central Intelligence
Agency specializing in South Asia, holds a Masters in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard University and a Ph.D. in International Relations from Georgetown University,
2012 (“American Grand Strategy and the Democratic Peace,” Survival: Global Politics and Strategy,
Volume 54, Issue 2, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Taylor & Francis Online)

A grand strategy that includes promoting the democratic peace has much to recommend it. The
historical evidence seems convincing : established democracies rarely, if ever , fight one another. The
more states that adopt democracy, the fewer there are that are likely to become enemies of the United
States. Additionally, as summarised by Sean M. Lynn Jones, editor of International Security, democracy
has a number of other benefits directly helpful for US national security. Democracies are less likely to
use violence against their own people and therefore less likely to draw in outside intervention . They
rarely sponsor international terrorism . Democracies have better long-run economic prospects , rarely
experience famine , and produce fewer refugees than non-democracies, which means they require less
international aid , are more likely to trade with and invest in the United States, and are more likely to
become centres of innovation and productivity .27

Scholars have offered a range of reasons why democracies rarely fight one another, which collectively
suggest that the benefits of democracy are not ephemeral accidents but permanent features of this
form of government. Citizens of democracies believe they share values with other democracies, and
thus are slower to see other democracies as potential enemies or combatants. Democracy enforces
peaceful dispute-resolution domestically, a norm that democratic leaders may simply transplant to the
international arena, especially in disputes with other democracies. Institutional considerations are also
relevant. Democracies typically constrain the government's war powers through civilian control and
checks and balances, making it harder to launch a war. The public, which pays the cost of war in a
democracy, is likely to be more selective about the wars it chooses to fight. And democracies are unable
to control information about themselves because of the freedoms of speech and press, which decreases
misperceptions that could lead to war and, in a militarised dispute, improves the credibility of a
democracy's military threats and hence decreases opponents' willingness to gamble on war.28

Promoting democracy also fits naturally with other long-standing components of US grand strategy.
Washington has, for example, long sought to prevent the rise of a hostile hegemon in strategically
important areas of the world – especially Europe or East Asia – by maintaining a favourable balance of
power through military dominance and a network of allies. Preventing hegemony has rightly animated
US policy for generations, from its tack-andweave between Britain and France from 1776 to 1815 to its
involvement in both World Wars and the Cold War. A commitment to democracy is, in a sense, the
corollary to resistance to hegemony, as democratic systems are defined by a diffusion of power among
many actors , thus limiting the chances for tyranny. The same holds internationally: the United States
should work to keep power diffused among many sovereign states and international organisations to
prevent the rise of a hostile, coercive hegemon . Regimes committed to those ideals at home are more
likely to apply them abroad, while autocracies are more likely to seek to expand their power at others'
expense, both domestically and internationally. The growth of democracy abroad alters the balance of
power in the United States' favour.

Finally, promoting democracy is well suited to one of the major challenges of the twenty-first century:
state failure and its attendant threats. The United States can and should respond to the rising tide of
state failure across the world with democratic peace-building interventions. The consequences of state
failure and anarchy across much of the world – including the rise of terrorist groups , organised crime ,
drug cartels , human traffickers , nuclear smugglers , pandemic disease and piracy – collectively erode
global stability and liberalism and raise the cost of US leadership. Effective democratic peace-building
(meaning peace-building that is well armed, well funded and well planned) is the answer to this
challenge . When successful, it holds out the promise not just of treating these various symptoms , but
of addressing the disease . The alternative is to play global Whack-a-Mole with the crisis du jour,
sniping pirates one day, drone-bombing terrorists or barricading drug cartels into narco-statelets the
next. Such policy is reactive , defensive and events-driven , the opposite of what strategy is supposed to
be. A grand strategy would complement these immediate, short-term actions to stave off threats with
longer-term efforts to address the underlying challenges to stability and democracy .
 ---Ext. Unions K2 Democracy
Unions are key to democracy – combats corporate dollars and increases civic
participation.
Bivens et al, 17 (Josh, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), “How today’s unions
help working people,” 8/24/17, Economic Policy Institute, https://www.epi.org/publication/how-todays-
unions-help-working-people-giving-workers-the-power-to-improve-their-jobs-and-unrig-the-economy/)

Unions are a dynamic and ever-evolving institution of the American economy that exist to give working
people a voice and leverage over their working conditions and the economic policy decisions that shape
these conditions. Collective bargaining is indispensable if we want to achieve shared prosperity.

Giving workers a real voice and leverage is essential for democracy. While unions historically have not
been able to match corporate political donations dollar for dollar, working people organizing together in
unions play an equalizing role because they can motivate members to give their time and effort to
political causes. For example, one study found that unions are very effective at getting people to the
polls—especially increasing voting among those with only a high school education.109

As this report has shown, unions—when strong—have the capacity to tackle some of the biggest
problems that plague our economy, from growing economic inequality, wage stagnation, and racial and
gender inequities to eroding democracy and barriers to civic participation.

And unions also help to address current workforce trends that are increasing work insecurity, from the
rise of part-time work and unpaid internships to the exploitation of student athletes to increasing
numbers of Uber drivers and other “gig economy” workers.110 In a recent New York Times op-ed,
Kashana Cauley cited some of these trends and called on her millennial peers to lead the next labor
movement.111 Indeed, there is evidence that young workers are primed to do so: 55 percent of 18- to
29-year-old workers view unions favorably, compared with 46 percent of workers age 30 and
older.112 And young people of both political parties are more amenable to labor unions than their older
peers.113 Having entered the workforce during the last recession, these young workers have
experienced a labor market with lower wages, diminishing benefits, “noncompete” clauses that make it
harder for even entry-level employees to move to better jobs, and other facets of increasing insecurity,
Cauley explains.114

Certainly, Americans of all ages, occupations, races, and genders have a vested interest in making sure
our economy works for everyone. To promote an inclusive economy and a robust democracy, we must
work together to rebuild our collective bargaining system.
 2nc Worker Safety
Unions Prevent Workplace Deaths – Weakened Unions lead to hundreds of thousands
of deaths
Zoorob 18, (Michael Zoorob, PhD Candidate in Government, Harvard University9-25-2018, accessed
on 6-27-2020, Scholars Strategy Network, "How Unions Help Prevent Workplace Deaths in the United
States", https://scholars.org/contribution/how-unions-help-prevent-workplace-deaths-united-
states) ///Ivanov

Between 1992 and 2016, about 138,000 workers in the United States died in on-the-job accidents, an
important if overlooked topic in public health. Worryingly, the number of workplace deaths has risen in recent years, reversing
earlier trends toward fewer deaths. In 2016, 5,190 US workers died on the job, marking the third consecutive year of
increasing occupational mortality, and reaching the highest number of workplace fatalities since 2008. This reversal has
coincided with the uptick in adoption of anti-union legislation, such as so-called “right-to-work” laws that
prohibit labor unions from charging fees to members of the collective bargaining units they represent. If workers who
benefit from union-bargained improvements do not join and pay dues, union finances suffer and so do
their abilities to perform key functions. Right to work laws have recently proliferated across the United States. Since 2000, seven
states – Oklahoma (2001), Michigan (2012), Indiana (2012), Wisconsin (2015), West Virginia (2016), Kentucky (2017) and Missouri (2017) have
implemented this legislation. The U.S. South, a region with high rates of workplace fatalities, has had such laws for decades, and now twenty-
eight states have right to work rules. Overall, the accelerated passage of right to work laws has exacerbated U.S.
union decline, a trend sure to be furthered by the recent Supreme Court decision in Janus vs American Federation of State, County, and
Municipal Employees to ban membership fees for all government employee unions. So what? Negative effect of union losses on wages and
benefits are well established. But unions also organize and work to improve safety and health. My research explores
how union declines – and right to work laws in particular – shape rates of workplace mortality at the state level. Scholars have identified
several ways that unions promote workplace safety. Unions make complaints to the Occupational Safety
and Health Administration, the federal agency charged with enforcing workplace safety regulations and investigating and fining
companies for violations. Unionized workplaces are more likely to be inspected ; and the threat of unionization may
prod employers to improve workplace safety. Unionized workplaces tend to have better health
insurance, which could improve the overall health of workers and reduce employee stress about medical expenses. Union collective
bargaining agreements frequently contain language that restricts excessive shifts and requires safety
equipment like gloves, goggles, and helmets. My research tracks changes in unionization rates and rates of workplace fatalities across the
50 U.S. states over the 25-year period from 1992 to 2016, the years for which the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries has been conducted.
After controlling for other variables, the statistical model finds that unions
have a protective effect on workplace fatalities
across the states. Specifically, a one-percentage point increase in the unionized workforce was
associated with a 2.8% decline in the rate of occupational fatalities. By weakening unions, right to work
legislation has been associated with about a 14% increase in the rate of occupational fatalities. These results held even
when I took into account the industry patterns in states and included an overall index of policy liberalism that can account for variations in state
openness to regulation. Though workplace
fatalities have declined overall in the United States, the declines were
greater in states with more robust unions. The implications of my study are stark. In Wisconsin, for example, from 2000 to 2016
the percentage of the workforce that was part of a union declined from about 18% to about 8%. According to the statistical model, a change of
this magnitude corresponds to an increase in the predicted rate of workplace fatalities from about 3.5 to about 5 deaths per 100,000 workers.
The decline of unionization – stemming, in part, from anti-union
policies like “right-to-work” legislation as adopted by Wisconsin – may
undermine workplace safety at the cost of human lives and limbs. As scholars have pinpointed in detail, unions
make the workplace safer, and my new study suggests that falling unionization rates are associated with higher
rates of death on the job. Union organizers, social reformers, and lawmakers alike would do well to consider how laws that hinder
unionization might have harmful consequences for safety on the job.
 2nc Innovation
Unions are critical to R&D and innovation.
Shin et al ’19 [Ilhang Shin, College of Business & Economics, Gachon University; Sorah Park, Ewha School of Business, Ewha Womans
University; Seong Pyo Cho, School of Business, Kyungpook National University; Seungho Choi, Ewha School of Business, Ewha Womans
University; “The effect of labor unions on innovation and market valuation in business group affiliations: new evidence from South Korea”;
10/26/19; Asian Bus Manage 19, 239–270 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41291-019-00089-9; Accessed 7/7/20; NT] *Edited for readability

In contrast, unions can facilitate innovation by reducing grievances and staff turnover or by improving
employees’ moral and training (Freeman and Medof 1984). Ulph and Ulph (1989) argued that an
increase in union power can actually increase R&D as the union bargains over employment and wages.
Furthermore, unions may allow firms to increase the speed of diffusion and implementation of
technology and, hence, increase the firm’s incentive to invest (Menezes-Filho et al. 1998a, b). For
instance, in the European studies, there was no compelling evidence that unions have a detrimental
effect on R&D (e.g., Menezes-Filho et al. 1998a, b; Schnabel and Wagner 1992). Menezes-Filho et al.
(1998a) showed that a negative relationship between unions and R&D investment disappears when
unions could control the availability of innovative technology in the industry in the UK. Furthermore,
Menezes-Filho et al. (1998b) showed that unions in the UK improve a firm’s relative R&D performance.
In addition, Schnabel and Wagner (1992) showed that unions do not impede innovation in Germany,
because of the more cooperative nature of industrial relations. Strong labor unions may act as a
corporate governance mechanism that monitors the agency problems, thereby mitigating managerial
myopia. This may eventually encourage risk taking and innovative behaviors. According to Chen et al.
(2011), labor unions can effectively monitor managerial actions because they can acquire their firms’
information more easily than can outside stakeholders can. Also, unions exert their power on
management by using their bargaining power to increase the corporate transparency. For instance,
affiliated labor unions in Korea have asked management to share information and to allow their
participation in decision making in order to monitor whether managers harm the transparency and
betray the trust of stakeholders.2

Declines in R&D cede tech dominance to China.

Davidson ’17 [Paul; Reporter for USA Today; “Why China is beating the U.S. at innovation”; 4/17/17; USA Today;
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/04/17/why-china-beating-us-innovation/100016138/; Accessed 7/7/20; NT]

The U.S. has also given birth to a Smithsonian-worthy collection of breakthrough technologies —
including flat-panel displays, digital mobile handsets, notebook computers and solar panels — only to
fumble away their development to other countries, particularly China and Japan.

The BCG study concludes the U.S. has the potential to reverse the trend through better collaboration
among private industry, universities and research consortia. Such a shift would increase annual
manufacturing output by 5%, or $100 billion, and add 700,000 factory jobs and another 1.9 million in
other sectors through ripple effects.

Yet while President Trump is focused on narrowing the nation’s trade deficit, his proposed budget would
slash federal funding for R&D, potentially snuffing out a significant source of U.S. manufacturing jobs
that could help accomplish that goal. Last year, the U.S. had an $83 billion trade gap in advanced
technology products, according to the Census Bureau.
The country is still the global leader in “basic and applied” R&D, which makes early discoveries and
further refines them. About a third of the $500 billion the country spends on R&D is funneled to those
activities. But while two-thirds of the total goes to later-stage “development” R&D, China invests 84% of
its R&D money on advances that yield commercial products. For the past decade, “development” R&D
has been growing 20% a year in China, versus 5% in the U.S., the BCG report says. As recently as 2004,
the U.S. spent four times as much as China.

In China, many technology companies are state-owned and so they don’t have to worry if massive R&D
spending yields losses until a product is commercialized, and even the research of private firms is often
subsidized by the government, says Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and
Innovation Foundation. The Chinese government, he says, also gives the private sector specific
timetables for achieving dominance in areas such as solar, printers, robots and drones. And China
routinely steals technology and fails to enforce patent laws, Atkinson says

“They have huge advantages,” he says.

US tech dominance is critical to sustain nuclear deterrence – collapse ensures nuclear

conflict.
Saalman ’20 [Dr. Lora; Associate Senior Fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and a Senior Fellow at the
EastWest Institute.; “THE IMPACT OF AI ON NUCLEAR DETERRENCE: CHINA, RUSSIA, AND THE UNITED STATES”; 4/14/20; East-West Center;
https://www.eastwestcenter.org/news-center/east-west-wire/the-impact-ai-nuclear-deterrence-china-russia-and-the-united-states; Accessed
7/7/20; NT]

HONOLULU (14 April 2020)—Artificial intelligence (AI) is an increasingly important component of

weapons systems, with both positive and negative implications for nuclear deterrence. Integration of AI
into military platforms has the potential to allow weaker nuclear-armed states to reset the imbalance of
power, but at the same time it exacerbates fears that stronger states may further solidify their
dominance and engage in more provocative actions.

China, Russia, and the US are all engaged in developing and integrating AI applications into their military
modernization programs. These applications include machine learning, neural networks, and autonomy
that feature in Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and
Reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems. They also include the deployment of unmanned weapons-delivery and
defense platforms.

AI has both defensive and offensive applications

At the defensive level, AI has a strong allure for countries that have less capable early-warning systems
and smaller and weaker nuclear and conventional arsenals. Machines have the capacity to make
decisions based on objective criteria, avoiding the pitfalls of human error, and they can provide faster
anticipation and response to an incoming attack. These capabilities are compelling for countries such as
China and Russia that have concerns about deficiencies in their early-warning capabilities in the face of
improving US capacity to mount high-precision, stealthy, and swift attacks.

At the offensive level, Russia, China, and the US are all developing unmanned platforms with varying
levels of AI integration and autonomy that can be used to deploy nuclear or conventional weapons.
These unmanned platforms include underwater vehicles, combat aerial vehicles, and spaceplanes. One
risk is that such platforms could potentially select and engage targets without meaningful human
control. The three countries’ differing—and at times contradictory—definitions of what constitutes a
lethal autonomous weapon system (LAWS) impede consensus on how to avoid such risks.

Roles are shifting

The US remains one of the largest drivers of AI and nuclear trends. In part this is because the US system
is relatively transparent, thereby eliciting countermeasures and imitation. It also stems from the history
of US military deployments in East Asia and elsewhere.

US development of unmanned combat aerial and underwater vehicles, as well as spaceplanes, has
raised the attention of Russia and China, given their longstanding concerns over US attempts to gain an
absolute strategic advantage. Not surprisingly, both Russia and China have engaged in similar, and in
some cases more expansive and unpredictable, AI-driven weapons developments and deployments of
their own.

The Chinese military has been leveraging AI research and development in private industry and
universities under “military-civil fusion” (军民融合), with a focus on autonomous decision-making,
early-warning, guidance, and targeting systems optimized by machine learning. China has also worked to
integrate neural networks that can enhance the maneuverability of its hypersonic glide vehicles and
unmanned underwater and aerial vehicles. These are currently thought to be platforms for conventional
weapons, but they could serve as AI-enabled nuclear platforms in the future.

While Russia was late in releasing its national AI strategy, it has made strides in developing and testing a
suite of AI-enabled platforms and gearing them toward nuclear delivery. These include an AI-equipped
missile-carrying bomber, hypersonic glide vehicles that can deliver both nuclear and conventional
payloads, and a nuclear-powered unmanned underwater vehicle that will reportedly carry a nuclear
weapon. Unlike China that has hedged on the ultimate payload of its platforms, Russia has been much
more explicit about its intention to use these systems for nuclear weapons.

Such Chinese and Russian advances have overturned the traditional view that these two countries are
simply responding to the US. As revealed by the 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review and the growing
interest in low-yield submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and cruise missiles (SLCMs), the US is
increasingly reacting to China and Russia. China’s hedging on the ultimate payload and future aims of its
hypersonic (DF-ZF) and unmanned systems, as well as Russia’s substantial tactical nuclear assets and
projects to enhance survivability and nuclear delivery, such as the Poseidon (Status-6) unmanned
underwater vehicle, are driving US strategic evolution.

Arms control mechanisms need to be revitalized

In light of these developments and threat perceptions, unmanned weapons platforms controlled by AI
systems could increase the risk of nuclear escalation, in particular through the unintentional or
intentional collision of unmanned vehicles. Despite these emerging challenges, current arms control
mechanisms remain mired in decades of historical grievances. Both the multilateral Non-Proliferation of
Nuclear Weapons (NPT) Review Conference and the largely stalled bilateral China-US and Russia-US
strategic dialogues are plagued with ossified definitions of weapons platforms and nuclear deterrence.
 ---Ext. Unions Key to Innovation
Unions key to innovation, reform, and knowledge sharing
Bivens et al, 17 (Josh, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), “How today’s unions
help working people,” 8/24/17, Economic Policy Institute, https://www.epi.org/publication/how-todays-
unions-help-working-people-giving-workers-the-power-to-improve-their-jobs-and-unrig-the-economy/)

Because they are on the front lines, working people often have some of the best information on how to
improve their workplaces and make their workplaces safer and more productive. Unions provide the
means for workers to share their knowledge about what works and what doesn’t—without fear of
retaliation. Unionized workplaces also provide their workers with more transparency about company
finances and processes that can help shape responses to problems.

Here are a few examples of specific ways unions have sought to improve their workplaces:

Shifting from teacher punishment to professional development. The Peer Assistance and Review (PAR)
system created by the Toledo Federation of Teachers (TFT) in the early 1980s transformed teacher
evaluation and professional development in Toledo and subsequently spread to other cities and
counties in Ohio and throughout the country, including Boston; Rochester, New York; St. Paul,
Minnesota; and Montgomery County, Maryland. Under the PAR program, new teachers—and
experienced teachers who have been struggling—work with “consulting teachers” who provide
mentoring and evaluation. Only after that process do principals get involved in evaluation. Veteran
teachers may be referred to the program or seek it out on their own. Districts that have adopted PAR
say that it strengthens instruction, increases teacher leadership, and helps strengthen the relationship
between the district and the teachers union.63

Training manufacturing workers in new technology skills. Labor unions and the AFL-CIO Working for
America Institute have been key partners in implementing a program that trains workers to operate
more technical and highly specialized manufacturing processes. The Industrial Manufacturing
Technicians (IMT) apprenticeship program began in Milwaukee and is expanding across eight states. The
program, operated by the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership (WRTP)/BIG STEP, provides workers
with 2,700 hours of on-the-job training and 260 hours with technical college instructors. Labor union
partners include the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW), the
International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART), the
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), the United Automobile Workers (UAW), and the
United Steelworkers (USW). “Union support ensures that the firm-specific design of the program is
responsive to worker feedback as well as to lessons learned from IMT programs at other employers that
the union covers.”64

Ending quotas that force bank workers to sell exploitive loans. More than 15,000 U.S. bank workers for
Spain-based Santander Bank are trying to create the first bank workers’ union in the United States (bank
unions are widespread in other developed countries). Among Santander workers’ goals is to end quotas
that force workers to hawk subprime auto loans and other exploitative loans to customers—often
people of color and neighbors in their communities—without being able to properly explain the terms of
those loans.65 While there has been no election petition filed for Santander Bank yet, Santander
workers have brought attention to what has been a problem for American consumers. By forming
unions and gaining a seat at the table, financial services employees could help end predatory practices
like those engaged in by Wells Fargo Bank in recent years.66

Innovation, reform, and knowledge sharing is key to sustained economic growth and
job development in a new technological landscape.
Raymond 13 , Kailey Raymond, 06/23/16, "What is the innovation economy and why should you
want to be a part of it," Startup Institute, https://www.startupinstitute.com/blog/what-is-the-
innovation-economy-and-why-should-you-want

First, let’s start with what is the innovation economy. It sounds an awful lot like a buzzword. Well,
maybe, but as buzzy as it may sound, innovation economics is a real thing. Scouts honor. This relatively
new theory of economics is based upon the idea that knowledge, entrepreneurship, innovation,
technology and collaboration fuel economic growth. Look no further than theWe are Made in New
Yorkcampaign, which seeks to connect the city’s tech startups with its jobs seekers. Government is now
supporting the idea that technology and innovation spurs economic growth. Mayor Bloomberg statedin
Mashable, “The growth of the tech industry in New York City has been a critical part of weathering the
nation’s economic downturn, far better than the rest of the country.” The Innovation Economy in New
York A quick glance at the Made in New York map shows over a thousand tech companies in NYC that
are hiring. Who knew there were even a thousand tech companies in NYC, let alone that they were all
growing their teams!? What about all this talk about unemployment and underemployment, you may
ask? The numbers are pretty scary, it’s true. Almost 54% of bachelor’s degree holders under the age of
25 last year were either jobless or underemployed. That’s 1.5 million people. So, what’s the number one
reason why you should want to be a part of the innovation economy? That’s where many of the jobs are
hiding! But, is this just a bubble? Will the innovation economy slow down soon? To that fear, I borrow
from an old adage - the only thing that is constant is change. That means there will always be
innovation. Because what is innovation, if not change? There has always been an innovation economy,
we just haven’t put a name on it before. From factories and industry, economies of scale, to computer
software and cloud-based technologies, every generation has had one. And it is here, in the innovation
economy, that there will always be jobs. These are the jobs on the cutting edge that, often, there aren’t
yet names for. I look around me and see growth hackers, technovangelists, wizards and ninjas- the list
goes on of titles that didn’t exist just a few years ago. The growth hackers and wizards of the world are
the job makers of the innovation economy. These job descriptions evolve everyday, reflecting the fast-
paced tech environment.
 2nc Teachers Unions Mpx
Undermining police unions hurts teachers’ unions.
Ujifusa ‘6/23 [Andrew; “Police Face Fierce Push for Accountability. Could Unionized Teachers Be Next?”; 6/23/20; Education Week;
https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/06/23/police-face-fierce-push-for-accountability-could.html; Accessed 6/25/20; NT]

A nationaldiscussion about how police do their jobs and are held accountable has quickly—perhaps inevitably—raised parallel
questions about whether teachers should be put under the same kind of microscope, and how their unions should approach law
enforcement policy.

The death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd while in police custody has sparked protests and emotional debates about law
enforcement and whether to reform, defund, or abolish police forces, including in schools. Such proposals, many of which are a long way from
becoming national policy but could gain traction locally, would blunt the collective bargaining power of law
enforcement.

So could the same type of political energy soon affect teachers’ unions? And to what extent has the unions’ stance shifted
on the related issue of police in schools?

The kind of teacher misconduct that can lead to criminal or civil penalties, while rare, has created headlines and heated disputes in the past.
And there’s no shortage of people willing to connect disappointing student outcomes with what they say are unhelpful or outdated labor
protections for adults.

“Any time we have a consolidation of power, and it disempowers and marginalizes the people and the communities that it’s supposed to serve,
then it’s problematic,” said Sharif El-Mekki, the CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development and a former principal. “It bewilders me that
people think that unions of various types, including teachers, are immune from systemic racism. It’s beyond naive. It’s disingenuous to believe
that because you signed up to teach, you magically evolve from racial tendencies and racial biases.”

Yet police brutality is a fundamentally different issue from educator accountability and, more specifically, how teachers are evaluated for their
students' performance. Uneasiness about the role of police unions has been growing on the left for some time—including,
most recently, among the two national teachers’ unions themselves—at the same time that teachers’ unions have strengthened their standing
in the Democratic Party.

Teachers Unions and collective bargaining key to democracy promotion and civil rights
Kahlenberg ’17 (Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, previously a
Fellow at the Center for National Policy, a visiting associate professor of constitutional law at George
Washington University, and a legislative assistant to Senator Charles S. Robb, serves on the advisory
board of the Pell Institute, the Albert Shanker Institute and the Research Advisory Panel of the National
Coalition for School Diversity, magna cum laude from Harvard College and cum laude from Harvard Law
School, he spent a year at the University of Nairobi School of Journalism as a Rotary Scholar. Summer
2017 “Resisting the Threat to Democracy with Union Activism”,
https://www.aft.org/ae/summer2017/kahlenberg Accessed 10/31/17)

“Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost .” The late AFT President Albert
Shanker saw a pattern in authoritarian regimes. “ There is no freedom or democracy without trade unions ,” he noted.
“The first thing a dictator does is to get rid of the trade unions.”38 Indeed, when the United States
attempts to plant the seeds of democracy in other countries, free trade unions are critical elements of
what we advocate . For one thing, democracies need a strong middle class, and unions help create
shared prosperity. In America after the Great Depression, strong unions helped build the middle class, and they continue to have a
positive effect on ameliorating extreme inequalities of wealth. Research finds, for example, that unions compress wage differences between
management and labor. According to one study, “controlling for variation in human resource practices, unionized establishments have on
average a 23.2 percentage point lower manager-to-worker pay ratio relative to non-union workplaces.”39 By the same token, as the Center for
American Progress’s David Madland has vividly illustrated, the decline in union density in the United States between 1969 and 2009 has been
accompanied by a strikingly similar decline in the share of income going to the middle class (the middle three-fifths of the income distribution).
Civic organizations that are run democratically can also be an important mechanism for acculturating
citizens to the inner workings of democracy . Unions are among the most important of these
organizations, bringing together rank-and-file workers from a variety of ethnic, racial, and religious
backgrounds, and serving as what Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam calls “schools for
democracy.” Union members learn skills that are essential to a well-functioning democracy: how to run
meetings, debate one another, and organize for political action.40 Labor unions can also help create a culture of
participation among workers. Being involved in workplace decisions and the give-and-take of collective bargaining, voting on union contracts,
and voting for union leadership have all been called important drivers of “democratic acculturation.”41 In addition, union members routinely
engage in civic activities, such as staffing phone banks and canvassing voters door to door. This involvement can boost civic participation among
union members and nonmembers alike. One study found that for every 1-percentage-point increase in a state’s union density, voter turnout
increased between 0.2 and 2.5 percentage points. In a presidential election, a 10-percentage-point increase in union density could translate
into 3 million more voters.42 Likewise, research shows that unions played an important role in countering “an authoritarian streak” among
working-class voters. Sociologist and political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset found that organized labor made workers more inclined to
embrace democratic norms by inculcating “civic virtues in its members.”43 Social Justice Unionism and the AFT Given the extraordinary threats
facing our democracy, unions must not limit themselves to their traditional bread-and-butter work of negotiating better wages and benefits for
members. The times demand a social justice unionism that resists the Trump agenda on an array of fronts:
privatization of schools, union bashing, and cutbacks on civil rights at home and human rights abroad.
But in this difficult era, social justice unionism also needs to promote a forward-looking agenda that
includes making public schools more democratic, fighting to expand union organizing rights at the state
and local levels, and adopting an approach on civil rights and diversity that is more inclusive. The
resistance to Trump’s anti-democratic agenda has already begun, and the AFT has been a central player
—joining the 2017 Women’s March the day after the inauguration, where the crowd was so big that
people couldn’t move, and supporting the large numbers who flocked to airports in response to Trump’s
travel ban. We have seen judges stand up to Trump’s unconstitutional restriction on travel, and the press stand up to the administration’s
attempt to intimidate them. We’ve seen Muslims raise money to rebuild Jewish cemeteries that were vandalized, and Jews, such as AFT
President Randi Weingarten, committing to register as Muslims if Trump moves forward on his pernicious proposal for a registry. But these
early promising developments must be sustained over the long haul. The AFT has a special history upon which it can draw at this moment of
democratic crisis. There
are other labor unions that represent workers, and there are other organizations
that represent teachers. But only the AFT stands directly at the intersection of public education and
the trade union movement, both of which are so essential to the survival of democracy . Throughout
its 100-year history, the AFT has epitomized social justice unionism. That was true when early AFT
members created the union’s motto: “ Democracy in education; education for democracy .” It was true in the
1950s, when the AFT was the only education organization that filed an amicus brief to overturn segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.
And it is true today, under Weingarten’s fight for “solution-driven unionism” that emphasizes the importance of teachers connecting with the
communities they serve.44 Through a third of the AFT’s history—the 33 years from 1964–1997—Al Shanker lived and breathed social justice
unionism as president of the AFT and United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in New York City. As I explain in my 2007 biography, Tough Liberal:
Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Unions, Schools, Race, and Democracy,45 Shanker believed that teachers unions could
be at the forefront of promoting a more democratic society in three distinct ways: by not only fighting
for better wages and benefits for members, but also getting involved in politics and leading coalitions
of educators to defend public education ; by representing teachers, but also being part of the larger
trade union movement that represents sheet metal workers, farm workers, and nurses; and by
participating in larger progressive movements for civil rights at home and human rights abroad.*
Effective democracy promotion is crucial to global stability — it solves the root cause
of major impacts.
Miller 12 — Paul D. Miller, Assistant Professor in the Department of Regional and Analytical Studies at
the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University, serves as an Officer in
the U.S. Army Reserve and was deployed to Afghanistan in 2002, served as Director for Afghanistan on
the National Security Council from 2007 to 2009, served as a political analyst for the Central Intelligence
Agency specializing in South Asia, holds a Masters in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard University and a Ph.D. in International Relations from Georgetown University,
2012 (“American Grand Strategy and the Democratic Peace,” Survival: Global Politics and Strategy,
Volume 54, Issue 2, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Taylor & Francis Online)

A grand strategy that includes promoting the democratic peace has much to recommend it. The
historical evidence seems convincing : established democracies rarely, if ever , fight one another. The
more states that adopt democracy, the fewer there are that are likely to become enemies of the United
States. Additionally, as summarised by Sean M. Lynn Jones, editor of International Security, democracy
has a number of other benefits directly helpful for US national security. Democracies are less likely to
use violence against their own people and therefore less likely to draw in outside intervention . They
rarely sponsor international terrorism . Democracies have better long-run economic prospects , rarely
experience famine , and produce fewer refugees than non-democracies, which means they require less
international aid , are more likely to trade with and invest in the United States, and are more likely to
become centres of innovation and productivity .27

Scholars have offered a range of reasons why democracies rarely fight one another, which collectively
suggest that the benefits of democracy are not ephemeral accidents but permanent features of this
form of government. Citizens of democracies believe they share values with other democracies, and
thus are slower to see other democracies as potential enemies or combatants. Democracy enforces
peaceful dispute-resolution domestically, a norm that democratic leaders may simply transplant to the
international arena, especially in disputes with other democracies. Institutional considerations are also
relevant. Democracies typically constrain the government's war powers through civilian control and
checks and balances, making it harder to launch a war. The public, which pays the cost of war in a
democracy, is likely to be more selective about the wars it chooses to fight. And democracies are unable
to control information about themselves because of the freedoms of speech and press, which decreases
misperceptions that could lead to war and, in a militarised dispute, improves the credibility of a
democracy's military threats and hence decreases opponents' willingness to gamble on war.28

Promoting democracy also fits naturally with other long-standing components of US grand strategy.
Washington has, for example, long sought to prevent the rise of a hostile hegemon in strategically
important areas of the world – especially Europe or East Asia – by maintaining a favourable balance of
power through military dominance and a network of allies. Preventing hegemony has rightly animated
US policy for generations, from its tack-andweave between Britain and France from 1776 to 1815 to its
involvement in both World Wars and the Cold War. A commitment to democracy is, in a sense, the
corollary to resistance to hegemony, as democratic systems are defined by a diffusion of power among
many actors , thus limiting the chances for tyranny. The same holds internationally: the United States
should work to keep power diffused among many sovereign states and international organisations to
prevent the rise of a hostile, coercive hegemon . Regimes committed to those ideals at home are more
likely to apply them abroad, while autocracies are more likely to seek to expand their power at others'
expense, both domestically and internationally. The growth of democracy abroad alters the balance of
power in the United States' favour.

Finally, promoting democracy is well suited to one of the major challenges of the twenty-first century:
state failure and its attendant threats. The United States can and should respond to the rising tide of
state failure across the world with democratic peace-building interventions. The consequences of state
failure and anarchy across much of the world – including the rise of terrorist groups , organised crime ,
drug cartels , human traffickers , nuclear smugglers , pandemic disease and piracy – collectively erode
global stability and liberalism and raise the cost of US leadership. Effective democratic peace-building
(meaning peace-building that is well armed, well funded and well planned) is the answer to this
challenge . When successful, it holds out the promise not just of treating these various symptoms , but
of addressing the disease . The alternative is to play global Whack-a-Mole with the crisis du jour,
sniping pirates one day, drone-bombing terrorists or barricading drug cartels into narco-statelets the
next. Such policy is reactive , defensive and events-driven , the opposite of what strategy is supposed to
be. A grand strategy would complement these immediate, short-term actions to stave off threats with
longer-term efforts to address the underlying challenges to stability and democracy .
 ---Ext. Teachers Union Key to Democracy
Teacher unions are key to external democracy promotion
Kahlenberg ’17 (Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, previously a
Fellow at the Center for National Policy, a visiting associate professor of constitutional law at George
Washington University, and a legislative assistant to Senator Charles S. Robb, serves on the advisory
board of the Pell Institute, the Albert Shanker Institute and the Research Advisory Panel of the National
Coalition for School Diversity, magna cum laude from Harvard College and cum laude from Harvard Law
School, he spent a year at the University of Nairobi School of Journalism as a Rotary Scholar. Summer
2017 “Resisting the Threat to Democracy with Union Activism”,
https://www.aft.org/ae/summer2017/kahlenberg Accessed 10/31/17)

Democracy is in crisis across the globe. For years, polling in the United States and Europe has suggested an alarming rise in the
number of young people who believe democracy is a bad way to run a society.1 Democracy is in retreat in Russia, Hungary,
India, Venezuela, and the Philippines. And in November, the unthinkable happened, as nearly half of
American voters elected a president who has consistently disregarded democratic constitutional norms
such as freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and the independence of the judiciary —norms that
until now had been broadly accepted by members of both major political parties. That president, Donald
J. Trump, is now seeking to weaken other pillars of our democracy, including public education and free
trade unions. Historically, teachers unions have played a special role in strengthening democratic
cultures , and they are urgently called on to do so again. What is needed now more than

Teachers unions increase academic achievement and check autocratic rule

Richard D. Kahlenberg 16, is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, previously a Fellow at the
Center for National Policy, a visiting associate professor of constitutional law at George Washington
University, and a legislative assistant to Senator Charles S. Robb, serves on the advisory board of the Pell
Institute, the Albert Shanker Institute and the Research Advisory Panel of the National Coalition for
School Diversity, magna cum laude from Harvard College and cum laude from Harvard Law School, he
spent a year at the University of Nairobi School of Journalism as a Rotary Scholar, January 6 th, 2016,
“How Defunding Public Sector Unions Will Diminish Our Democracy”,
https://tcf.org/content/report/how-defunding-public-sector-unions-will-diminish-our-democracy/

Unions Are Needed to Serve as Schools for Democracy Civic organizations that are run democratically
can be an important mechanism for acculturating citizens to the inner workings of democracy. Unions
are among the most important of these organizations, bringing together rank and file workers from a
variety of ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds, and serving as what Harvard sociologist Robert
Putnam calls “schools for democracy.” Union members learn skills that are essential to a well-
functioning democracy: how to run meetings, debate one another, and organize for political action.30
Labor unions can also help create a culture of participation among workers. Being involved in workplace
decisions and the give and take of collective bargaining, voting on union contracts, and voting for union
leadership have all been called important drivers of “democratic acculturation.”31 In addition, union members
routinely engage in civic activities, such as staffing phone banks and canvassing voters door to door. This involvement can boost civic
participation among union members and nonmembers alike. One study found that for every one-percentage-point increase in a state’s union
density, voter turnout increased between 0.2 and 2.5 percentage points. In a presidential election, a ten-percentage-point increase in union
density could translate into 3 million more voters.32 Democracies Need Well-Educated Citizens, Which Teachers
Unions Help Produce Democracies need well-educated citizens, and one important subset of public
sector unions—those representing teachers—play a vital role in promoting that goal. Of the 17 million state and
local government employees in 2010, 6.9 million were teachers.33 Most contemporary political rhetoric emphasizes the importance of
education in creating a skilled workforce. But the original purpose of public education was to provide an educated citizenry that could make our
ongoing experiment in self-governance work. Democracy
requires a thinking people who are not easily swayed by
demagoguery. Thomas Jefferson argued that public schooling was necessary “to ensure that citizens
would know how to protect their liberty.” Nineteenth century educator Horace Mann, widely seen as the father of public
education, put it more colorfully: “A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-
house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one.” At
root, the idea of self-governance requires an
educated citizenry because the people themselves rule. All nations, as historian Paul Gagnon noted, provide an excellent
education to “those who are expected to run the country,” and that quality of education “cannot be far from what everyone in a democracy
needs to know.”34 In the Friedrichs case, the lawyers for the petitioner try to make the case that teachers unions have a “detrimental” effect
on education. Citing the Hoover Institution’s Terry Moe, the attorneys for Friedrichs argue, “there is strong evidence that, as union-negotiated
agreements become denser with rules and procedural protections, student achievement falls, especially among minority students.”35 Critics
such as Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas compare teacher unions to special interests like the Tobacco Institute. But the difference, of
course, is that the latter is dedicated to getting more children addicted to deadly cigarettes, while the former represent rank and file teachers
who are trying to help teach children to read and understand math and science. 36
As the amicus brief of the American
Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors points out, states with
“fair share” collective bargaining provisions have higher academic performance on average than
those who do not . Fourth grade math proficiency is 9 percent higher, while reading proficiency is 13
percent higher; and in eighth grade, by which time students have spent more time in school, the
difference is more pronounced: 16 percent higher in both math and reading proficiency. 37 (See Figure 2.) Of
course, there are lots of other factors, such as poverty, that influence a state’s student achievement levels. But careful studies that seek to
control for those additional factors tend to find higher achievement in states with strong teacher unions. A
review by sociologist
Robert Carini concluded that “there is an emerging consensus in the literature that teacher unionism
favorably influences achievement for most students, as measured by a variety of standardized tests.”38
Carini’s 2002 review of seventeen widely cited studies observed that twelve found positive effects, and five found negative effects (see Figure
3). Moreover, the twelve concluding positive results were more methodologically rigorous than the five
that found negative effects, because they were more likely to look at student level data (rather than
using state or district averages) and to control for more variables.39 Union representation is plausibly
connected to higher achievement, as Leo Casey of the Albert Shanker Institute has noted, because “the
working conditions of teachers are, in significant measure, the learning conditions of students, and so,
improvements in the working lives of teachers generally translate into improvements in the education of
students.”40 Before Albert Shanker and his colleagues in New York City began bargaining collectively for teachers in the early 1960s,
teachers were paid less than people who washed cars for a living.41 Subsequently, unions began bargaining for higher
teacher salaries, which are likely to attract better candidates, and smaller class sizes, which can improve
student learning. Unions also seek greater voice for teachers in school decision making, which can
reduce teacher turnover.42 Indeed, one could argue that teachers unions provide a healthy
enhancement to democratic decision-making on education policy because teachers, as much as any
other group in society, serve as powerful advocates for those Americans who cannot vote—school
children. As journalist Jonathan Chait has noted, politicians—who have short-term horizons—are prone to under-investing in education, and
teachers unions “provide a natural bulwark” against that tendency. Since most voters do not have children in the public school system, those
parents who do need political allies have their concerns heard. The interests of teachers and their unions do not always coincide with those of
students, but on the really big issues, such as overall investment in education, the convergence of interests is strong. And evidence suggests
that the alliance is working. In general, American society consistently under-invests in children outside of schools, compared with other leading
democratic societies. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the child poverty rate in the United
States is 21.6 percent, the fifth highest among the forty member-nations. Only Turkey, Romania, Mexico, and Israel have higher child poverty
rates. Put differently, the United States is in the bottom eighth in preventing child poverty. By contrast, when the interests of children are
represented by and connected to the interests of teachers—as they are on the question of public education spending—the United States ranks
close to the top third. Among thirty-nine OECD nations, the United States ranks fourteenth in spending on primary and secondary education as
a percentage of gross domestic product.43 There
is little doubt that, without the voice of teachers, the United States
would under-spend on public education as well. In her dissent in Harris v. Quinn, Justice Elena Kagan made a parallel
argument about home care workers. Patients suffer when low wages induce workforce shortages and high turnover. “The individual customers
are powerless to address those systemic issues,” Kagan wrote, but the unionization of home-care assistants helped doubled wages over ten
years.44 Thereis a final, important way in which teacher unions can promote democratic citizenship: by
modeling workplace democracy for children. In schools where educators have a voice, as my colleague
Halley Potter and I noted in A Smarter Charter: Finding What Works for Charter Schools and Public
Education, “teachers are not simply workers who implement the directives of principles but are active
participants in decision making. Students see workplace democracy in action, underlining the lessons
found in the civics books.”45

Teacher unions key to effective democracy

Weiner ’14 (Lois Weiner is a professor of education at New Jersey City University, where she directs
the Urban Education and Teacher Unionism Policy Project. She blogs at New Politics. January 17, 2014
“The CTU’s Strike for Democracy,” https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/04/chicago-teachers-union-
strike-karen-lewis Accessed 10/24/17)

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike today is not primarily about increased school funding, pensions
for teachers, or even corporate taxation, though the union is fighting for all of these. It is a strike about
democracy — about who owns our society’s resources and how decisions about those resources are
made.

The CTU has shown us, once again, what real democracy looks like. Under an Illinois law designed to
undercut teachers’ right to withhold their labor, 75 percent of the union’s active members must
authorize a strike. The CTU met and surpassed that bar in December, with 92 percent of members voting
on the issue and more than 96 percent of those casting a ballot endorsing a walkout. Then on March 23,
the CTU’s representative body, the house of delegates, voted 486-124 to call a one-day strike.

Is it democratic for a union to demand that all members respect the decision to strike? Insisting on
solidarity in action after a vote is taken is unusual in our society. In contrast to the cutthroat competition
and dog-eat-dog individualism that capitalism cherishes, unions are based on the idea that one’s own
well-being is bound up with the fate of others. Collective action depends on trust and a strong sense of
shared interest, ideals that underlie democracy.

Others object that the CTU’s action is illegal — that the union is walking out over issues that aren’t,
statutorily, grounds for striking. But in doing so, the union has made interpretation of its contract a
political struggle rather than one fought solely in the courts.

Over the past few decades, labor unions have been seriously weakened by acceding to the rules of a
political game rigged by wealthy, powerful elites. Collective bargaining, the forty-hour week, overtime,
social security, union representation in the public sector — each was won through direct action. Unions
had to engage in activities that were defined as illegal and cast as immoral by those who controlled
business, government, and, often, religious institutions.

In addition, lamentations about students missing a day of instruction are crocodile tears given the
savage budgets cuts that have hurt so many children’s education. And most parents recognize this.
Although many in the media hope the strike will turn parents against teachers, it’s unlikely that
communities devastated by school closings will side with the very mayor responsible for those closures.
During its 2012 strike, the CTU’s support was strongest among public school parents, and has since that
strike developed bonds with social justice activists, including fast-food workers and Black Lives Matter.

The Chicago Tribune‘s editorial dismissal of the CTU’s strike as a “tantrum” is a telling indication of the
frustration the city’s most powerful business interests and the mayor experience in dealing with a union
that won’t play the usual game of living with cuts and defeats while praying for friendly politicians to be
elected.

Although Emanuel and his backers have won victories (primarily the school closings), the CTU has with
each defeat developed new relationships with parents and community. Because the union has built
strong support at the building level, teachers (mostly women) are not so easily cowed by threats. And
few parents from communities of color buy the rationale for tax giveaways that rob the schools of
needed revenue, again because the union has worked so diligently in making the political case for fair
taxation that pays for school expenditures.

Chicago’s teachers are not alone in redefining the rules of engagement with governments over school
funding and ownership of public education. UK teachers will soon engage in a national one-day strike,
followed by local strikes throughout the summer. From South Africa to Hungary, Kenya to India,
teachers, parents, and students are resisting the dismantling of public education, the process of
dispossession.

What makes the CTU strike so important, though, is that it challenges the rest of US labor to break the
old rules and fight alongside those most disempowered and most affected by brutal cuts and systemic
injustices.

The CTU has shown that when labor forges strong connections with other unions and social justice
groups — from low-wage fast-food workers to Black Lives Matter — they can still be a force for
progressive change in American society. And reinvigorate democracy in the process.

Strong teacher unions are key to effective democracy and combatting systemic racism
Weiner ’15 (Lois Weiner is a professor of education at New Jersey City University, where she directs
the Urban Education and Teacher Unionism Policy Project. She blogs at New Politics. September 7, 2015
“A Labor Movement That Takes Sides,” https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/black-lives-matter-labor-
day-dyett-strike Accessed 10/24/17)

Here’s an urgent Labor Day challenge for organized labor: grapple with the simultaneously heroic and
sordid history of unions in America, and use the past to inform the fight to revive the labor movement
today. The emergence of Black Lives Matter demands that we remember not just those unions who
fought for principles of racial equality, but those that capitulated to racism.

Too many of labor’s supporters won’t criticize unions for their lack of internal democracy, seeing it as
airing dirty laundry in public and thus weakening an already enfeebled progressive force. The fear is
understandable, but labor’s desperately needed revitalization is unlikely to occur without unions and
their supporters facing what is essentially an identity crisis.
Labor’s opponents, who see, correctly, that unions have tremendous potential to derail the project of
increasing wealth for the few at the expense of the many, are quick to expose labor’s dirty laundry. Our
best defense against this is to confront the problems openly.

As it stands, unions can’t be counted on to be on the right side of the struggle between wage earners
and the boss. What Kim Moody wrote in 1998 remains true: the AFL-CIO has the “vaguely class-oriented
idea that the federation must speak for all ‘working families’ and turn up the ‘street heat’ to organize
the millions.” But they simultaneously cling to the illusion that they will be rewarded for cozying up to
capital, accepting all but its worst excesses.

We see this with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which collaborates with the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED). Through NED, the AFT aids the US State Department’s undercutting
of unions unfriendly to US capitalism, subverting efforts by teacher unions across the world to fight the
global project to destroy public education. NED also promotes the Center for International Private
Enterprise, which supports the “development of market-oriented institutions around the world” and is
led by the US Chamber of Commerce president.

So while (sort of) fighting education privatization in the US, the AFT also pushes free-market policies.
Which side is the AFT on?

To be sure, there is positive change occurring in organized labor, as seen in the Fight for 15 campaign,
the new understanding of and support for immigration rights, and the greater willingness to recognize
systemic racism in response to Black Lives Matter. But these are constrained by the unions’ lack of
internal democracy and unwillingness to break with business (unionism) as usual.

Unions can’t fix every social problem, and ought not be expected to do so, but to win the loyalty and
trust of working people, labor has to embrace and act on the principle that if it’s a social justice problem,
it’s a labor issue.

When AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka acknowledges the contradiction of police unions’ membership
in AFSCME, that both Michael Brown’s mother and killer are union members and “our brother killed our
sister’s son,” he begins to do that. However, it’s not enough to talk. We need to enforce the principle
that solidarity, social justice, and democracy are as “union” as wages and benefits. When unions make
these labor issues, they become the connective tissue of a broad social movement that wins public
loyalty and trust in labor battles.

What does this kind of unionism actually look like? One source of guidance is historic labor struggles, like
the Battle of Virden in Illinois. An 1898 mineworkers strike, this story shows both the difficulty and
potency of interracial organizing in worker struggles.

As historian Carl Weinberg explains, to break the miners’ strike, which had deep, social support and was
organized by an extraordinarily courageous, militant union, employers brought up black workers from
Alabama by train. African-American union miners, mainly from Springfield, helped patrol the tracks
approaching Virden to aid their striking “brother miners.”

In a remarkable show of solidarity, “penniless Black miners and their families who arrived in Virden
refused to serve as strikebreakers once they learned the truth of the situation.” While the strikers won
the immediate battle, the operators’ divide-and-conquer tactic of recruiting blacks to break the strike
did harm that lasted long after the strike — the tactic was partly successful in convincing white Illinois
miners that blacks would be strikebreakers. Weinberg concludes that the limit of the miners’ success in
the Battle of Virden was “the powerful and ongoing scourge of racism in the region.”

The other part of this story is how leaders of black pro-union miners interacted with racist miners and
negotiated with the union apparatus. The letters of Richard L. Davis, a black spokesman in the 1880s and
1890s for many African-American miners in Ohio and three southern states, show he had a tough sell as
an intermediary with the white majority and white national leadership of the United Mine Workers. But
what a salesman he was.

In one letter he responds to a black miner who justifies going to coalfields near Seattle and breaking a
strike. Striking white miners and the Seattle labor movement as a whole responded with vicious, violent
racism to this scabbing, yet Davis’s commitment to interracial solidarity is unswerving.

He first asserts the need to fight for racial equality in the union and the coalfields, then turns the issue
around and asks the strikebreaking miner,

suppose that you were working in a place and the company brought in three or four hundred white men
to take your places, what would be the result? I fancy you would not speak as you do now. No, sir, you
would pick [up] your gun if you had one, and you would try to kill every white man that you saw,
whether he was your enemy or not.

And to the strikebreaker’s argument that “28 years ago he was a chattel slave; today he is a free
American citizen,” Davis writes:

How utterly false! None of us who toil for our daily bread are free . . . Does any negro think that an
operator thinks any more of him than he does of a white man? If you do, you are sadly mistaken, for I
remember several instances right here in this valley: whenever the colored men asked for that which
was something like right and just, the answer was, whenever you colored men want the same as the
whites do then we have no further need for you . . . it is not a white man’s country; it is partly ours as
well.

Davis then urges black strikers to defend their rights to be treated as equals, a right they forfeit when
they allow themselves to be used as replacement workers.

We hear reverberations of Davis’s ideas in battles that aren’t conventionally understood as labor
struggles — yet must be if we take social justice to be a labor principle as dear as not crossing a picket
line. “You are not better than us; you are not smarter than us; and you do not love these children more
than we do,” Jitu Brown said on Friday, announcing that he and the other Chicago activists involved in
the Dyett hunger strike, now in its third week, won’t be letting up.

The strikers are demanding the recognition of their rights as parents to be involved in deciding what
school their children attend. They are pushing back against “systemic disinvestment” in Chicago public
schools by the powerful elite that runs the city, including Mayor Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s
former chief of staff. The school district is dismantling neighborhood schools and the African-American
community with them.
Activist teachers in the Chicago Teachers Union have been supporting the Dyett 12, as they’re called, but
the hunger strikers deserve and need far more help from other unions — especially the Illinois state
teachers unions, the Illinois AFL-CIO, and the two national teachers unions.

A letter from both state teachers unions to the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus does not constitute the
solidarity Dyett hunger strikers should expect from labor. Given organized labor’s historic complicity in
racial segregation in Chicago and Illinois schools, it’s an embarrassingly token gesture.

I was recently asked by a union activist, “How many backs do we have to watch?” My answer: as many
as we want to watch ours. That’s the meaning of solidarity. Let’s live it this Labor Day by taking sides.

Black Lives Matter and hunger strikers in the #Fight4Dyett are giving US unions an opportunity to
reinvigorate themselves.
 ---Ext. Democracy Impact
The spread of democracy promotes peace and reduces the risk of conflict— strong
statistical evidence.
Lynn-Jones 98 — Sean M. Lynn-Jones, Research Associate in the International Security Program at the
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, Editor of International Security,
Series Editor of the Belfer Center Studies in International Security, 1998 (“Why the United States Should
Spread Democracy,” Harvard University Center for Science and International Affairs Discussion Paper 98-
07, March, Available Online at
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/2830/why_the_united_states_should_spread_democra
cy.html, Accessed 08-11-2013)

In addition to improving the lives of individual citizens in new democracies, the spread of democracy will
benefit the international system by reducing the likelihood of war . Democracies do not wage war on
other democracies. This absence—or near absence, depending on the definitions of "war" and
"democracy" used—has been called "one of the strongest nontrivial and nontautological
generalizations that can be made about international relations."51 One scholar argues that "the absence
of war between democracies comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international
relations."52 If the number of democracies in the international system continues to grow, the number of
potential conflicts that might escalate to war will diminish . Although wars between democracies and
nondemocracies would persist in the short run, in the long run an international system composed of
democracies would be a peaceful world . At the very least, adding to the number of democracies would
gradually enlarge the democratic "zone of peace."

1. The Evidence for the Democratic Peace

Many studies have found that there are virtually no historical cases of democracies going to war with
one another. In an important two-part article published in 1983, Michael Doyle compares all
international wars between 1816 and 1980 and a list of liberal states.53 Doyle concludes that
"constitutionally secure liberal states have yet to engage in war with one another."54 Subsequent
statistical studies have found that this absence of war between democracies is statistically significant
and is not the result of random chance .55 Other analyses have concluded that the influence of other
variables, including geographical proximity and wealth, do not detract from the significance of the
finding that democracies rarely, if ever, go to war with one another.56
 Unions Good LL
Public Sector Unions ensure high quality of government services, decrease economic
inequality, increase health and wellbeing, increase voter participation, and decreases
racial inequality.
Madland 19 “All Public Sector Workers Should Have the Right to Join a Union” by David Madland,
published June 25th, 2020. David Madland is a senior fellow and the senior adviser to the American
Worker Project at American Progress. He has written extensively about the economy and American
politics on a range of topics, including the middle class, economic inequality, retirement policy, labor
unions, and workplace standards such as the minimum wage.
https://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/economy/news/2019/06/25/174281/public-sector-
workers-right-join-union/

Unions benefit all Americans by raising worker pay and benefits, combating racial and economic
inequality, helping ensure that government services are of high quality, and giving workers a strong
voice in the nation’s democracy. Unions are particularly important for government workers, who
typically receive lower compensation than comparable private sector workers. Studies show that the
compensation gap between public sector workers and private sector workers is much smaller in states
that protect public sector bargaining, since unions raise wages and benefits. Public sector unions are
particularly important for women and African American workers, since they are overrepresented in
the public sector. When unions are strong, entire communities benefit. For example, research shows
that higher statewide unionization rates reduce rates of working poverty for both union and nonunion
households. Furthermore, areas with higher rates of union membership increase the likelihood of
children moving up the economic ladder. Without unions, the middle class suffers. Indeed, sociologists
Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld found that the decline of unions from 1973 to 2007 explains one-fifth
and one-third of rising wage inequality among women and men, respectively. Unions representing
government workers help improve the quality of public services and ensure that taxpayer dollars are
spent efficiently. For example, research finds that school districts with strong teachers unions are more
likely to dismiss underperforming teachers and retain high-quality teachers than districts with weaker
unions. After the state of Wisconsin enacted the highly controversial Act 10—a law that virtually
eliminated collective bargaining rights for most government employees, including K-12 teachers—
turnover rates among teachers increased, and the percentage of teachers with low levels of classroom
experience increased. Emerging research by E. Jason Baron finds that the Wisconsin law lowered
average performance on statewide exams, especially in already lower-performing schools. In Chicago,
the union representing garbage collectors saved the city $7 million by identifying more efficient truck
routes. In California and New York, unionized health care workers in the two largest municipal health
systems in the country worked with employers to institute quality and efficiency improvements that
resulted in increased patient satisfaction and shorter wait times; lower asthma readmission rates
among children; and improved workplace safety. Finally, by providing ordinary Americans a stronger
voice in the nation’s democracy, unions ensure that democracy works for all Americans, not just
corporate interests and the wealthy. Indeed, voter turnout is higher in states with strong unions, since
union members are more likely to vote than nonunion members and often play a role in getting out the
vote. Unions are one of the few interest groups in American society with the power to successfully
advocate for economic policies that help the working class and to serve as a counterbalance to the
corporate lobby. Unions have played an instrumental role in passing, protecting, and promoting the
Affordable Care Act and have been at the forefront of state and local efforts to raise the minimum wage.
Unionized workers have also used contract negotiations to make demands that benefit their broader
communities. In Chicago, for instance, unionized teachers obtained access to medical and mental health
services for students and expanded funding for after-school programs. Labor organizations in Oakland
helped launch a successful campaign against a predatory banking deal that was harming taxpayers. And
in Massachusetts, unionized child protective services workers partnered with the state to launch
systemwide reforms to address a history of neglect in the foster care system.

Unions good- wages, reduced inequality, support for social welfare programs, and
voter turnout
IBEW, 18 (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, “New Study Confirms: When Unions Thrive,
Every Worker Wins,” 9/4/18,
http://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/18Daily/1809/190904_NewStudyConfirms)

Unions are great for union members, of course. There are decades of research showing that, as a group,
union members make 15 to 20 percent more than people doing the same jobs without a union.

But the new study, published in the journal SocialForces, confirms that nonunion workers in regions and
industries where unions stayed strong not only have higher wages, but their income is more stable and
the income of top executives doesn’t rise quite so far into the stratosphere.

“In the U.S. … labor unions tend to reduce inequality and increase both pay and well-being,” wrote the
study’s author, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Prof. Tom Van Heuvelen. “Simply put, actions
taken by governments and businesses to reduce union power may have had broad negative
consequences.”

“This isn’t anything we didn’t know in our guts,” said International President Lonnie R. Stephenson. “But
our opponents haven’t been fighting us with common sense. They have been fighting us with the best
cooked numbers money can buy and foolish theories that somehow always point to more tax cuts for
the rich and fewer rights for working people. This is a pretty good bat to swat those pitches down.”

Van Heuvelen was responding to a persistent criticism of the idea that unions make things better for
workers than they otherwise would be.

The critics claim the so-called union wage benefit doesn’t say anything about collective bargaining’s
benefit. All unions do, they say, is sort through all workers and select only the most naturally productive
of them. Then once they have long-term union contracts, it is worth it for companies to give them on-
the-job training. That explains that 15 percent pay premium, according to the skeptics.

The union, the critics said, really didn’t offer much to members except this selecting-out process.

Van Heuvelen’s research not only rebuts the claim of the union critics, he found what he called “robust
evidence” that strong unions raise all boats.

“It is not just wages that are higher if you have a union card. There are all these spillover effects that
improve your own well-being but can also help other people who don’t have a union card,” he said.
“Union decline not only changes the wage attainment of union members, but it may broadly suppress
income inequality and volatility along all workers’ careers.”

And the impact of policies that weaken unions, he writes, are felt widely.

“Had the power of unions to protect the economic well-being of lower and middle-class workers not
declined over the past several decades, my results suggest that workers might have experienced
stronger and more stable wage growth across their career[s]” he wrote. “[R]esults highlight the
potential collateral damage of policies designed to undermine union strength and membership.”

Van Heuvelen took a novel approach in the paper, titled “Moral Economies or Hidden Talents?"

Historically, economists and sociologists have only been able to analyze wages through snapshots of the
entire workforce taken at a specific moment in time. Union members on such-and-such day in 1973
make this much; nonunion members in similar jobs at that same time make this much. Compare. Then
you take another snapshot at another time, compare. Gather enough snapshots over enough time, they
ended up with that 15-20 percent number.

But what you can’t see using that data set is what union membership means for individuals. If you could
follow an individual you might find that they made 15 to 20 percent more whether they were in a union
or not because of what Van Heuvelen, tongue planted firmly in cheek, calls ‘hidden talent.’

So, using data that followed thousands of individual workers’ wages recorded over decades, Van
Heuvelen found that ‘hidden talent’ explains away some of the union wage benefit, but nowhere close
to all of it.

Union members have, on average, 3 to 12 percent higher wage growth over a career, irrespective of
how naturally gifted they may have been. And since wages form only part of total compensation –
especially for union workers who have, on average, more generous health, vacation, sick leave and
retirement benefits— total compensation growth rates may be even higher.

And by looking at individuals over a lifetime, Van Heuvelen could show that nonunion workers saw 3 to
7 percent higher growth in wages when working in regions and industries where unions weakened the
least.

Determining precisely how unions raise nonmembers’ wages is, Van Heuvelen said, one of the next
steps for researchers like himself trying to find out why economic inequality has grown so wildly in the
past few decades.

There is evidence for a fair few straightforward economic mechanisms including pulling down top
managerial salaries, increasing labor’s share of total corporate income, raising wages of nonmembers in
similar jobs as firms try to keep their workforce from organizing, strengthening labor’s bargaining
position generally and boosting compensation expectations.

But Van Heuvelen says he found evidence supporting another theory about how unions make all
workers better off. The theory is that unions give critical power and support for what academics call the
moral economy: broadly shared norms of fairness institutionalized in market rules and customs.

They are the buffer against an unleashed free market that would treat people as no different from a pile
of money or a machine.
One straightforward example is that unions historically have supported programs that make the
economy more reliable for all people, not just members, including food stamps, minimum wage
increases, universal healthcare and Medicare.

Unions also have a long history of getting left-leaning, low-frequency voters to the polls. This supports
politicians who support unions and more egalitarian economic policies.

And simply by existing, unions make sure to keep equality at the center of our national political and
moral conversation. When the national conversation is seduced by communist or proto-fascistic ideals
like “blood and soil” and CEO-take-all tax policies, no one else speaks for the ideals of fairness and
equality like labor unions do.

This study confirms what academics have been finding around the world: “denser unionization, broader
union coverage, greater centralization, and more generous labor rights reduce inequality, lower poverty
and pull down top-end managers’ pay.”

Clearly the message is getting out. In a Gallup poll this month, 62 percent of Americans approve of labor
unions, which is consistent with the 61 percent who approved last year and up from 56 percent in 2016.

It’s the highest number in almost 15 years.

That is something everyone can celebrate this Labor Day.

 Gender and Race Discrim
Unions reduce racial and gender discrimination and wage inequality in the workplace
Bivens et al, 17 (Josh, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), “How today’s unions
help working people,” 8/24/17, Economic Policy Institute, https://www.epi.org/publication/how-todays-
unions-help-working-people-giving-workers-the-power-to-improve-their-jobs-and-unrig-the-economy/)

Unions help raise wages for women and lessen racial wage gaps

Unions help raise the wages of women and black and Hispanic workers—whose wages have historically
lagged behind those of white men—by establishing pay “transparency” (workers know what other
workers are making), correcting salary discrepancies, establishing clearer terms for internal processes
such as raises and promotions, and helping workers who have been discriminated against achieve
equity.

Unions also narrow the racial wage gaps. Black workers, for example, are more likely than white workers
to be in a union and are more likely to be low- and middle-wage workers, who get a bigger pay boost for
being in a union than do higher-wage workers. This effect is an important tool in closing the black–white
wage gap, which has actually grown somewhat since 1979, largely due to growth in the gap since 2000—
while wages since 2000 have stagnated for both black and white workers, the decline in wage growth
has been larger for black workers.29 Today, black workers are, on average, paid 85 cents for every dollar
paid to white workers of the same gender and with similar education, experience, and location of
residence.30

Unions help raise women’s pay. Hourly wages for women represented by unions are 9.2 percent higher
on average than for nonunionized women with comparable characteristics. 31

Unions raise wages in the female-dominated service occupations. Union-represented workers in service
occupations (which include food service and janitorial services) make 87.0 percent more in total
compensation and 56.1 percent more in wages than their nonunion counterparts.32

Unions help close wage gaps for black and Hispanic workers. Black and Hispanic workers get a larger
boost from unionization than their white counterparts. Black workers, both male and female, are more
likely than white workers to be covered by collective bargaining and the wage boost they get from being
covered by collective bargaining is above average. The result is that collective bargaining lifts wages of
black workers closer to those of their white counterparts. Hispanic workers have slightly lower union
coverage than white workers but have much higher union wage advantages: thus wage gaps between
Hispanic workers and their white counterparts are also smaller because of collective bargaining.33

Unionized black workers earn even more in some sectors. Unionized black construction workers in New
York City earn 36.1 percent more than nonunion black construction workers in New York City.34

These data showing that unions raise wages for all workers—and especially for women and black and
Hispanic workers—do not erase the problematic historical episodes of sexism and racism practiced by
unions. Unions are an American institution, and like nearly every other American institution their past
includes clear instances of gender and racial discrimination. But there has been significant progress in
increasing the shares of women represented by unions and in union leadership. There has also been
significant progress in the racial integration of unions and in ensuring that nonwhite workers have
equitable access to apprenticeships, as illustrated by the progress in New York City construction
unions.35 AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka recently claimed, with justification, that “the labor
movement is the most integrated institution in America.”36 Labor leaders are calling for broad and
sustained attention to addressing racism and sexism where they continue to violate labor’s democratic
ideals.37
 Turns Policing
The success of reform rides on police union cooperation
Marice Richter 20, veteran news reporter and editor, 6/17/20, “Will Texas’ Police Unions Help or
Hinder the Reform Process?”, https://www.reformaustin.org/public-safety/will-texas-police-unions-
help-or-hurt-the-reform-process/
Could the images caught on camera of George Floyd dying under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, Javier Ambler dying while being tased
by Williamson County deputies, Rayshard Brooks being shot in the back by Atlanta police and Black Lives Matter protestors being tear-gassed
and shot with rubber pellets be the reckoning that leads to meaningful criminal justice reform? As Reform Austin previously reported, Texas
lawmakers are already compiling lists of reforms they hope to push through the Legislature next year.
Whether they succeed or fail could hinge on how much Texas’ powerful and deep-pocketed police unions do to
help or hinder the process. Following Floyd’s death, Minneapolis’ mayor and police chief hurled blame
at the city’s police union for blocking criminal justice reform. In Texas, some of the largest police unions responded to
Floyd’s death with statements condemning police misconduct but also lashed out at critics for blaming unions for the latest spate of brutality
and violence. “It’s extremely disturbing, it’s abhorrent what the officer did,” Joe Gamaldi, president of the Houston Police Officers’ Union and
vice president of the national Fraternal Order of Police said of Floyd’s death. Yet, Gamaldi later told Fox News, “We’re being demonized.” He
then criticized police chiefs for “blaming police unions for all the ills of law enforcement.” The Texas Municipal Police Association, representing
more than 29,500 officers across the state, also denounced the actions of Minneapolis officers involved in Floyd’s death. “There is no
justification for police brutality,” the association stated. “We strongly condemn the actions of the officer who took the life of George Floyd, as
well as the inaction of his peers, and we agree that justice must be served.” “We also acknowledge a crisis of public trust in law enforcement —
a trust we must carefully and deliberately work to rebuild in good faith.” Yet the association indicated that it would participate in discussions
about reforms but would not support rules that would threaten the safety of officers doing their jobs. “Any changes in law enforcement
criminal justice reform say
protocols must be based on fact, not emotion, false narratives or mistruths,” TMPA stated. Advocates for
efforts have been hobbled by the political power of police unions to protect their members and the
intertwined working relationship between police and prosecutors, which makes it difficult to hold officers
accountable. Although some efforts at reform have been successful, police unions have had a role in
quashing strict restrictions on policing. A high-profile example was the Texas Legislature’s adoption of the Sandra Bland Act,
which aimed to require police training on racial profiling and bias and would have limited arrests for minor offenses that would have been
punishable by only a fine. The legislation was triggered by the 2015 death of Bland, a black woman who died of an apparent suicide in the
Waller County Jail three days after being arrested during a traffic stop. Video footage from the state trooper’s dashboard camera contradicted
the officer’s claim that she assaulted him. Instead, it showed he dragged her out of her car and used a Taser on her when she refused to put out
a cigarette. The adopted law requires investigations of jail deaths and provisions for directing inmates with mental health or substance abuse
issues into treatment. With provisions addressing police conduct stripped away, the two lawmakers who introduced the legislation will push for
adding them back into the 2017 law along with reforms such as banning chokeholds that were triggered by Floyd’s death. This go round, police
unions may have a harder time blocking policies and legislation than they have in the past. “I fully
expect them to push back; it’s
central to their mission,” said Dr. Howard Henderson, founding director of the Center for Justice Research and professor of justice
administration in the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University. This time, their pushback will be
without an ability to protect bad officers. “Police unions have found out that they don’t reserve the privilege of overlooking rogue police
officers,” Henderson said. “The thin blue line has been divided. Policing is, for now, denouncing police misconduct.” Henderson said most
critical reforms include removing immunity in excessive and deadly use of force cases. “Eighty-two percent of officers report having witnessed a
fellow officer engage in misconduct, yet their likelihood of being held accountable remains dismal,” he said. “The phone videos have shown us
the body cameras by themselves are not the answer. “There is a need for comprehensive, systematic criminal justice reform,” Henderson said.
Police union officials point to their support of reforms that increase training on de-escalation tactics,
prevent use of force and eliminate racial bias in policing. “Many, if not most, departments have already adopted policies
addressing ‘chokeholds’ along the lines of what President (Donald) Trump said in his executive order,” said Kevin Lawrence, president of TMPA.
“We believe those are good policies. “Bias training and de-escalation tactics have been part of our training regimens for many years, and we
continue to adapt and improve those trainings.” Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas, which bills itself as the
largest police officers’ union in Texas, supports additional reforms with some caveats. “We are supportive of a reform on use
of force guidelines as long as they are statewide and uniform,” said CLEAT Executive Director Charley Wilkison. “CLEAT supported the ban on
racial profiling and supports strengthening the law as long as it considers that officers work where they are assigned. They do not have a choice.
“Any restructuring of the statute should not be designed to be punitive toward officers who are assigned to high-crime areas,” Wilkison said.
CLEAT would also support lowering traffic fines and a statewide system that addresses late fees to eliminate arrests and incarceration of those
unable to pay, he said. Reform Austin reached out to the Houston Police Officers Union and the Dallas Police Association for comment for this
story, but neither responded.

Policy backlash against reform by purposely ignoring 911 calls, not implementing
reforms, and by pressuring politicians to decrease accountability in other ways
Scheiber et. al, 6/5 “How Police Unions Became Such Powerful Opponents to Reform Efforts.” By Noam Scheiber,
Farah Stockman and J. David Goodman published June 5th, 2020. Noam Scheiber is a Chicago-based reporter who covers
workers and the workplace. Before coming to the New York Times, he spent nearly 15 years at The New Republic magazine,
where he covered economic policy and three presidential campaigns. J. David Goodman covers lobbying, fund-raising and the
influence of money in politics. A former reporter in City Hall and at police headquarters in New York, he has written about
government, politics and criminal justice for The Times since 2012. Farah Nisa Stockman is an American journalist, who has
worked for The Boston Globe and is currently employed by The New York Times. In 2016, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for
Commentary. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/police-unions-minneapolis-kroll.html

In St. Louis, when Kim Gardner was elected the top prosecutor four years ago, she set out to rein in the
city’s high rate of police violence. But after she proposed a unit within the prosecutor’s office that would independently investigate
misconduct, she ran into the powerful local police union. The union pressured lawmakers to set aside the proposal,
which many supported but then never brought to a vote. Around the same time, a lawyer for the union
waged a legal fight to limit the ability of the prosecutor’s office to investigate police misconduct. The
following year, a leader of the union said Ms. Gardner should be removed “by force or by choice.” Thanks for reading The Times. Subscribe to
The Times Politicians tempted to cross police unions have long feared being labeled soft on crime by the unions, or more serious consequences.
When Steve Fletcher, a Minneapolis city councilman and frequent Police Department critic, sought to
divert money away from hiring officers and toward a newly created office of violence prevention, he
said, the police stopped responding as quickly to 911 calls placed by his constituents. “It operates a little
bit like a protection racket,” Mr. Fletcher said of the union. A spokesman for the Minneapolis Police Department said he
was unable to comment. A few days after prosecutors in Minneapolis charged an officer with murder in the
death of George Floyd, the president of the city’s police union denounced political leaders, accusing
them of selling out his members and firing four officers without due process. “It is despicable behavior,”
the union president, Lt. Bob Kroll, wrote in a letter to union members obtained by a local reporter. He also
referred to protesters as a “terrorist movement.” Mr. Kroll, who is himself the subject of at least 29 complaints, has also chided the Obama
administration for its “oppression of police,” and praised President Trump as someone who “put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of us.”
DEFUNDING POLICE DEPARTMENTS Here are some answers to questions about defunding police departments. In
other instances, unions have not resisted reforms outright, but have made them difficult to put in place.
Federal intervention is often one of the few reliable ways of reforming police departments. But in
Cleveland, the union helped slow the adoption of reforms mandated by a federal consent decree,
according to Jonathan Smith, a former U.S. Justice Department official who oversaw the government’s
investigation of policing practices there. Mr. Smith said union officials had signaled to rank-and-file
officers that the changes should not be taken seriously, such as a requirement that they report and
investigate instances in which they pointed a gun. “I heard this in lots of departments,” Mr. Smith said. “‘Wait it out. Do the
minimum you have to do.’” He said he believed that the reforms have since taken hold. Steve Loomis, the Cleveland police union
president at the time of the consent decree, said he and his colleagues saw some of the mandated rules
as counterproductive. “Every time a kid points a gun, he has to do a use-of-force investigation,” Mr.
Loomis said of his younger colleagues. “Now guys aren’t pointing their guns when they should be
pointing their guns.” Robert Bruno, a professor of labor relations at the University of Illinois, posited that many police officers see
themselves as authority figures who equate compromise with weakness. Other experts said it was rational for police unions, which are often
regarded with suspicion by others in the labor movement and see themselves as distinct from it, to protect their members so relentlessly. “A
major role for police unions is basically as an insurance policy,” said Dale Belman, a labor relations professor at Michigan State University who
has consulted for police unions. “The feeling of a lot of officers is that it’s very easy to sacrifice them. Something
goes wrong and boom.” This has only become more true in an era of ubiquitous cellphone cameras and
social media. And the feeling of being under siege has only strengthened demands from union members
that they be protected.
 Nurses Unions
a key concern in nursing is staffing – unions are key to push better staffing ratios that
increase patient care quality
Amy Neff Roth 16, reporter for observer dispatch, 9/4/16, “Do nurses unions improve the quality of
care?”, https://www.uticaod.com/news/20160904/do-nurses-unions-improve-quality-of-care

St. Elizabeth Medical Center nurse Tosha Elseth said she thinks the nurses’ new contract agreement will keep her patients
safer. “My unit isn’t typically short-staffed on a regular basis, but when it is, it’s really, really seriously short-staffed,” she said. “I work in
cardiothoracic ICU so things can go sour quite quickly.” In the past, nurses could only document the problem, Elseth said. But a new pool of
floating nurses in the contract, which was ratified last week, will bring immediate help, she said. Elseth was skeptical of nurses unions when
moving to this area from the Midwest six years ago, but now she’s a believer. “I can tell that it makes a difference. It has given me a renewed
joy in my own job, to be a part of that,” she said. Nurses unions aren’t quite the same as other types of collective
bargaining units, said Ariel Avgar, an assistant professor specializing in employment relations in the health care industry at Cornell
University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. There’s a third stakeholder in health care who is very much
affected by what happens at the bargaining table – the patient. Staffing has become a key issue in
nurses contract negotiations around the country, including those just resolved with the New York State Nurses Association at
St. Elizabeth, Samaritan Medical Center in Watertown and Nathan Littauer Hospital in Gloversville. It’s also been an issue in ongoing contract
negotiations with two Buffalo-area health systems, said Debora M. Hayes, an area director for the Communications Workers of America in
upstate New York, which represents Faxton St. Luke’s Healthcare’s nurses. “ The
big issue for us in both health systems has
been staffing,” Hayes said. “Nurses really are concerned about patient care delivery and the quality of care
that’s delivered. Staffing has ranked as high on our bargaining surveys as wages and higher than all other
benefits like retirement and paid time off and health insurance. It just is that important to people.” Nurses also
have lobbied hard for laws setting minimum staffing ratios in hospitals, although only California has passed minimum
staffing legislation. “Unions have been especially successful in improving staffing levels, which is a classic
example of a way to address both working conditions and patient care with the same kind of action ,”
Avgar said.
 AT: Police Union Bad
Even though police unions have a bad rep, they are changing
Shackford, 20 (Scott, “Even Police Unions Trash the Actions of the Cop Who Killed George Floyd,”
Reason, 5/29/2, https://reason.com/2020/05/29/even-police-unions-trash-the-actions-of-the-cop-who-
killed-george-floyd/)

After New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer Daniel Pantaleo was videotaped confronting and
choking Eric Garner to death in 2014, public outrage over what had happened was fueled in part by
defiant police unions in the city who refused to consider the possibility that Pantaleo's conduct was
unacceptable and unnecessary.

Even after Panatleo's eventual termination—which only happened five years later—organizations like
the Police Benevolent Association took Pantaleo's side, calling for work slowdowns (which backfired as
crime continued to decline in New York City without their help). The unions generally acted like both
mayor and police commissioner had betrayed the police by holding an officer responsible for killing
somebody under circumstances in which it was completely unnecessary to protect public safety.

This has long been typical police union behavior, which makes some of the union responses to the death
of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Monday surprising. Police unions are coming forward not to defend
Derek Chauvin, the police officer who pressed his knee on Floyd's neck for nearly eight minutes, but to
agree that Chauvin's behavior was inappropriate and unacceptable.

Last night, police officer associations for San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland, California, put out a joint
statement about Floyd's death:

"What we saw in the video was inconsistent and contrary to everything we have been taught, not just as
an academy recruit or a police officer, but as human beings. Reverence for life in every incident a police
officer encounters must be the floor and not the ceiling. … We are equally disturbed by not seeing any of
the other officers on scene intervene to prevent this tragedy."

The problem isn’t police unions- their negative qualities are only a manifestation of
the improper tools, assignments, and other systemic biases
Spross, 16 (Jeff, economic and business correspondent, “In defense of police unions,” The Week,
7/14/16, https://theweek.com/articles/635690/defense-police-unions)

While many conservatives love police, and many liberals love unions, you won't find many people on
either end of the political spectrum who proclaim their love for police unions.

On the left, police unions are often seen as the rotten apples in the labor movement — capitalism's
enforcers of class and racial oppression. And heterodoxconservatives often argue that police unions are
just as bad as other public-sector unions, defending sclerosis and incompetent workers at great taxpayer
expense and to the detriment of reform and the greater social good.

But this odd convergence of the hard left and the reformist right might be a hint that they've just
stumbled into the same blind spot.
Cops are workers, too. They are workers put in an almost impossible position. And they need a union to
stand up for them.

Go down the standard list of proposed police reforms — more accountability for bad cops, body
cameras, demilitarization, more federal monitoring, civilian oversight, transparency, and so on. They're
all worthy, but what they all have in common is getting police to behave better within the role of
"police" as we already conceive of it; namely, as the state's enforcers of law and order, whose primary
tools are the threat of violence and the ability to throw people into cages.

What these reforms don't deal with is the possibility that our society has rendered this role an
impossible one to pull off in any sort of successful, functional, or healthy manner.

Cops must deal with everything from gang violence to drug addiction to mental illness to domestic
abuse to helping single parents to broken taillights and speeding cars. They respond so often with
violence and incarceration because those are the tools we train them to use. They are no more immune
to racism than any other human institution in American society. And of course the well-being of cops
themselves often resembles what you'd find in veterans from a war zone.

Meanwhile, America's long history of racism has left many black American communities deeply
damaged. And poverty and crime go hand in hand. So when cops are shoved into the role of what is
often privileged white society's sole institutional interaction with black Americans' world, and left with
nothing but violence and incarceration as their tools, of course racism still permeates the way they
operate.

Our society has pulled out of supplying the resources, the institutions, and the personnel that could
support cops in handling this societal breakdown. "We're asking cops to do too much in this
country," said an exhausted David Brown, Dallas' police chief, in the aftermath of the killing of five cops
at a protest march. "Policing was never meant to solve all of those problems."

Can anyone be surprised when police unions bristle and revolt at reforms aimed at drawing even greater
virtue out of cops in the course of performing very difficult tasks? Cops wield an immense amount of
power in our society. But that abstract privilege does not change the lived experience of being a cop,
which is what the police and the unions that represent them draw upon when deciding how to defend
themselves. We can't just keep trying to make the police better-armed saints in the very places where
the injustices of U.S. society collide the hardest. Nor can we assume that combating racism is merely a
matter of enlightening individual cops or their departmental culture.

There are plenty of necessary reforms that police unions will oppose. But other reforms are possible,
too: There's nonviolent neighborhood mediation, forms of restorative justice, and of course building our
society's ability to help and aid the mentally ill, not just ignore them or lock them up. Support for
decriminalization is not unheard of among cops, as well. The unions could be amenable to reforms that
relieve them of burdens, and that lessen the contradiction that it's extremely easy to both under- and
over-police poor minority communities at the same time.

And remember: The purpose of any union is ultimately to collectively agitate for the interests of the
specific workers they represent, precisely because no one else will do it. Those interests are not just
purely material, but are also a matter of how those workers understand their place in the American
social fabric. In the absence of that agitation, there is a power imbalance at the bargaining table of
employment. And that is a problem, because at the end of the day, cops are workers, too.

If some workers seem to be a pernicious force in society when they organize to make their fears and
concerns and interests heard, we should stop to ask ourselves if that says something about the nature of
the labor we ask those workers to do. That's as true for cops as it is for anyone.

Police Unions are key to Police Officer rights – if police unions are diminished in power
it wrecks police officer ability to fight crime
Lynch 6/21/20, (Patrick J. Lynch, 6-21-2020, accessed on 7-10-2020, Nycpba, "Police unions protect
us all", http://nycpba.org/news-items/daily-news/2020/police-unions-protect-us-all/#:~:text=Police
%20unions%20have%20the%20same,have%20involved%20pay%20and%20benefits.) ///Ivanov

Police unions have the same basic role as every other union: We protect police officers’ rights as workers,
their rights to fair pay and fair treatment under the law. For the last two decades, our union’s most intensive fights have involved
pay and benefits. New York City police officers remain dramatically underpaid — by 30% or more in many cases — in comparison to
other police officers in our area and in other big cities around the country. Since 2009, we have been saddled with an inferior pension
plan compared to other police officers around the state. Many of the politicians now attacking have shown support for
improved police officer pay and benefits in the past. But during the current crisis, not one of them has proposed a serious look at the
connection between our pay and benefits and recruitment, hiring and retention, or the way that all those factors affect the NYPD’s performance. We would
welcome such a conversation. Instead, the political class has been exclusively focused on the other part of our responsibilities: the protection of police
officers’ rights to fair treatment and due process. The myths and misconceptions in this area abound. For example, a common anti-
union talking point is that “police unions have traditionally used their bargaining agreements to create obstacles to disciplining officers.” In New York State, at least,
that’s false. Policeunions are prohibited from negotiating disciplinary issues . The police commissioner — and, by extension,
the mayor who appointed him — have full authority over discipline. Police unions – and all other unions – can and do press for legislation
that will protect[s] and advance[s] our members’ rights. But those efforts are also the subject of outlandish caricature. Breathless
reports of the “enormous sway” and “hefty resources” that the PBA and other police unions deploy in lobbying and political efforts miss the broader context of
labor and other advocacy in our state. The state lobbying watchdogs’ most recent annual report, for example, shows the city’s United Federation of Teachers, the
New York State Nurses Association and New York State United Teachers unions among the state’s top lobbying spenders, with payouts ranging from $1.3 million to
$1.6 million. That same year, the PBA spent just over $200,000 on lobbying — the vast majority of it in our fight to obtain the same pension benefits as every other
police officer and firefighter in New York State. It’s also a myth that police unions blindly defend every police officer accused of a crime. Our union has said —
repeatedly, unequivocally and with the unanimous support of the police officers we represent — that George Floyd was murdered and the police officer who
murdered him should be behind bars. At home, we can and do decline to defend our own members accused of crimes with no connection to their police duties. A
PBA member currently accused of fatal child abuse has received no representation or support from the PBA, nor has another member accused of shooting an
unarmed civilian during a drunken off-duty brawl. But when members are accused of misconduct or a crime in the performance of their duties, we must work within
laws that require all unions to provide fair representation to all members, even and especially in difficult, tragic cases. Once again, police unions are not the outlier
here: The teachers union provides representation for members “facing criminal charges as a result of disciplinary actions taken against a pupil while the member
was doing his or her job.” The transit workers union defends members who are charged in fatal on-duty accidents, and even waged a PR campaign against a
proposed change to the right-of-way laws that would have unfairly criminalized bus drivers who were attempting to do their job. Apart from activists’ ludicrous
claim that transit workers were “demand[ing] to be allowed to kill people,” these other unions’ defense of their members never receive the kind of attention and
outrage that police unions do. Why? Many in the police reform movement would say, with reason, that the difference comes from police officers’ unique role in our
society. That difference is an undeniable fact: as police officers, we have a different job than bus drivers or nurses or teachers, with
different responsibilities and powers. But those differences are confined to the job we do, not the rights we are
guaranteed as employees or citizens. As Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote some 50 years ago: “Policemen, like teachers
and lawyers, are not relegated to a watered-down version of constitutional rights.” Those who are now calling to strip
police officers of their rights and protections — especially our right to form a union and bargain over the terms and conditions of our employment — should
pause and reflect on Douglas’ words. They embody two fundamental truths that have been absent from the current debate. The first truth: Our
constitutional promise of equal rights for all cannot be realized by diminishing the rights of some. We
cannot strengthen constitutional protections in one area by weakening them elsewhere. Police officers and
police unions have never asked for any rights in the criminal realm that are not available to all
Americans. We recognize that there are problems in the criminal justice system — misguided laws, bad law enforcement strategies,
dysfunctional courts — that are depriving too many Americans of their rights. None of those issues can[‘t] be fixed by abridging the rights of
accused police officers. In the disciplinary realm, too, our only demand has been for the due process rights afforded to other civil servants. Another
example: During the fight over repeal of Civil Rights Law Section 50-a, the law that protected police officers’ personnel records, none of the repeal proponents made
mention of Education Law 3020-a, which expunges unsubstantiated accusations of misconduct from teachers’ records. Now 50-a is gone and 3020-a and analogous
provisions remain, and police officers are left with fewer rights than other city employees. Which raises the second core truth in Douglas’ statement: Police officers’
rights are not free-standing. They are intimately linked to the rights of all other civil servants — every single woman and man who draws a taxpayer-funded salary
and carries out the public’s business. At this moment, public sector union solidarity is critical. Distrust in government and its agents is at an all-time high. A three-
month public health lockdown has only made it worse. Police officers, as one of the most visible faces of government, are now bearing the brunt of a popular
backlash that has been brewing for some time. Scott Walker and his allies are not going to waste this crisis. They know that divide-and-conquer is the key to ending
unions and the rights they protect. Union members who are not listening to and understanding our arguments now — not on every policing question, but on the
basic question of our collective bargaining rights — will soon find Douglas’ rule turned upside down. Other public employees will all be “like police officers,” by
virtue of having no rights at all.
 AT: Unions Provide No Safety
Unions key to Worker Safety – Union Safety Efforts Spill Over to Non-Unionized
workers
EHS 19, (EHS Insight Staff, 7-8-2019, accessed on 6-27-2020, Ehsinsight, "Unions and Safety for
Workers", https://www.ehsinsight.com/blog/unions-and-safety-for-workers) ///Ivanov

Your workers deserve safe and fair working conditions. But before labor unions, they didn’t have much power to negotiate for such conditions.
Today, labor unions have huge sway over workplace safety standards, for unionized and non-unionized workers alike. And if your company
wants to thrive, you have to be willing to come to the negotiating table. Here’s why unions have so much power to create safer workplaces, and
why your company should work with labor unions to increase safety for your workers. First, let’s address the basic question: do
unions actually make workplaces safer? According to several studies, the answer is yes. A study of
right-to-work laws published in the BMJ Occupational & Environmental Medicine journal found that a 1% decrease in
unionization resulted in a 5% increase in occupational fatalities . In Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska, all states with
right-to-work laws, there was a notable increase in workplace deaths due to falls, machine hazards, and
struck-by hazards. And in construction, often regarded as one of the most dangerous industries in the country, a survey showed
that construction firms with union workers were far more likely to engage in safety practices than those
with non-union workers. There are many theories as to why unions help promote workplace safety. One likely explanation is worker
protection. Under the wing of labor unions, workers are free to speak up about safety hazards without fear
of retaliation. And because unions can put pressure on employers to fix safety problems, employers are
incentivized to fix and prevent problems – or face significant productivity losses. One of the biggest
advantages unions have is the power of collective bargaining. An individual worker can often feel that they don’t have a
voice, or that if they speak up alone, they won’t have much power to affect change. By joining a union, workers agree to
bargain for their rights as a collective entity. This gives them far greater leverage to bargain for things like
better safety conditions, improved wages, and reasonable work hours. The fact that they cover an entire group forces
employers to come to the table. Of course, the work of a labor union doesn’t end with reaching a collective bargaining agreement. Once an
agreement is reached, union representatives work with employees and management to ensure that the
terms of the agreement are honored on both sides. Unions can influence the safety of all workers because
of two things: Companies need workers. But workers have the right to a safe and fair working environment. Unions leverage
this by increasing the demand for union laborers, which in turn forces companies to negotiate with them to
access union workers. This, in turn, sets the standard for non-union workers. A specific workplace may not be
unionized, but an industry is – and that means that the workplace must comply with industry
standards. At the end of the day, labor unions and companies have related goals. Companies want to create a great product or service for
their customers. Unions want to give workers the best possible working conditions to thrive in their work environments. By working together,
you can ensure worker safety and productivity in equal measure.

Unions improve the health and safety practices of workplaces

Bivens et al, 17 (Josh, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), “How today’s unions
help working people,” 8/24/17, Economic Policy Institute, https://www.epi.org/publication/how-todays-
unions-help-working-people-giving-workers-the-power-to-improve-their-jobs-and-unrig-the-economy/)

More than 4,800 workers are killed on the job every year. An estimated 50,000 to 60,000 more die of
occupational diseases each year, and the estimated number of work-related injuries and illnesses
exceeds 7 million.38 Unions have always championed worker safety by investing in programs to educate
workers about on-the-job hazards and working with employers to reduce worker injuries and the time
lost due to injury.39 In unionized workplaces, workers generally have a right to involve a union
representative in injury and fatality investigations, which gives workers a voice in their own safety. And
researchers have suggested that unions create safer workplaces; because union workers are protected
by their union from repercussions for reporting safety issues, they are more likely to report not only
injuries but near misses. This increased reporting can lead to a reduction in work hazards.40The union
contribution to safety is particularly important because government health and safety regulations are
being weakened.41

Union construction sites are safer for workers. In 2014, OSHA inspected New York state construction
sites and found twice as many health and safety violations at nonunion construction sites as at union
construction sites.42 Another study, of Missouri construction sites, found higher levels of OSHA
violations among nonunion St. Louis residential construction job sites than at unionized St. Louis
residential job sites.43

Mine workers in union mines are less likely to be severely injured or die on the job. Unionization is
associated with a substantial and statistically significant drop in traumatic injuries and in fatalities in
underground bituminous coal mines from 1993 to 2010.44

Unions ensure that employers are held accountable. Tragedies arise when employers cannot be held
accountable. Miners in the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia tried and failed to a join a union
three times, according to In These Times. Each time, at least 65 percent of the miners signed cards
saying they wanted to be members of a union. And each time, these workers were repeatedly
intimidated by management at Massey Energy, which owns the mine: Massey CEO Don Blankenship
delayed the election process for months while he threatened to close the mine if the workers voted for
a union—and the workers ended up voting against joining a union to save their jobs.45 On April 5, 2010,
an explosion collapsed the mine’s roof, killing 29 miners and injuring two. In the aftermath, reports
surfaced that the nonunion mine had a record of safety violations and that coal miners who worked in
the mine knew about the dangerous working conditions. Blankenship was found guilty on a charge of
conspiracy to willfully violate mine health and safety standards and was sentenced to a year in prison.46

Here are some specific ways unions have improved safety in the workplace by representing workers’
concerns in public and testifying before Congress and state legislatures:

Nurses win violence prevention standards. In the past decade or so, the rate of reported violence
against health care workers (who make up 9 percent of the nation’s workforce) has more than doubled.
The increase stems from cuts in state funds for mental health services and hospital budget cutbacks
thinning the ranks of nurses and security guards. National Nurses United (NNU), which represents more
than 160,000 nurses across the country, has fought for and won workplace violence prevention
standards in California, Minnesota, and Massachusetts. NNU is now petitioning the federal Occupational
Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for a formal workplace violence prevention standard that
would apply nationwide.47

Laborers, autoworkers, and others secure protections for workers from deadly silica dust. Roughly 2.3
million workers are exposed to silica dust, which causes silicosis (an incurable and often deadly lung
disease), lung cancer, other respiratory diseases, and kidney disease. Silica dust is produced by grinding
stone or masonry in mines or on construction sites. Although the hazards of silica dust have been known
for at least a century, existing regulations limiting exposure were outdated and were not keeping up
with worker exposure to silica in new industries such as stone countertop fabrication and hydraulic
fracturing. A broad section of the labor movement—including the United Automobile Workers and the
Laborers’ International Union of North America—helped persuade OSHA to issue a new rule that
reduces workers’ exposure to silica.48

Firefighters get relief from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Firefighters who develop PTSD after
witnessing repeated trauma on the job don’t always have recourse if the disorder means they cannot
work while they seek treatment. When independent studies showed that post-traumatic stress rates are
on the rise for Texas firefighters, the Texas State Association of Fire Fighters (TSAFF) launched an
education campaign for state lawmakers leading to legislation to improve workers’ compensation
coverage for Texas first responders diagnosed with line-of-duty-related PTSD. The legislation (HB 1983)
was signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott on June 1, 2017.49

Collective bargaining is a human right and key to work conditions

Bivens et al, 17 (Josh, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), “How today’s unions
help working people,” 8/24/17, Economic Policy Institute, https://www.epi.org/publication/how-todays-
unions-help-working-people-giving-workers-the-power-to-improve-their-jobs-and-unrig-the-economy/)
The freedom of workers to join together in unions and negotiate with employers (in a process known as
collective bargaining) is widely recognized as a fundamental human right across the globe. In the United
States, this right is protected by the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law and is supported by a majority of
Americans.1
Over 16 million working women and men in the United States are exercising this right—these 16 million workers are represented by unions. Overall, more than one in nine U.S. workers are represented by unions. This representation makes organized labor one of the largest institutions in America.2

By providing data on union coverage, activities, and impacts, this report helps explain how unions fit into the economy today; how they affect workers, communities, occupations and industries, and the country at large; and why collective bargaining is essential for a fair and prosperous economy and a vibrant democracy. It also describes how decades of anti-union campaigns and
policies have made it much harder for working people to use their collective voice to sustain their standard of living.

‘Collective bargaining’ is how working people gain a voice at work and the power to shape their working lives

Almost everyone has at one point felt unheard or powerless as an employee. Joining a union simply
means that you and your colleagues have a say because you negotiate important elements of
employment conditions together. That could mean securing wage increases, better access to health
care, workplace safety enhancements, and more reasonable and predictable hours. Through collective
bargaining negotiations, the union also works with management to develop a process for settling
disputes that employees and their managers are unable to settle individually.
Aff
UQ
 Unions Weak
Unions are weak – collective bargaining is failing and membership is at an all time low
CHRIS MAISANO 20, 1/23/20, “Labor Union Membership Has Just Hit an All-Time Low. We Need to
Reverse This Trend.”, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/01/labor-union-membership-density-bls-2019

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has just released its 2019 union membership and collective bargaining
coverage report. And the news isn’t great. Unfortunately, the uptick in strike action that swept the country in 2018 and
2019 is not translating into a recovery of union organization, at least not yet. The general trend continues to
be downward in both the public and private sectors, though it looks like the Janus v. AFSCME decision, which imposed an
open-shop regime on the entire public sector nationwide, hasn’t had the catastrophic impact on public sector density that many feared it
would. Overall union density now stands at 10.3%, private sector density at 6.2%, and public sector density
at 33.6%. Another year, another round of media reports on how union membership has fallen to all-time lows. Union
density and formal collective bargaining rights aren’t everything. Education workers in particular have used strike action
to win big victories in low-density states where public employees lack the right to bargain collectively. But these are some of the
clearest indicators of working-class power we have, and their steady decline does not bode well for either
popular living standards or the health of political democracy.

Unions have been steadily dwindling in numbers and strength – shift in composition of
American jobs makes it inevitable
Dan Kopf 19, Quartz's data editor, writes about economics and statistics, 2/5/19, “Union membership
in the US keeps on falling, like almost everywhere else”, https://qz.com/1542019/union-membership-in-
the-us-keeps-on-falling-like-almost-everywhere-else/

Unions were once a central force in the US economy. Their steady decline may be having an impact on
inequality. In 2018, just 10.5% of American workers were members of unions, according to recently released
data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s is the lowest rate of membership since the bureau began
collecting statistics in the early 1980s. Most analyses of pre-1980s union membership suggest it was close to 30% in the 1940s and 1950s.
The drop has been particularly steep in the private sector. Just 6.4% of workers in the private sector are unionized,
compared with 16.8% in 1983. On the other hand, government employee unions, like those for teachers and postal
workers, have remained fairly strong, with a small decline from about 37% of the workforce in 1983 to 34% in 2018.
The overall decline of union membership is partly the result of the changing composition of jobs in the
US. Healthcare, restaurant, and hospitality jobs are among the fastest growing and, historically, these
industries that have not had high unionization rates. By contrast, manufacturing, a much more organized
sector, has been losing jobs over the past few decades. Another contributor to unions’ reduced clout has
been laws to make it more difficult to unionize, including “right-to-work” legislation passed in about half of US
states. These laws stipulate that people who work in unionized workplaces do not have to join the
union. The US is not alone in seeing a fall in union membership. Across the rich world, nearly every country’s share of
the unionized workers has declined, according to data from the OECD. The group notes that this is mostly the result of the
shrinking manufacturing and public sectors, and the rise of contract-based jobs.
 Police Unions Weak
Police unions are losing leverage after George Floyd – a sweeping shift in public
opinion is calling for their end
Alana Abramson 20, congressional reporter for time magazine, 6/11/20, “'We As Professionals Are
Under Assault.' How the George Floyd Protests Are Shifting Power Away From Police Unions”,
https://time.com/5851499/police-unions-protests/

police unions have successfully protected laws favorable to their officers by courting local
For more than half a century,

politicians and maintaining leverage through a strong member base willing to go on strike. But after
nearly two weeks of popular protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, the grip of these powerful
unions is starting to weaken. As state and local governments move to reorganize police departments,
require the disclosure of disciplinary records, and make it easier to sue officers, union leaders say
they’re being unfairly punished. “We as professionals are under assault,” Patrick Lynch, President of the Police Benevolent Association of the City
of New York, which represents 24,000 New York City police officers, said at a press conference on Tuesday. “I don’t want the neighborhood that I worked in, that I
brought back, that we brought back—I don’t want it to slide back.” But in
the face an emerging national movement calling for
sweeping police accountability—buttressed by a sweeping shift in public opinion—the unions’ longtime
strategy appears to be faltering. A Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted the first week of June found that 69 percent of
Americans surveyed believe Floyd’s murder is indicative of law enforcement’s broad treatment of
African-Americans, and 74 percent support the protesters on some level . Across the country, hundreds of thousands of
Americans of all races and generations have taken to the streets to condemn police brutality and racial
inequality, ratcheting up the pressure for legislative action. In Minneapolis, the city council pledged on June 7 to
disband the police department. Three days later, the Police Chief announced he would withdraw from
negotiations with the city’s police union. Between Monday and Wednesday, the New York State assembly passed a series of police bills,
including the repeal of a nearly 50-year-old law that prohibits the public from accessing disciplinary records without a court order. And on June 8, Congressional
Democrats in Washington unveiled the “Justice in Policing Act,” which encompasses reforms that include banning chokeholds, easing the path for civil lawsuits
against officers and creating a national registry of misconduct. Senate Republicans have said they are working on their own set of proposals. “As a police expert who
keeps close tabs on the national scene, I never would have expected this. I’m really stunned,” says Samuel Walker, Emeritus Professor of Criminal Justice at the
University of Nebraska at Omaha who studies police accountability. “The
police unions are now on the defensive in terms of any
legislative action, or actions by mayors, city councils, [and] state legislatures.”

Protests and legislation are undermining police union power

Abramson 6-11 (Alana; Covers Congress for Time; 6-11-2020; “How the protests are shifting power away from police unions“; Time;
https://time.com/5851499/police-unions-protests/; Accessed 6-27-2020; Camp-BM)

For more than half a century, police unions have successfully protected laws favorable to their officers by courting local politicians and
maintaining leverage through a strong member base willing to go on strike. But after nearly two
weeks of popular protests in the
wake of the police killing of George Floyd, the grip of these powerful unions is starting to weaken. As
state and local governments move to reorganize police departments, require the disclosure of
disciplinary records, and make it easier to sue officers, union leaders say they’re being unfairly punished.
“We as professionals are under assault,” Patrick Lynch, President of the Police Benevolent Association of the City of
New York, which represents 24,000 New York City police officers, said at a press conference on Tuesday. “I don’t want the
neighborhood that I worked in, that I brought back, that we brought back—I don’t want it to slide back.” But in the face an emerging national
movement calling for sweeping police accountability—buttressed by a sweeping shift in public opinion— the
unions’ longtime
strategy appears to be faltering. A Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted the first week of June found that 69 percent of
Americans surveyed believe Floyd’s murder is indicative of law enforcement’s broad treatment of African-Americans, and 74 percent support
the protesters on some level. Across the country, hundreds
of thousands of Americans of all races and generations have
taken to the streets to condemn police brutality and racial inequality, ratcheting up the pressure for legislative
action. In Minneapolis, the city council pledged on June 7 to disband the police department. Three days later, the
Police Chief announced he would withdraw from negotiations with the city’s police union. Between Monday and
Wednesday, the New York State assembly passed a series of police bills, including the repeal of a nearly 50-year-
old law that prohibits the public from accessing disciplinary records without a court order . And on June 8,
Congressional Democrats in Washington unveiled the “Justice in Policing Act,” which encompasses reforms that include banning chokeholds,
easing the path for civil lawsuits against officers and creating a national registry of misconduct. Senate Republicans have said they are working
on their own set of proposals. “As a police expert who keeps close tabs on the national scene, I never would have expected this. I’m really
stunned,” says Samuel Walker, Emeritus Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who studies police accountability.
“The police unions are now on the defensive in terms of any legislative action, or actions by mayors, city councils,
[and] state legislatures.”

Police union collective bargaining rights are being curtailed

Pearce 6-15 (Matt; Staff Writer, ; 6-15-2020; “Police unions become target of labor activists who see them as blocking reform“; Los
Angeles Times; https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-06-15/police-unions-george-floyd-reform; Accessed 6-27-2020; Camp-BM)

It was a far cry from “defund the police,” but the response was severe anyway. In 2019, Steve Fletcher, a first-term member of the
Minneapolis City Council, decided to oppose a budget proposal to add more officers to the Police
Department. Business owners soon started calling Fletcher, who represents part of downtown, complaining of slow police responses to 911
calls about shoplifting. Store owners told Fletcher the officers who eventually responded had a message: “We’d love to help you with this, but
our hands are tied by the council; talk to your council member,” Fletcher said in an interview. Fletcher suspected the hand of the Police Officers
Federation of Minneapolis, which supported the budget proposal. The federation, like many police unions, has been a vocal and formidable
force in city politics. (The federation did not respond to requests for comment, and a police spokesman called Fletcher’s allegation of a
slowdown “false and emphatically untrue.”) But after a Minneapolis officer knelt on the neck of George Floyd for more than eight minutes,
killing him — unleashing a national protest movement that has yielded criminal charges against him and the other three officers on the scene —
the police union, like many others, has become a target for otherwise labor-friendly liberals like Fletcher who
see them as major obstacles to reform. “I’ve been a labor organizer and a union member who’s gone on strike, so I have a deep
history with the labor movement, was born into a labor family,” Fletcher said. But when it comes to police unions, after his
experience in Minneapolis, he now thinks “there need to be real constraints around what can be bargained.” Los
Angeles, CA, Tuesday, June 2, 2020 - LAPD officer Decote watches for people tossing debris from tall buildings as dozens of protesters are
arrested for curfew violations on Broadway. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) CALIFORNIA L.A.
police union spent big in local
elections. Some politicians now shun the money June 10, 2020 Many activists have called for legal reforms to
limit police collective-bargaining agreements and union-backed laws that limit transparency into
misconduct or make it harder to fire officers for wrongdoing. Some union contracts allow departments to erase disciplinary records,
give officers access to investigative records before they are questioned or allow the officers to essentially prevent their departments from
publicly releasing internal records — making it easier for officers to beat misconduct charges or to prevent the public from knowing about
them. One University of Chicago Law School working paper from 2019 on newly unionized sheriff’s deputies in Florida concluded that
“collective bargaining rights led to about a 40% increase in violent incidents of misconduct among sheriffs’ offices.” The labor movement in the
U.S. is facing questions about what its relationship should be with the hundreds of thousands of police officers who make up a major portion of
unionized public-sector workers. The
AFL-CIO has faced growing calls to disaffiliate from the International Union
of Police Assns., and some liberal activists have started calling for Democratic politicians to reject campaign
contributions from police unions. “Even for people who have a deep long-standing genuine commitment to the labor movement ...
there’s a recognition that the power of unionization, the power of collective bargaining is being abused in
indefensible ways by police unions,” said Benjamin Sachs, a Harvard law professor and faculty director of the school’s labor and work-life
program, which will be studying potential legal reforms to collective bargaining by police.

They’re losing power – officials are starting to turn away their donations
Reyes 6-10 (Emily Alpert; covers City Hall for the Los Angeles Times., ; 6-10-2020; “L.A. police union spent big in local elections. Some
politicians now shun the money“; Los Angeles Times; https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-10/lapd-union-political-donations;
Accessed 6-27-2020; Camp-BM)

It was the morning after Los

Angeles Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez and other officials had proposed cutting
up to $150 million from the Police Department and she was facing a dismayed crowd at a command post in Panorama City.
One officer said that if the city needed to cut, it should start with protection details at council members’ homes. Another accused Rodriguez of
“pandering” to protesters and said that if it weren’t for the police, the city would have burned down. “I promise you, this union will go to our
grave fighting. ... We’re gonna fight,” said Jerretta Sandoz, a board member with the Los Angeles Police Protective League. “At the ballot box,”
another person chimed in. The LAPPL, which represents rank-and-file officers, has been a significant force in
local elections. In the past decade, the union has given more than $100,000 directly to city candidates . Its
independent expenditure committees, which cannot legally be controlled by candidates and do not have the same limits on donations, have
spent millions of dollars more. Now that money is under scrutiny by Angelenos supporting a national movement
against police brutality — and some local politicians say they won’t accept it anymore. It is the latest sign of the push
against longstanding practices at City Hall as Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles and other activist groups have pushed to defund
and overhaul the Police Department. When Rodriguez ran for office three years ago, the LAPPL backed her candidacy with more
than $100,000 in mailers and telephone calls. The league also spent more than $220,000 to support Councilman Joe Buscaino when he first ran
nine years ago. And when Garcetti first ran for mayor, the
union sponsored committees that spent more than $1.5
million backing his opponent. It has successfully pushed to rework officer discipline and advocated for higher
pay. More recently, the LAPPL spent $150,000 to back Councilman John Lee, who narrowly kept his seat earlier this year; gave $50,000 to
another committee supporting Councilman Herb Wesson as he campaigns to become a county supervisor; and spent nearly $45,000 in support
of Councilman David Ryu, who is facing off against nonprofit leader Nithya Raman. L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti said in his State of the City address
that he would be shifting 200 officers from elsewhere in the Police Department to its Metropolitan Division, a group that fights crime in
different areas of the city. Above, at LAPD headquarters. CALIFORNIA Callers to City Hall demand big cuts from the LAPD June 8, 2020 Raman
argued that politicians should disavow such spending, saying that it distorts decisions when every elected official in the city has been bolstered
by political donations from the LAPPL. As protesters have faced batons and other violent tactics, “the reluctance of our local officials to speak
out against even clearly documented harms is a sign of the power of the police union,” said Raman, who wants to reassess the LAPD budget.
Ryu said Tuesday that he had returned a campaign donation from the LAPPL and was disavowing any future
independent spending by the police union on his behalf. The councilman said he had opposed increasing the
LAPD budget while other city services were being cut and argued that the city needs to reexamine the use of force. L.A.
also needs “a visionary, long-term plan to replace the use of police officers to address chronic social issues,” Ryu said. Councilman Mike
Bonin also said Tuesday that he was rejecting any future contributions from the police union, which has donated
directly to the councilman and whose independent committees have spent over $45,000 backing his candidacy. Bonin, who has raised concerns
about police tactics during protests, said he was making a personal donation in the amount he had received directly in the past — more than
$4,000 for his campaigns and office holder accounts — to organizations working to oppose racism and reform policing, including Black Lives
Matter. He also said he would disavow independent spending by the union. “Angelenos are demanding a new approach to
how we keep our neighborhoods safe, and they want to know that their public representatives are accountable to the people,” Bonin said. And
there has been an especially concerted push for elected prosecutors to forgo money from police unions .
George Gascón, who is running to unseat Los Angeles County D.A. Jackie Lacey, recently joined other prosecutors in lobbying to prohibit district
attorneys from accepting support from police unions, which Gascón said he would no longer do.

Nationwide protests are spurring bipartisan pushes to reform police unions

Gambacorta et. al 6-27 (David; Juliana Feliciano Reyes; William Bender; Sean Collins Walsh; writers for the Philadelphia Enquirer;
6-27-2020; “Police Union Amassed Power Over Decades, Now Facing Changes“; US News & World Report;
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/pennsylvania/articles/2020-06-27/police-union-amassed-power-over-decades-now-facing-
changes; Accessed 6-27-2020; Camp-BM)

This is the way it’s gone for a long time in big cities like Philadelphia: Outrage over episodes of police misconduct are met with promises from
political leaders to achieve meaningful reform. Union officials puff out their chests and dig in their heels. The merry-go-
round spins again. Names and details change, but little else. But the May 25 death of Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police has led
to a rare instance of broad political agreement: Something has to change this time. Republican lawmakers —
normally staunch defenders of law enforcement’s status quo — are now pushing legislation that could radically
diminish the police union’s ability to have officers reinstated after they’ve been fired, or protect cops who have
been habitually named in civilian complaints. “There’s got to be a little better balancing of the scales,” said State Rep. Russ Diamond (R.,
Lebanon). He has sponsored a bill that would amend Act 111, the Pennsylvania law governing collective bargaining rights
for police officers, to remove certain infractions from binding arbitration protections for officers who commit crimes, use excessive force,
or violate someone’s constitutional rights. John McNesby, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 5, which represents 6,500 active-
duty officers, recognizes that the political winds have shifted. “Law enforcement across the country is suffering because of
those couple of a-holes in Minneapolis — and you can quote me on that — choking the life out of a guy,” he said. “Now the reform talk is
kicked back up again. I have zero problem with sitting down and discussing anything with anybody.” It’s a notable shift for McNesby,
who just a year ago dismissed the idea of a state law enforcement licensing board being given more power to remove bad cops from
circulation. That’s not to say, though, that the FOP will roll over and allow reforms “to get shoved down on our throats,” he said. Even in
Philadelphia, where labor unions have shaped the political landscape, the FOP has long stood out for its ability to shrug off mayors and police
commissioners who have accused the union of being a critical obstacle to weeding out corruption and regaining the public’s trust. That clout
wasn’t amassed overnight. And it’s unlikely to be surrendered easily. “The FOP personified” The FOP’s roots can be traced back to the late
stages of the Great Depression, when many city workers were desperately seeking an economic foothold. Sanitation workers in Philadelphia
went on a one-week strike in 1938, and subsequently unionized. Police officers took note, and formed their own union a year later. But the FOP
didn’t emerge as a force to be reckoned with until the 1960s, according to Francis Ryan, a labor historian who wrote a book about
Philadelphia’s municipal unions. During upheaval as the civil-rights and the anti-war movements surged, union officials discovered that they
could attract public support — especially from white communities — by touting the importance of law and order. “They got politicians on their
side,” Ryan said. “They increased their economic standards. They were able to impose their will on public policy.” The Philadelphia FOP’s
president, a motorcycle cop named John Harrington — whom Ryan called “the FOP personified” — waged a years-long battle against the
Philadelphia Police Advisory board, a civilian commission created in response to concerns about oppressive policing raised by the NAACP in the
1950s. In what would become a familiar rallying cry for union officials decades later, Harrington argued officers couldn’t do their jobs properly if
they faced civilian oversight. Mayor James Tate caved in to pressure from Harrington, and shut down the board. The FOP’s muscle continued to
grow in the 1970s, when former Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo became mayor. Rizzo’s legacy — empowering police officers to use brute
force, particularly on minority communities, with few consequences — continues to hinder the Police Department’s reputation even now. “The
police were bulletproof, especially under Rizzo,” said Tony Wigglesworth, a former city manager who started working for the city in the 1970s.
The U.S. Department of Justice sued the Police Department in 1979 over heavy-handed practices that included shooting unarmed civilians and
pressuring residents to withdraw complaints filed with Internal Affairs. (A judge tossed the lawsuit.) Not only did the rank and file not have to
worry about meaningful oversight, they also enjoyed the benefits of Act 111, which became law in 1968. It doesn’t allow police to go on strike,
but in return ensures that disputes can be turned over to a binding panel of arbitrators if the city and the FOP can’t reach a deal within 30 days.
McNesby, who became the union’s president in 2007 and is paid $193,000 a year in total compensation, has often touted his team’s ability to
consistently win sizable raises for cops when their contract is up for renewal, even at the height of a recession more than a decade ago. (In
2018, the union took in $7.6 million in revenue, including $5.9 million from membership dues, according to its most recent federal nonprofit
filing. That year, it spent $6.6 million, including $2.4 million on staff expenses and $1.7 million on benefits paid out to or on behalf of members.)
Earlier this year, the city reached one-year contract extensions with municipal unions amid the uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic; the
FOP negotiated a 2.5% raise, while most other unionized city workers received a 2% raise. “They were always given favored status,” said
Thomas Paine Cronin, the former president of AFSCME District Council 47, which represents white-collar city workers. “It’s just part of the
tradition in Philadelphia.” “Normal is part of the problem” McNesby’s elevation to president coincided with the start of Mayor Michael Nutter’s
administration in 2008, and the arrival of an outsider police commissioner — Charles H. Ramsey — who often seemed aghast at how few
accountability measures were in place. Ramsey updated a disciplinary code that had been unchanged since the 1960s; the FOP initially
objected, but then agreed to many of the new rules. He also complained publicly that the union and the arbitration process hamstrung his
ability to weed out bad cops at a time when the department was dogged by multiple corruption scandals. “No one would wear this as a badge
of honor, but in eight years, I think he fired more people than I think had been fired in the last 20,” Nutter said. McNesby argued, as he often
has, that Ramsey and other commissioners rushed to fire cops — especially those caught up in high-profile misconduct allegations — before
Internal Affairs’ often-lengthy investigations were complete, leaving the union with strong grounds to take the cases to arbitration. An Inquirer
investigation last year, based on 170 previously confidential arbitration opinions between 2011 and 2019, found that the FOP successfully
fought to have police discipline overturned or reduced about 70% of the time, even in some instances where Internal Affairs investigators
determined that officers had committed crimes. The union represents cops as well as high-ranking supervisors, which can seemingly lead to
conflicts, such as when multiple female officers accused former Chief Inspector Carl Holmes of sexual assault between 2004 and 2007. Ramsey
demoted Holmes to captain in 2008, but the FOP successfully fought for his demotion to be reduced to a suspension. Holmes was arrested last
year, and charged with aggravated indecent assault. McNesby said the union won’t consider putting commanders into a separate bargaining
unit. “We’re not even going to blink on that one,” he said. “That’s divide and conquer, and then you have everyone pointing fingers at each
other.” Ramsey isn’t surprised by the outcry over Floyd’s death, or the widespread interest in police reforms, which include calls to divert
millions of dollars from police budgets to underfunded social service programs. “People tend to relax when things get back to quote-unquote
normal. But normal is part of the problem,” he said. “That’s why people are out there now. They’re demanding a new normal, and it’s
important to not lose sight of that.” While Ramsey was commissioner, the union won the right for officers to be able to make political
contributions. Unlike the building trades unions, the FOP doesn’t heap cash on its favored candidates or deploy legions of its members to work
the polls on Election Day. Instead, the union has exercised a kind of soft power, using its endorsement process to
christen candidates as the choice for those who favor law-and-order politics. In last year’s municipal election, the union’s political action
committee doled out about $75,000 in mostly small donations to a variety of candidates and party organs, including Republican City Council
hopefuls, Mayor Jim Kenney’s reelection bid, and the Democratic City Committee. But many of its favored candidates flopped.
Republicans Al Taubenberger and Dan Tinney, who each received $12,000 from the FOP, lost their bids for City Council. The union also gave
$5,000 to former City Councilmember Jannie Blackwell, and $6,500 to former Sheriff Jewell Williams, who both lost their offices in shocking
Democratic primary upsets. Political consultant Neil Oxman said political candidates can no longer count on the union’s
members to vote as a bloc, especially as police academy classes grow more racially diverse. “I doubt if you get
90% of them voting monolithically for any mayoral candidate or any City Council candidate. It just doesn’t happen.” Former Gov. Ed Rendell,
who had to overcome opposition from the FOP during his races for mayor and governor, took it one step further, saying that he wouldn’t advise
politicians to seek the union’s endorsement because its clout has eroded. “If I were a candidate, I wouldn’t want it against me, but I wouldn’t
want it for me,” he said. “I wouldn’t want my opponent to necessarily get it, but I wouldn’t necessarily seek it.” A narrative shifts Few experts
could have predicted just how radically Floyd’s death would impact political and public opinion about law enforcement. “ The death of
George Floyd was so egregious and so clear-cut. It just shifted the narrative,” said State Rep. Jordan Harris, the House Democratic
whip from Gray’s Ferry. “The eyes of the public are now open to what black folks have been talking about for years. Now our
white allies are able to see the egregious nature of what happens in policing.” Democrats introduced police
accountability legislation to beef up police certification standards in June 2019 — marking the one-year anniversary of an East
Pittsburgh police officer fatally shooting 17-year-old Antwon Rose II — but it was rejected by State Rep. Rob Kauffman (R., Franklin County), the
chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “I actually believe our law enforcement in Pennsylvania do a good job in policing,” Kauffman said
at the time, according to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. Earlier this week, Kauffman’s committee changed course, and unanimously advanced
police oversight reforms. The legislation would require additional use-of-force and racial-awareness training, mental-health screenings, and
create a database for tracking officers with a history of misconduct. Democrats who have been fighting for police reform for years in Harrisburg
say evenlaw-and-order Republicans who control the House are starting to get the message. “Unfortunately, it took
the loss of another life and national attention to force our
colleagues to say, ‘You know, maybe we should listen to or read
those bills you mentioned a year or two or three years ago,’ ” said State Rep. Donna Bullock (D., Phila.), who has been pushing for
changes to Act 111. McNesby expected to meet with state FOP officials the following week, but hadn’t yet been presented with any of
the legislative proposals being bandied about. There is room for some compromises, he said, but giving up the protections that are granted to
officers through Act 111 isn’t one of them. “That’s insane,” he said. When protesters first took to the streets in Philadelphia several weekends
ago, the FOP’s voice was included in the chorus of criticism that was leveled at the Police Department’s leaders, whose bungled planning was
laid bare as looting and fires spread across the city for several days. But the
union was outraged when District Attorney Larry
Krasner filed felony assault charges against Joe Bologna, a longtime police inspector, after he was filmed striking a
young protester. Bologna had been accused of misconduct before, when he worked on a narcotics squad that was the subject of both a
federal corruption probe and a 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning series by the Daily News. Less than two weeks ago, more than 100 officers gathered
at the FOP’s headquarters in Northeast Philadelphia to cheer for Bologna before he turned himself in; the union announced it would raise
money for him by selling shirts for $20 that read: Bologna Strong. If Bologna beats his criminal case, the union will fight to have him reinstated.
“You’ll see him back to work,” McNesby vowed. It’s the kind of thing you expect an FOP leader to say, a boast that’s supported by a long history
of seeing things usually fall the union’s way. But now there’s
an undercurrent of uncertainty where there hasn’t been
before. McNesby concedes that even the FOP’s political allies might be taking a step back to consider if their
response to George Floyd’s final, agonizing moments will show up on the right side of history. “Some of the ones who
were our friends,” he said, “now their phone is off the hook.”

Police’s role in the labor movement is diminished – calls to remove them are growing
Garza 6-11 (Frida; Freelance writer and reporter; 6-11-2020; “'They don't belong': calls grow to oust police from US labor movement“;
The Guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/11/police-unions-american-labor-movement-protest; Accessed 6-27-2020;
Camp-BM)

As protests against police brutality continue across the US, a

new tactic is emerging to combat the huge influence of police
unions: kicking them out of the American labor movement. Police unions and labor groups, like other unions, usually
represent their members in debates over pay and working conditions. But they are controversial for being dominated by white leaders, often
deeply conservative and hostile to criticism of police officers or attempts at police reform. This
week the Writers Guild of
America, East – a trade union of TV writers and digital journalists – called for the removal of the International Union of
Police Associations from the AFL-CIO, the labor federation which represents them both. White US police union
bosses protect officers accused of racism Read more “As long as police unions continue to wield their collective bargaining power as a cudgel,
preventing reforms and accountability, no one is safe,” the Guild said in a press release. “Therefore we believe that police
unions do not
belong in our labor coalition.” The Writers Guild is the first AFL-CIO affiliate to demand IUPA’s expulsion from the nation’s largest
labor federation. That demand reflects a central tension between police unions and the broader labor
movement, and points to a gulf that has historically existed between them . In the last few days and weeks, that
gulf has seemed to be getting bigger. Following the police killings of African Americans George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna
Taylor in Louisville, labor organizations that count police officers among their members are being forced to reckon with their position as a
national debate over racism spreads. A rally in support of George Floyd and against police brutality at Dolores Park in San Francisco.
FacebookTwitterPinterest A rally in support of George Floyd and against police brutality at Dolores Park in San Francisco. Photograph: Josh
Edelson/AFP/Getty Images “There are real questions about being an anti-racist organization if you also represent police,” says David Unger, a
CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies staff member. Last week, the King county Labor Coalition told the Seattle police to confront its racism
problem or be kicked out of the coalition. The
Association of Flight Attendants-CWA also issued a resolution arguing
police unions should be “removed from the Labor movement” if they cannot address racism within their ranks.

Seattle proves police unions may be removed from the labor movement
Associated Press 6-18 (Associated Press; American not-for-profit news agency headquartered in New York City; 6-18-2020;
“Seattle police union expelled from city's largest labor group“; PBS NewsHour; https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/seattle-police-union-
expelled-from-large-labor-group; Accessed 6-27-2020; Camp-BM)

SEATTLE (AP) — The largest labor group in the Seattle area has expelled the city’s police union, saying the guild
representing officers failed to address racism within its ranks. The vote Wednesday night by the King County Labor Council to exclude
the Seattle Police Officers Guild comes after weeks of protests in the city over police brutality and racism following
the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. It’s also significant as the labor council is politically influential . Local elected
leaders are reluctant to go against the umbrella group of more than 150 unions and 100,00 workers. “Any union that is part of our labor
council needs to be actively working to dismantle racism in their institution and society at large,” the labor council said on
Twitter after the vote. “Unfortunately, the Seattle Police Officer’s Guild has failed to do that work and are no longer part
of our council.” The Seattle Times reports that the delegate vote was 45,435 to expel, with 36,760 voting to keep the police union within the
council. READ MORE: Trump pushes back as protesters stake out ‘an autonomous zone’ in Seattle Before the vote, police union president Mike
Solan told delegates the police union wanted to stay involved with the council and was “willing to learn.” “We are human beings and we are
workers who are committed to this city and committed to the community,” Solan said. “We see a future, one that engages in these robust
conversations, and in particular to race and how the institution of racism impacts all labor unions.” Labor council representative said the police
guild could be readmitted at some point in the future. “At this point, I just can’t justify to our members, ones who are staffing the medical tents
and getting gassed by SPD, having SPOG at the table, using our unity as a shield to justify contracts that go against our principles and mission,”
said Jane Hopkins, registered nurse and executive vice president of SEIU Healthcare 1199NW. The
Seattle City Council on Monday
voted unanimously to bar police from using tear gas, pepper spray and several other crowd control
devices after officers repeatedly used them on mostly peaceful demonstrators. The 9-0 vote came amid
frustration with the Seattle Police Department, which used tear gas to disperse protesters in the city’s densest
neighborhood, Capitol Hill, just days after Mayor Jenny Durkan and Chief Carmen Best promised not to.
Link
 L/T – Generic
Calls for reforms unite police officers around their unions.
Cohen et. al 6-8 (Marshall; Sara Murray; David Shortell; Katelyn Polantz; Mark Morales; writers for CNN; 6-8-2020; “ Police
unions dig in as calls for reform grow“; CNN; https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/08/politics/police-union-reform-protests/
index.html; Accessed 6-27-2020; Camp-BM)

Washington (CNN)A
crowd of police officers in Philadelphia gathered outside their local union headquarters on
Monday to show their support for one of their own -- a staff inspector facing assault charges after allegedly beating
a college student at an anti-racism protest last week. Like all criminal defendants, Philadelphia Police Staff Inspector Joseph Bologna is innocent
until proven guilty. But it seemed like the crowd of more than 100 applauding officers already made up their
minds, despite viral footage of Bologna hitting the student in the back of the head with a metal baton, sending him to the hospital. Following
the rally, the union that represents Bologna issued a statement, saying it "will not stand-by and watch Inspector Bologna
get railroaded." As public opinion shifts on issues of police violence and racial discrimination, and cities begin to
rethink their approach to law enforcement, powerful police unions across the country are digging in, and preparing
for a once-in-a-generation showdown over policing. The flashpoint has been seemingly brewing for years and has flared in
intensity with each high-profile police killing involving an African American. Elected officials, facing more pressure than ever after last month's
police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, are pledging to take action. "Let me be clear, we're going after the police union," Minneapolis
Mayor Jacob Frey said Monday on ABC's Good Morning America, after members of the city council said they wanted to go even further and
dismantle the local police department to pursue other models of policing. MORE FROM CNN POLITICS The hidden history of the secret
presidential bunker VIDEO: Martial law: Here's what can and can't happen in the US Fact check: Five false or misleading claims Trump and his
allies make about the response to the protests But that might be easier said than done. Police unions in the US wield significant power and
enjoy higher membership rates than many other unions, which have declined in recent years. Government officials and labor experts also tell
CNN that police union contracts often make it tougher to remove officers that have been flagged for misconduct -- a key roadblock to reform.
"They've become far too powerful. They form political action committees. They donate to district attorneys' race or state attorneys' race, state
senators and representatives and so forth," Charles Ramsey, a former DC police chief and former Philadelphia police commissioner, said Sunday
on CNN. "And then we wonder why you can't get anything done." For the first time, police unions will need to grapple
with a skeptical public that doesn't automatically support law enforcement. New polls indicate that most Americans now acknowledge
that African Americans are more likely to be mistreated or even killed by police. "This is big," legendary GOP pollster Frank Luntz tweeted on
Monday about a dramatic shift in how Americans are viewing police violence. After Eric Garner died in police custody in 2014, 33% of Americans
said they believed police were more likely to use excessive force against African Americans. That figure now stands at 57%, according to a poll
from last week. In
response to the public sentiment over the past two weeks, Jim Pasco, executive director of the national
Fraternal Order of Police, the largest law enforcement union in the country, told CNN that his organization is willing to
sit down with "anybody, anytime who wants to have a fact-based discussion" on public and police safety, and that
these discussions were ongoing. 'Corrosive' police culture For years, lawmakers from both parties passed police-friendly laws and empowered
police unions in their cities. But in this moment, there could be limited opening for bipartisanship. "We need reform in the area of the police
unions to make sure that the chief can actually have disciplinary control over the force," said Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who is
personally handling the prosecution of the four police officers involved in Floyd's death. House Democrats unveiled a sweeping proposal on
Monday to address racial disparities in policing. The bill would establish a national registry for police misconduct, among other things. It's not
clear that any Republicans will support that bill, but some are breaking from President Donald Trump's hardline stance toward the protests,
which he has focused on more than Floyd's killing. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney marched in a Black Lives Matter protest over the weekend in
Washington, DC. And the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, released a report last year that said many police unions
"run counter to the best practices of professional law enforcement standards" and are more concerned with sustaining the union than with
promoting public safety. Ronal Serpas, the former police chief in New Orleans and Nashville, said unions nationwide have successfully
negotiated for control over disciplinary processes, creating a "corrosive" culture where problematic officers know their union will protect them
from consequences. "To change police culture, we have to change the way contracts are handled," said Serpas, who oversaw police reforms in
New Orleans after years of corruption and after Hurricane Katrina. Decades of collective bargaining has resulted in police forces where
department chiefs have little control, and the unions have set the terms for internal investigations. Even if an officer is formally punished,
nuances in the contract often help officers prevail on appeal, Serpas said. For instance, some police union agreements have outlined how long
police leadership must wait to investigate an incident, how they can ask the police officers questions and what they can ask, and how quickly
the department must complete an investigation. Taken together, it puts the disciplinary power in the hands of the unions, which are set up to
protect police officers' jobs. Sometimes, police officers of color face discrimination within their own departments, and police unions have been
complicit in allowing these inequalities to fester and survive, experts tell CNN. As local governments look to pass new reforms, they'll need to
rewrite many of these policies and claw back some of the powers they've ceded to the police unions, Serpas explained. " The unions are
doing what they are supposed to be doing -- finding ways to protect their employees," Serpas said. "They'll go as far as the local
government will let them go." Taking action in New York New York, home to the largest police department in the country, has sprung into
action. Answering a question Monday from CNN's Mark Morales on police unions and reform, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that "every
union argues the interest of their employees, their workforce," and that he will "listen to all voices," including the unions, as he pushes reforms.
Lawmakers in New York are moving forward this week with a series of measures to address police misconduct. This includes repealing a state
law commonly known as 50-A, which prevents the public from seeing disciplinary records for officers, including those who kill civilians. Activists
have said this law has made it harder to hold abusive police officers accountable, while police unions have said that this change could
jeopardize the privacy of individual officers. Cuomo cast those concerns aside Monday, saying the bill includes ample privacy protections. "All its
doing is reversing an exemption on police records, so now a police officer is like a schoolteacher," Cuomo said. "It's just parity and equality with
every other public employee." The legislation is being taken up by the Democrat-controlled state legislature, along with other bills that would
establish a new office under the New York attorney general to investigate police misconduct, and also would require officers to turn on their
body cameras in specific situations. The spotlight in this state isn't only on efforts by the New York Police Department to enforce curfews and
maintain order in New York City. Last week, two officers from the Buffalo Police Department were charged with
assault after allegedly shoving an elderly man at a protest. After the officers were suspended, all 57 members of the police
force's emergency response team resigned from that team. The local union said they quit in solidarity with
the two officers, though some officers told local news outlets that the union's public statements weren't accurate. "The Buffalo police
union is on the wrong side of history, they are wrong in this situation, they have been a barrier to further police reform in the city of Buffalo and
that barrier that the police union presents needs to be addressed," Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said Saturday on CNN. Unions flex their muscle
While union membership has declined nationally, membership among law enforcement remains high. Those membership
dues can be funneled toward litigation, support for political candidates or lobbying on legislation that can impact police forces. Police unions
also say they work to secure better pay and benefits for officers, and that they have a duty to defend their members. "Police unions have a
tremendous amount of influence," said Jonathan Smith, executive director of the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban
Affairs, and a former Justice Department official who worked on police issues. "There's a lot of police officers in this country and the dues
accumulate a large war chest that can be used to enhance their political agenda." Local officials have also benefited from endorsements and
donations from police unions, making it less politically palatable for some officials to try to take on police unions or cases involving individual
officers. In an interview with the New York Times, one
Minneapolis city councilman even recently compared the local
police union to a "protection racket" that slows down services in areas with unfriendly officials . A
spokesman for the Minneapolis Police Department declined to comment on the accusation to the Times. To flex their political
muscle, police unions have used aggressive and at-times threatening rhetoric to attack elected officials who
were trying to rein in their local police departments. The head of a St. Louis police union said last year that the city's chief prosecutor, an
African American woman, should be removed "by force or by choice" because she was supposedly sowing distrust of law enforcement. And
after an attempted assassination of NYPD officers in February, a
major police union in New York City said its members
were "declaring war" on liberal-leaning Mayor Bill de Blasio because they blame him for creating a dangerous climate for police
officers. In 2016, the Fraternal Order of Police threw its support behind then-candidate Trump. The organization counts more than 300,000
members nationwide. In an interview with the Washington Post last year, Pascos said, "I would say at least 80% of our membership nationwide
is solidly supportive of President Trump." Across the country, the
actual work of a police union can be much more
mundane than it appears in this moment, when tensions are high after a spate of high-profile incidents.

Pushes to reform unions strengthen the labor movement’s unity.

Campbell 6-5 (Alexia Fernández; Senior Reporter; 6-5-2020; “As protests grow, big labor sides with police unions “;
Center for Public Integrity; https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/as-protests-grow-big-labor-sides-with-police-unions/;
Accessed 6-20-2020; Camp-BM)

Leaders of the country’s other labor unions are tiptoeing around the subject as their members join protests in hundreds
of U.S. cities this week over the killing of George Floyd. Labor leaders have strongly denounced police officers’ actions in that case and called on
lawmakers to address systemic racism. But they’re suggesting that collective bargaining agreements shouldn’t be on the table. They’ve been
careful not to blame police unions for the problem, choosing to embrace them instead. Police union contracts are not normal collective
bargaining agreements. Police unions have crafted a complex web of disciplinary rules that critics say makes it impossible to hold police
accountable for killing unarmed Black citizens. After a Minneapolis police officer pinned Floyd’s neck to the ground for more than 8 minutes
while fellow officers stood by and watched, many want to see these union contract rules reformed or dismantled. “The short answer is not to
disengage and just condemn,” Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO labor federation, said Wednesday on a press call about racial justice. “The
answer is to totally re-engage and educate.” Investigations in your inbox Join the Watchdog newsletter to hear about our latest ground-
breaking investigation. Email address you@example.com (Editor’s note: The author of this article is a member of the Washington-Baltimore
News Guild, which is affiliated with the Communication Workers of America, a member union of the AFL-CIO.) Public Integrity reached out to
leaders of 10 major unions and labor groups. None were willing to talk about police unions. Trumka, of the AFL-CIO, was too busy to chat. The
president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union couldn’t fit a call into his schedule. Teamsters President James Hoffa declined to
comment. Silence from the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, United
Auto Workers, Communication Workers of America, Unite Here and the American Federation of Teachers. Labor leaders briefly talked about
police unions in response to a reporter’s question Wednesday. They seemed uncomfortable. Randi Weingarten, president of the American
Federation of Teachers, said no union contracts should shield employee misconduct, but that focusing on collective bargaining is a “false
choice.” “I think we have to do something nationally about the demilitarization of policing,” she said. Joshua Freeman, a labor historian at City
University of New York, said he’s not surprised that the labor movement doesn’t want to focus on police unions. It wasn’t until the police killed
Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014 that the labor movement began to acknowledge racism in policing, he said. But more existential
questions about reforming police unions are still taboo. “It’s a very delicate subject, it’s rarely discussed openly and out loud,” Freeman said.
The labor movement’s quiet support for police unions comes at a critical moment. News outlets have described
how Derek Chauvin, the officer who tackled Floyd, had at least 17 complaints filed against him but never got more than a written reprimand.
That has led some criminal
justice reform advocates to call for changes that would curtail — or outright abolish — the
power of police unions. The labor movement’s silence on the subject so far suggests that it won’t be an ally in
that fight.

The fear of reform leads the labor movement to increase its support for police unions
Pu 6-21 (Benjamin; 2020 campaign embed for NBC News; Charlie Gile; Producer at NBC News; 6-21-2020; “National labor groups
mostly close ranks to defend police unions“; NBC News; https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/national-labor-
groups-mostly-close-ranks-defend-police-unions-n1231573; Accessed 6-27-2020; Camp-BM)

While some in the labor movement are seeking to distance themselves, most are supportive even as
they call for reforms. National protests against police brutality and mistreatment of Black Americans have prompted
new criticism of police unions, which for years have negotiated contracts that critics say help protect members from punishment,
suppress complaint records and weaken civilian oversight boards. The renewed spotlight on those unions has placed other
national labor leaders in the increasingly uncomfortable position of defending their right to organize while largely staying
quiet on the complicated topic of police unions. This week, after two Atlanta police officers were charged in the death of Rayshard Brooks —
who was shot in the back after clashing with an officer over a stun gun, according to Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Vic Reynolds —
the local police union confirmed that many members were participating in work slowdowns and sick-outs. Describing officers as “fed up,” Vince
Champion, spokesman for the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, said that officers are “protesting that they’ve had enough and they
don’t want to deal with it any longer.” While most labor leaders have chosen to keep silent on police union actions, some have begun speaking
out for change. The Writers Guild of America, East, part of the umbrella labor group AFL-CIO, startled many in organized labor earlier this
month when it announced a resolution calling for the International Union of Police Associations to be kicked out of the federation. The
resolution ignited a firestorm in the labor world, triggering a larger conversation on whether the labor movement should align with law
enforcement unions. Although IUPA is the AFL-CIO’s main police union, several other unions in the federation also have members who work in
police departments and correctional facilities. Derek Chauvin, the officer charged with second-degree murder in George Floyd’s death, was a
member of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis union, which is not affiliated with any larger labor organization. The Writers Guild’s
resolution declared that police unions “wield their collective bargaining power as a cudgel, preventing reforms and accountability” and that the
IUPA has policies and activities that “are consistently directed toward the achievement of the program or purposes of authoritarianism,
totalitarianism, [and] terrorism.” Much of organized labor recoiled and quickly closed ranks to defend collective
bargaining. Lee Saunders, president of AFSCME — the American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Employees — wrote an op-ed article in USA Today that described attacks on police unions as attacks on
all of labor. AFSCME represents around 90,000 law enforcement officers. “Everyone should have the freedom to join a
union, police officers included,” Saunders wrote. “The tragic killing of George Floyd should not be used as a pretext to
undermine the rights of workers.” Later that day, the AFL-CIO General Board published recommendations on police reform but also
shot down the idea of disaffiliating the police union. In a statement, the board said the best way to address police brutality is
to “engage our police affiliates rather than isolate them.” “It would be quick and easy to cut ties with police unions,” the
statement added. “But disengagement breeds division, not unity.” NBC News reached out to all 55 of the AFL-CIO affiliated unions to discuss
their stance on calls to expel the police union from the AFL-CIO. Unions including the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, Transport
Workers Union of America and United Steelworkers declined to comment. IUPA did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the AFL-CIO
headquarters. IUPA also did not publish any general statements about Floyd’s killing in the weeks following nationwide protests. No responses
were received from larger national unions such as United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, UNITE HERE and United Auto
Workers. These unions are typically very vocal on labor issues but have sidestepped
calls with reporters on the topic of
police unions. In a statement, the Utility Workers Union of America said that any decision to expel an
affiliate union would have to go through “a collective, democratic process.” In a brief statement, the United Mine
Workers of America said it viewed the debate around the police union “as an internal AFL-CIO matter that should
be discussed and decided within the house of labor, not in the media.” Some union leaders, however, spoke up about the frustration they felt
about police unions but still hoped that reform could happen from within the labor movement. All union leaders NBC News spoke
to were against expelling police from the labor federation.

Link turn – decarceration is a net boost for the labor movement

Mike Davis, 6-8-2020, "Ending Mass Incarceration Can Help Build the Labor Movement," Jacobin,
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/labor-movement-unions-decarceration-prisons-defund-police zw

Nearly everybody understands that having a criminal record hurts an individual’s ability to find work.
Those on the Right justify this by saying employers have a right to refuse employment to criminals.
Those on the Left disagree, arguing for immediate reforms like “banning the box” as well as overall
decarceration. But while the responses may differ, the reality that incarceration has negative economic
consequences for individuals is recognized across the spectrum. A lesser-understood aspect of
incarceration is its aggregate effect on workers’ collective ability to secure higher wages, along with
better benefits and working conditions. A new paper in the American Journal of Sociology, “The
Disciplining Effect of Mass Incarceration on Labor Organization” by Adam D. Reich and Seth J. Prins,
takes up the question. The authors find that mass incarceration has a significant chilling effect on the
labor movement , making decarceration a critical undertaking for a renewed socialist movement that
recognizes the necessity of workplace organization. Reich and Prins acknowledge that broad shifts in the
economy are fundamental to the decline of the labor movement in the United States. But at the end of
the day, unions are formed by people who must personally take initiative to organize and join them.
Therefore, alongside an evaluation of the changing economic terrain, it’s necessary to ask what disposes
people to workplace organizing as a means of solving their individual problems — and in turn what
makes them disinclined to organize. This is the level at which mass incarceration comes into play.
Unique Pressures Reich and Prins contend that workers with criminal records are likely to be more
fearful of retaliation for workplace organizing than their counterparts. This is because the economic
consequences for them are greater, precisely because having a criminal record so drastically limits job
opportunities. If they lose their job as punishment for taking a stand, there’s no guarantee there will be
another one waiting for them.The authors also enumerate other factors that are likely to play a role in
diminishing formerly incarcerated workers’ likelihood of joining a union, including parole obligations
that require steady employment, as well as the well-documented depoliticizing effect of exposure to the
criminal justice system in general. Together, these unique pressures increasing the perceived risks of
collective action create a dampening effect on labor organizing among formerly incarcerated people.
Reich and Prins’s research bears this out, finding that “high rates of criminal justice exposure are
negatively associated with involvement in labor organization.” The researchers examined data from OUR
Walmart’s efforts to organize workers at Walmart, which is the nation’s top employer and which also
hires people with criminal records. Controlling for other factors, they found that both community
incarceration rates and individual exposure to the criminal justice system corresponded negatively and
significantly with people’s odds of joining the OUR Walmart campaign. The researchers also compared
county incarceration rates with the success rate of union representation elections. Again, controlling for
other factors, they found that “high levels of community-level criminal justice exposure are negatively
associated with workplace-level organizing success, regardless of whether individuals in the unit have
themselves been involved in the criminal justice system.”
 AT: Mandatory Min Link
No Link - Police Unions were Against Mandatory Minimums from the start
Paul J. Hofer 93, (Federal sentencing reporter, "The Possibilities for Limited Legislative Reform of
Mandatory Minimum Penalties", 1993, Vol. 6, No.2, )///Ivanov

The story begins before the 1992 election. For reasons that are familiar, the Judicial Conference of the United States and the
judges of virtually every federal circuit have in recent years adopted resolutions opposing mandatory minimum
penalties. The American Bar Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, defender organizations, and even some police groups have
taken positions opposing mandatory minimums. A new national organization, Families Against Mandatory Minimums
(FAMM), was founded by Julie Stewart. In order to facilitate and coordinate activities, an informal task force called the Criminal Justice Working
Group began regular meetings early this year with the help of Gene Guerrero of the ACLU. Many other advocacy organizations and
representatives of federal agencies and some Congressional staff attended.

No Link - FOP’s high ranking officials even call for reform

BLEAUSA 19, (BLEAUSA, 11-27-2019, accessed on 7-7-2020, Bleausa, "THERE’S A PATTERN OF POLICE
UNIONS ATTACKING PEOPLE WHO CALL FOR CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM, ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY ARE
BLACK", http://www.bleausa.org/theres-a-pattern-of-police-unions-attacking-people-who-call-for-
criminal-justice-reform-especially-when-they-are-black/) ///Ivanov

“While police unions are not a monolith, many have a penchant for fearmongering, disinformation and barely disguised racism,” Harris said. The national FOP did not respond to a request for

comment about whether it condones racially targeted rhetoric from local union chapters. The FOP has also directed its ire at law enforcement officials. Mosby, who charged six officers

involved in the fatal arrest of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in 2015, was depicted that year on the cover of the New York City police union magazine as “The Wolf That Lurks.” During an April

protest over Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s handling of the Jussie Smollett alleged hate crime case, an unidentified retired Chicago police officer and member of the Chicago FOP

suggested that Laquan McDonald, the Black teen murdered in 2016 by former city officer Jason Van Dyke, should have been shot more than the 16 times that authorities say he was shot. And

in Dallas, a statewide police unions association, which includes FOP lodges, called for Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot’s removal in April, after he announced plans to stop

prosecuting certain low-level offenses, such as criminal trespass and theft of necessities. The FOP’s attacks on pro-reform voices, including Black athletes, “reflect not only their ideological
and rhetorical harmony with President Trump and Attorney General [William] Barr, but also a recognition that many of them have little chance of regaining widespread Democratic Party

Jenkins has used his platform to advocate for broad changes to the criminal legal system—
support,” Harris said.

including bail and probation reform in Philadelphia, improved state expungement laws, and an end to
mandatory minimums in prison sentencing. McNesby, who was first elected president of Philadelphia FOP in 2007, has been as outspoken against Jenkins
and police reform movements such as Black Lives Matter as he has against the elected city prosecutor, Larry Krasner, who he called anti-law enforcement. Jenkins did not respond to a request

for comment Monday. In an interview last week in the Eagles locker room, he dismissed McNesby’s rhetoric and the news coverage it received as “a distraction from the actual issues and

topics at hand.” It is our duty as peace officers and members of Blacks in Law enforcement of America to continue the fight for freedom, justice, and equality for all citizens. We will be

advocates of law enforcement professionals by establishing continuous training and support. As black law enforcement professionals, we pledge our time, honor, and talent for the uplifting of

our communities. We are truly the leaders of the community, in and out of our blue uniform.
 L/T – Marijuana
Link turn – taxes on regulating Marijuana go to the police and make them more
powerful
Chris Roberts, 6-8-2020, "Why Marijuana Legalization Funds The Police," Forbes,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisroberts/2020/06/08/why-marijuana-legalization-funds-the-police/
#19a5f2a22f1e

But now, four years later, with the legal industry struggling and police unable to protect legal merchants
from either the illicit market or organized thieves, there’s serious doubt whether devoting tax revenue
from marijuana sales to police budgets was smart politics. And in light of calls to defund or cut police
spending throughout the country, California’s experience is a warning for legalization efforts in other
states. Should police get a cut before education, healthcare, or disadvantaged communities shut out of
the legal market? And does law enforcement have any business making money off of legalization at all?
Eager to sell regulating and taxing cannabis to uneasy suburban and conservative voters, the authors of
Proposition 64, the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, offered the state’s powerful law-enforcement lobbies a
gift . Twenty percent of the promised $1 billion in annual tax revenue legalization would create was
earmarked for “public safety.” Legalization advocates heard an earful from growers and merchants
eager to go legal—why reward the crews that had spent decades trying to arrest them?—but it was sold
as necessary and practical electoral strategy. And from a public-safety standpoint, the gambit worked—
sort of. Though the cop lobbies opposed the measure anyway, they also didn’t run a massive scare
campaign. On Election Day 2016, AUMA won more than 57 percent of the vote. “It was one of the more
difficult-to-swallow parts of the thing,” recalled Hezekiah Allen, a former lobbyist for California cannabis
growers, who had famously opposed legalization in 2010. Allen and his outfit remained neutral. “But,”
he noted, elsewhere in the state, the promise that pot would help cops “sure did get votes.” Similar
tactics have been employed elsewhere. California’s generosity was notable only in its size. Marijuana
legalization has meant money for American police everywhere the social experiment’s been tried. Part
of legalization’s sales pitch was lower law-enforcement costs. Since cannabis use was no longer a crime,
police would have less to do, and fewer people would go to jail. This has yet to materialize. In Nevada,
pot taxes help pay the police to “enforce” the measure (along with, one assumes, other laws). In
Colorado, cannabis taxes fund diversion and addiction-recovery programs, which are administered by
the police. In Portland, Oregon, most of a special 3 percent city tax on cannabis, part of which was
meant to help jump-start minority entrepreneurs, somehow ended up in the police budget, infuriating
local lawmakers who thought the cash would go to minority entrepreneurs.

Unions are amenable to reforms that ease the burden on officers- includes
decriminalization
Spross, 16 (Jeff, economic and business correspondent, “In defense of police unions,” The Week,
7/14/16, https://theweek.com/articles/635690/defense-police-unions)
While many conservatives love police, and many liberals love unions, you won't find many people on
either end of the political spectrum who proclaim their love for police unions.
Can anyone be surprised when police unions bristle and revolt at reforms aimed at drawing even greater
virtue out of cops in the course of performing very difficult tasks? Cops wield an immense amount of
power in our society. But that abstract privilege does not change the lived experience of being a cop,
which is what the police and the unions that represent them draw upon when deciding how to defend
themselves. We can't just keep trying to make the police better-armed saints in the very places where the
injustices of U.S. society collide the hardest. Nor can we assume that combating racism is merely a matter
of enlightening individual cops or their departmental culture.
There are plenty of necessary reforms that police unions will oppose. But other reforms are possible, too:
There's nonviolent neighborhood mediation, forms of restorative justice, and of course building our
society's ability to help and aid the mentally ill, not just ignore them or lock them up. Support for
decriminalization is not unheard of among cops, as well. The unions could be amenable to reforms that
relieve them of burdens, and that lessen the contradiction that it's extremely easy to both under- and over-
police poor minority communities at the same time.
And remember: The purpose of any union is ultimately to collectively agitate for the interests of the
specific workers they represent, precisely because no one else will do it. Those interests are not just
purely material, but are also a matter of how those workers understand their place in the American social
fabric. In the absence of that agitation, there is a power imbalance at the bargaining table of employment.
And that is a problem, because at the end of the day, cops are workers, too.
If some workers seem to be a pernicious force in society when they organize to make their fears and
concerns and interests heard, we should stop to ask ourselves if that says something about the nature of
the labor we ask those workers to do. That's as true for cops as it is for anyone.
i/L
 Internal Link Turn
t/ support for police unions drags down the rest. They’re trying to clear house now.
Garza, 20 (Frida, “’They don't belong': calls grow to oust police from US labor movement

Amid outrage over the killing of George Floyd, organized labor may be beginning to reconsider its
relationship to police unions.” 6/11/20, The Guardian,
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/11/police-unions-american-labor-movement-protest)

As protests against police brutality continue across the US, a new tactic is emerging to combat the huge
influence of police unions: kicking them out of the American labor movement.

Police unions and labor groups, like other unions, usually represent their members in debates over pay
and working conditions. But they are controversial for being dominated by white leaders, often deeply
conservative and hostile to criticism of police officers or attempts at police reform.

This week the Writers Guild of America, East – a trade union of TV writers and digital journalists – called
for the removal of the International Union of Police Associations from the AFL-CIO, the labor federation
which represents them both.

“As long as police unions continue to wield their collective bargaining power as a cudgel, preventing
reforms and accountability, no one is safe,” the Guild said in a press release. “Therefore we believe that
police unions do not belong in our labor coalition.”

The Writers Guild is the first AFL-CIO affiliate to demand IUPA’s expulsion from the nation’s largest labor
federation. That demand reflects a central tension between police unions and the broader labor
movement, and points to a gulf that has historically existed between them. In the last few days and
weeks, that gulf has seemed to be getting bigger.

Following the police killings of African Americans George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in
Louisville, labor organizations that count police officers among their members are being forced to
reckon with their position as a national debate over racism spreads.

“There are real questions about being an anti-racist organization if you also represent police,” says David
Unger, a CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies staff member.

Last week, the King county Labor Coalition told the Seattle police to confront its racism problem or be
kicked out of the coalition. The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA also issued a resolution arguing
police unions should be “removed from the Labor movement” if they cannot address racism within their
ranks.

But the situation is not simple. Not all police departments are unionized, and of the ones that are, many
are not affiliated with a larger labor federation like the AFL-CIO.

More than 350,000 officers are organized under the Fraternal Order of Police, an independent trade
union. But the demand to expel the IUPA – which claimed more than 100,000 members last year – from
the AFL-CIO is a sign that organized labor may be beginning to reconsider its relationship to police
unions.
But if the labor movement is going to change, it will probably need to be from the ground up. On
Tuesday, the AFL-CIO acknowledged police violence as a labor issue (“it happens in our backyards and to
our families”), but argued it was better to retain IUPA as an affiliate than to “isolate” them.
 Policy Unions Not Key
Police unions are distinct from the broader movement
Jamieson, 20 (Dave, “The Labor Movement Faces A Reckoning Over Police Unions,” 6/6/20,
Huffington Post, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-labor-movement-faces-a-reckoning-over-police-
unions_n_5eda9958c5b640424ef70cd2)

Carmen Berkley spent four years directing the AFL-CIO’s civil rights department, trying to advance the
cause of underrepresented communities at the country’s largest labor federation. Her tenure
overlapped with seismic social justice events, including the protests that followed the killing of Michael
Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

Berkley felt that the AFL-CIO often broached difficult conversations about race, but failed to follow
through. With the country now engulfed in anger over police brutality, she believes the federation
needs to cut its ties with police unions.

“It will take an extraordinary amount of bravery for the conversation to have action,” said Berkley, who
is Black. “My hope is that Americans know that American trade labor unions are different from police
associations. Police associations are a dangerous group that need to be defunded.”
 Unions Not Key to Wages
Non-Unique – unionization is down because of the new job landscape AND wages and
inequality are improving anyway
Michelle Cheng, 1-22-2020, "Despite Americans rallying for more unions, membership rates continue
to decline," Quartz at Work, https://qz.com/work/1789615/union-membership-rates-in-the-us-
continues-to-decline/

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics’s latest available data on annual union membership, released on Jan.
22, shows that 10.3% of American workers were in unions, down from 10.5% in 2018. For context, in
1983, the first year for which the bureau started collecting the data, the union membership rate was
about 20% with 17.7 million union workers. In 2019, union membership in both the public and private
sectors was down. In the private sector, 6.2% of the workforce, or 7.5 million workers, belonged to a
union, compared to 6.4% the year before. The public sector saw a slight decrease from 33.9% to 33.6%.
Some of the highest unionization rates were in education, where affiliation held steady at 33.1%. The
overall decline in union membership is due in part to the changing job landscape. Service and healthcare
jobs are some of the fastest-growing, but their unionization rates have not increased apace. The
manufacturing sector, which historically has made up the majority of unions, has been on the decline for
decades. In addition, about half of US states have “right to work” laws, where workers in unionized
workplaces do not need to join a union or pay dues, but may still benefit from its protections and
regulations. More broadly, in a tight US labor market, wage growth has been increasing, particularly for
the lowest-paid workers, due in part to a nationwide movement of rising minimum wages.
 Unions not key to Worker Safety
Unions fail to improve worker safety and COVID makes it impossible anyway.
Feuer 3/2 [William Feuer, 3-2-2020, “Coronavirus has ‘exposed every fracture’ in US workplace safety,
top labor union leaders say,” CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/28/coronavirus-has-magnified-us-
workplace-safety-weaknesses-unions-say.html

The coronavirus pandemic has “exposed every fracture” in U.S. workplace safety requirements as
essential workers are infected and die of Covid-19, several of the country’s largest unions and a former
worker safety official under President Barack Obama said Tuesday. Even as most states have rolled out
social distancing restrictions to curb the spread of Covid-19, the country’s essential workers, from
health-care providers and grocery workers to meatpackers and steelworkers, have continued to punch
into work. Now some of the country’s largest unions are calling for emergency regulation to ensure
worker safety. “You would not think that our professionals would be the ones who are screaming from
the rafters about the failure of OSHA to do its job,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American
Federation of Teachers, said of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The union also
represents health workers. “But I am mad.” Weingarten and other union leaders joined together to call
for OSHA, an agency that polices workplace safety within the Department of Labor, to implement
enforceable emergency coronavirus workplace regulations. The union representatives spoke on a
conference call with members of the press to commemorate Workers’ Memorial Day. “Under this
administration, OSHA’s response for America’s workplace safety has left workers to fend for themselves
during the biggest health crisis in recent history,” United Steelworkers Secretary-Treasurer John Shinn
said. “Instead of inspecting and fining employers, the agency is merely asking employers to investigate
complaints against themselves and take corrective action.” All of the union officials on the call, who
collectively represent more than 6 million American workers, criticized OSHA for not acting more quickly
to investigate workplace complaints related to Covid-19. The Washington Post reported earlier this
month that workers have filed more than 3,000 such complaints. The agency announced earlier this
month that it’s unlikely to investigate employers except for high-risk workplaces such as hospitals.
Rather than overseeing its own investigations, the agency is encouraging employers to respond to
worker complaints on their own, said David Michaels, who led the agency during the Obama
administration. Representatives of OSHA did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment. “Even an
enthusiastic OSHA would be fighting with one arm tied behind its back,” Michaels said. “The agency is
under-resourced, and the standard-setting process is lengthy and Byzantine, so many hazards are
unregulated. OSHA’s weaknesses have been magnified under President [Donald] Trump.”
 Unions not key to Inequality
COVID-19 makes income inequality inevitable, BUT unions couldn’t overcome system
racism before the pandemic anyway
Dominic Rushe, 6-19-2020, "Coronavirus has widened America's vast racial wealth gap, study finds,"
Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/19/coronavirus-pandemic-billioinaires-
racial-wealth-gap

The coronavirus pandemic has proved a bonanza for billionaires and further widened the enormous racial wealth
gap in the US, according to a new report released Friday. 'I'm squeaking by right now': voices of America's unemployment crisis In the 12
weeks between 18 March and 11 June, the combined wealth of all US billionaires increased by more than $637bn to
a total of $3.581tn, more than the entire wealth of the US’s 59 million Latinx population combined and equal to three-quarters of all Black
wealth, according to an analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). The report is called: White Supremacy as Pre-existing Condition: Eight
Solutions to Ensure Economic Recovery Reduces the Racial Wealth Divide. The top five billionaires – Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg,
Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison – saw their wealth grow by a total of $101.7bn, or 26% between 18 March and 17 June. They captured 17.4%
of the total wealth growth of all 600-plus billionaires in the last three months. The fortunes of Bezos and Zuckerberg together grew by nearly
$76bn. Over the same period, 44 million Americans lost their jobs and filed for unemployment insurance. The numbers have
declined from a one week peak of 6.6 million in April but are still historically high. More than 3 million people have filed for unemployment in
the last two weeks alone. Latinx and African American people have been hit hardest by the layoffs. The share of households of color with zero
or “negative” wealth, meaning their debts exceed the value of their assets, is much higher than the share of white households. According to the
report, 37% of black families and 33% of Latino families have zero or negative wealth, compared to just 15.5% of white
families. Black Americans have a homeownership rate of just 44%, compared to a white homeownership rate over 70%. Darrick Hamilton, one
of the report’s authors and the executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University, said:
“Today’s racial wealth divide is an economic archeological marker, the result of the multigenerational history of
white supremacy running from the African slave trade, Jim Crow, separate and unequal, predatory lending, and other forms of
systematic discrimination in wealth-building opportunities.” Even before the pandemic, the racial wealth gap had
expanded. Racial wealth inequality increased by more than $40,000 from 1983 to 2016, according to a previous IPS
report, Ten Solutions to Bridge the Racial Wealth Divide. “In 1983, white median wealth was $110,160, while black wealth was $7,323, and
Latino wealth was $4,289. By 2016, white median wealth had increased by $36,000 to $146,984, while Latino median wealth increased by only
a couple thousand to $6,591. “Black wealth declined by about $4,000, to a mere $3,557,” the report found.
Impact
 Aff Solves Democracy
Only criminal justice reform can restore democratic legitimacy.
Brannen et al ‘6/11 [Samuel Brannen leads the Risk and Foresight Group and is a senior fellow in the International Security
Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Christian Stirling Haig is a research assistant with the
CSIS Risk and Foresight Group. Habiba Ahmed and Henry Newton are interns with the CSIS Risk and Foresight Group.; “The George Floyd
Protests: A Global Rallying Cry for Democracy”; 6/11/20; Center for Strategic and International Studies; https://www.csis.org/analysis/george-
floyd-protests-global-rallying-cry-democracy; Accessed 7/7/20; NT]

The United States has emerged in 2020 as the global epicenter of mass political protests. Following the
murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, public outcry over police brutality and systemic racism ignited
popular protests across the United States. Despite the concurrent Covid-19 pandemic, these protests
grew rapidly across all 50 states, becoming the topic of conversation in every home and business in the
United States. The Black Lives Matter movement has gone global too, inspiring activists from Europe to
Africa, Asia to Oceania. Remarkably, international attention has shifted from the pandemic to U.S.
protests.

How the United States responds to popular demands for police accountability and addresses broader
systemic racism is a test for American democracy at a time of intensifying strategic competition with
China, Russia, Iran, and authoritarian regimes worldwide. How the United States chooses to act on
protesters’ legitimate grievances can demonstrate the resilience and responsiveness of democratic
governance despite recent gains by authoritarianism across the globe. Freedom House’s most recent
“Freedom in the World” report found that for the 14th consecutive year, democracy has declined. It
concludes, “The unchecked brutality of autocratic regimes and the ethical decay of democratic powers
are combining to make the world increasingly hostile to fresh demands for better governance.”

It is not coincidental that last week, as protests increased across the United States, Beijing cracked down
on freedom of assembly and speech in Hong Kong. That response follows a year in which protests and
activism by the city’s residents presented the most direct challenge in decades to the most powerful
authoritarian government in the world. Authoritarian governments universally see protests as an
existential threat, and so they have endeavored to crush popular unrest at home while helping allied
autocracies to suppress their own people.

Political protests occurred in 114 countries last year, with activist groups increasingly taking inspiration
and tactics of resistance from each other. Citizens see the power of protests reflected in the media and
in notable changes, such as the resignation of leaders. Inspired, would-be protesters undertake their
own movements seeking change. Though local circumstances were different in each case, protesters
over the past decade have called out broadly for one thing: reform of broken and outdated modes of
governance that perpetuate inequality—racial, socioeconomic or otherwise. In the current information
environment, where grievances and inspiration move rapidly through the internet, the spread of
politically activating ideas has increased in speed and scale. We released a study in March that found
significant growth in the number and scale of protests over the past decade. We forecast that growth
would continue for the foreseeable future, writing in early April that with much of the world in
lockdown, Covid-19 “will exacerbate existing tensions and create new ones . . . rewriting our history and
challenging the relationship between citizens and their governments.”

The United States should meet the protester demands by seriously addressing pervasive systemic racism
and brutality against African Americans as both a moral imperative and as vital to global democracy.
Recent polls find that the overwhelming majority of Americans support the protesters’ grievances as
legitimate. In recognizing as legitimate its citizens calls for change expressed through their right to
peaceful assembly and protest, U.S. government at the federal, state, and local levels can demonstrate
the power of democracy to strengthen and repair societies at moments of crisis. That tens of thousands
of sympathetic people around the world in the midst of a pandemic have marched in solidarity
underlines the power of this moment in the global imagination. Respond well, and the United States
reaffirms global democracy; respond poorly, and the United States’ moral authority as a global
champion of democracy is further eroded. All eyes are on the United States.

Throughout 2019, as during the events of the Arab Spring earlier in the decade, U.S. policymakers
grappled with how they should respond to foreign mass protests. They worried about the greater
disorder and instability that embrace of protesters could cause. They wondered whether U.S. direct
support or even endorsement of protesters could ultimately do more harm than good. They pondered
how to articulate values in a way that supported democratic rights but preserved relationships with
existing regimes. They also asked whether protests even mattered, aware that the political outcomes of
recent protests have been highly variable, with many producing few changes and some eliciting brutal
regime response. In most cases, they watched and did little to meaningfully affect events.

The Trump administration has responded to domestic protests in ways that undermine its interests at
home and abroad. The White House has yet to articulate a concrete set of actions to address the issues
at hand. On the contrary, the president himself last week attempted to recast the narrative around the
protests by painting them as violent and illegitimate. He and his advisers have also taken actions to
intimidate protesters, ranging from communications inviting violence to the large-scale deployment of
military and police forces in Washington, D.C. This response has created a strategic advantage for
authoritarian regimes that seek to displace U.S. influence in the world. For example, Chinese and
Russian state media have taken particular pleasure in broadcasting the social division between U.S.
protesters, police forces, and elected leaders. On the June 4 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square
massacre, U.S. criticism of Beijing’s denial of Hong Kongers’ right to assemble in peaceful protest rang
hollow, as Chinese officials pointed to the administration’s response as evidence of a double standard in
human rights.

The United States of America began as an experiment in governance that transformed the world. Its
power to learn, grow, adapt, and address injustice is what will ensure that experiment continues at
home and abroad. Government at all levels must be willing to fundamentally renegotiate its social
compact. Calls to defund the police, to channel resources instead into community programs, and to
reconceptualize standards of community safety should not be dismissed. From an international
perspective, disbanding and reorganizing security and police forces is not unusual, with the largest-scale
examples occurring across former Soviet republics in the 1990s.

In the span of just two weeks, the George Floyd protests have already demonstrated the possibilities for
change when a broad, multigenerational, multiethnic coalition of citizens vigorously organize across the
whole nation and demand reform. The House of Representatives, state and local governments, and
organizations and businesses across the country are enacting fundamental change. U.S. cities and states,
such as New York, New Jersey, D.C., Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and elsewhere, have announced
steps to reform, defund, or dismantle police departments. Calls to eliminate symbols of the Confederacy
are being heard across multiple cities, within the U.S. military (especially the Marine Corps and Navy),
and even by NASCAR. And the House of Representatives has introduced police reform legislation that
restricts the transfer of military-style equipment to law enforcement entities, among other provisions.

Government leaders should listen to the demands of citizens and commit at every level of government
to the principles of decency and democracy. Doing so would both be a signal that the American
experiment continues almost 244 years later. Such an undertaking would reinforce the United States’
international commitment to representative democracy and unequivocally display its rejection of the
tools of authoritarian states.
 Unions Bad – Productivity
unionization creates labor cartels that slow growth and hinder recession recovery by
reducing investment, job opportunities, and consumer spending – edited for language
James Sherk 9, research fellow in labor economics at The Heritage Foundation, 5/21/09, “What Unions
Do: How Labor Unions Affect Jobs and the Economy”,
https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/what-unions-do-how-labor-unions-affect-jobs-and-
the-economy/#_ftn9

Unions function as labor cartels, restricting the number of workers in a company or industry to drive up the
remaining workers' wages. They also retard [slow down] economic growth and delay recovery from recession . Over
time, unions destroy jobs in the companies they organize and have the same effect on business
investment as does a 33 percentage point corporate income tax increase. Unions benefit their members
but hurt consumers generally, and especially workers who are denied job opportunities. Unions decrease
the number of jobs available in the economy. The vast majority of manufacturing jobs lost over the past
three decades have been among union members. Congress should remember that union cartels retard [slow down]
economic growth and delay recovery when considering legislation that would force workers to join unions. What do unions do? The AFL-
CIO argues that unions offer a pathway to higher wages and prosperity for the middle class. Critics point
to the collapse of many highly unionized domestic industries and argue that unions harm the economy .
To whom should policymakers listen? What unions do has been studied extensively by economists, and a broad
survey of academic studies shows that while unions can sometimes achieve benefits for their members,
they harm the overall economy. Unions function as labor cartels. A labor cartel restricts the number of
workers in a company or industry to drive up the remaining workers' wages, just as the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC) attempts to cut the supply of oil to raise its price. Companies pass on those higher wages to
consumers through higher prices, and often they also earn lower profits. Economic research finds that unions benefit their
members but hurt consumers generally, and especially workers who are denied job opportunities. The average
union member earns more than the average non-union worker. However, that does not mean that expanding union membership will raise
wages: Few workers who join a union today get a pay raise. What explains these apparently contradictory findings? The
economy has become more competitive over the past generation. Companies have less power to pass
price increases on to consumers without going out of business. Consequently, unions do not negotiate
higher wages for many newly organized workers. These days, unions win higher wages for employees only at companies with
competitive advantages that allow them to pay higher wages, such as successful research and development (R&D) projects or capital
investments. Unions effectively tax these investments by negotiating higher wages for their members, thus
lowering profits. Unionized companies respond to this union tax by reducing investment. Less
investment makes unionized companies less competitive. This, along with the fact that unions function as labor
cartels that seek to reduce job opportunities, causes unionized companies to lose jobs . Economists consistently
find that unions decrease the number of jobs available in the economy. The vast majority of manufacturing
jobs lost over the past three decades have been among union members--non-union manufacturing employment has
risen. Research also shows that widespread unionization delays recovery from economic downturns. Some unions win
higher wages for their members, though many do not. But with these higher wages, unions bring less investment, fewer jobs,
higher prices, and smaller 401(k) plans for everyone else. On balance, labor cartels harm the economy, and
enacting policies designed to force workers into unions will only prolong the recession .
Unions do more harm than good – they stifle productivity, risk market disruption, and
harm ununionized people
Richard A. Epstein 20, legal scholar known for writings on law, economics, and classical liberalism,
Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University, James Parker Hall Distinguished Service
Professor of Law at the University of Chicago 1/27/20, “The Decline Of Unions Is Good News”,
https://www.hoover.org/research/decline-unions-good-news

All of these pro-unioncritiques miss the basic point that the decline of union power is good news, not bad.
That conclusion is driven not by some insidious effort to stifle the welfare of workers, but by the simple and profound
point that the greatest protection for workers lies in a competitive economy that opens up more doors
than it closes. The only way to achieve that result is by slashing the various restrictions that prevent job formation, as Justin Haskins of the
Heartland Institute notes in a recent article at The Hill. The central economic insight is that jobs get created only when there is the prospect of
gains from trade. Those gains in turn are maximized by cutting the multitude of regulations and taxes that do nothing more than shrink overall
wealth by directing social resources to less productive ends. President Trump is no master of transaction-cost economics, and he has erred in
using tariffs as an impediment to foreign trade. But give the devil his due, for on the domestic front he has repealed more regulations than he
has imposed and lowered overall tax rates, especially at the corporate level. During the 2016 election, President Obama chided Trump by
saying: “He just says, ‘Well, I’m going to negotiate a better deal.’ Well, what, how exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do
you have? And usually the answer is, he doesn’t have an answer.” This snarky remark reveals Obama’s own economic blindness. The gains in
question don’t come from any “negotiations.” And they don’t require any “magic wand.” They come from unilateral government decisions that
allow for private parties on both sides of a transaction to negotiate better deals for themselves. True to standard classical liberal principles, the
market has responded to lower transaction costs with improvements that Obama, as President, could only have dreamed of creating. Overall
job growth was 5.53 million jobs between 2007 and 2017. But new job creation has exceeded 7 million in the first three years of the Trump
administration. In addition, the sharp decline in manufacturing jobs that started in the late Clinton years and which continued throughout the
Obama years has also been reversed. Over 480,000 manufacturing jobs have been added to the economy since Trump took office, compared to
the 300,000 manufacturing jobs lost in the eight years under Obama. Happily, the distribution of these jobs has been widespread, causing drops
in Hispanic and African unemployment levels to 3.9 percent and 5.5. percent respectively, both new lows. Basic neoclassical theory predicts
that regulatory burdens hit lowest paid workers the hardest. Hence, the removal of those burdens gives added pop to their opportunities and
to the economy at large. Trump’s domestic labor performance is even better than these numbers suggest. Too many state-level initiatives hurt
employment, like raising the minimum wage or imposing foolish legislation such as California’s Assembly Bill 5, which takes aim at the gig
economy. The surest way to improve the situation is to repeal these regulations en masse. But progressive prescriptions to strengthen unions
cut in exactly the wrong direction. Unions
are monopoly institutions that raise wages through collective
bargaining, not productivity improvements. The ensuing higher labor costs, higher costs of negotiating
collective bargaining agreements, and higher labor market uncertainty all undercut the gains to union
workers just as they magnify losses to nonunion employers, as well as to the shareholders, suppliers,
and customers of these unionized firms. They also increase the risk of market disruption from strikes,
lockouts, or firm bankruptcies whenever unions or employers overplay their hands in negotiation . These
net losses in capital values reduce the pension fund values of unionized and nonunionized workers alike.
Employers are right to oppose unionization by any means within the law, because any gains for union workers
come at the expense of everyone else. Of course, the best way for employers to proceed would be to seek efficiency gains by
encouraging employee input into workplace operations—firms are quite willing to pay for good suggestions that lower cost or raise output. But
such direct communications between workers and management are blocked by Section 8(a)(2) the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which
mandates strict separation between workers and firms. This lowers overall productivity and often prevents entry-level employees from rising
through the ranks. So what then could justify this inefficient provision? One
common argument is that unions help reduce
the level of income inequality by offering union members a high living wage, as seen in the golden age of the 1950s. But that
argument misfires on several fronts. Those high union wages could not survive in the face of foreign competition
or new nonunionized firms. The only way a union can provide gains for its members is to extract some fraction of the profits that
firms enjoy when they hold monopoly positions. When tariff barriers are lowered and domestic markets are deregulated, as with the airlines
and telecommunications industries, the size of union gains go down. Thus the sharp decline in union membership from 35 percent in both 1945
and 1954 to about 15 percent in 1985 led to no substantial increase in the fraction of wealth earned by the top 10 percent of the economy
during that period. However, the income share of the top ten percent rose to about 40 percent over the next 15 years as union membership fell
to below 10 percent by 2000. But don’t be fooled—that 5 percent change in union membership cannot drive widespread
inequality for the entire population, which is also affected by a rise in the knowledge economy as well as a general aging of the
population. The far more powerful distributive effects are likely to be those from nonunion workers whose job prospects within a given firm
have been compromised by higher wages to union workers. It is even less clear that the proposals of progressives like Sanders, Warren, and
Buttigieg to revamp the labor rules would reverse the decline of unions. Not only is the American labor market more competitive, but the work
place is no longer dominated by large industrial assembly lines where workers remain in their same position for years. Today, workforces are
far more heterogeneous and labor turnover is far higher. It is therefore much more difficult for a union to organize a common front among
workers with divergent interests. Employers, too, have become much more adept at resisting unionization in ways that no set of labor laws can
capture. It is no accident that plants are built in states like Tennessee and Mississippi, and that facilities are designed in ways to make it more
difficult to picket or shut down. None of these defensive maneuvers would be necessary if, as I have long advocated, firms could post notices
announcing that they will not hire union members, as they could do before the passage of the NLRA. Such changes to further weaken unions
won’t happen all at once. But turning the clock back to increase
union power is not the answer. It will only cripple the
very workers whom those actions are intended to help.
 Police Unions Bad
Police unions use lobbying money to block reform efforts – that ensures a never-
ending cycle of racial violence and police brutality.
Perkins 6-23 [Tom Perkins, 6-23-2020, "Revealed: police unions spend millions to influence policy in
biggest US cities," Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/23/police-unions-
spending-policy-reform-chicago-new-york-la

Police unions and officers active in America’s three largest cities spend tens of millions of dollars annually to influence law
enforcement policy and thwart pushes for reform, a Guardian analysis of local, county, state and federal campaign finance
records found. Reform advocates say the spending partly explains why police unions have defeated most reform measures in recent years, even
as high-profile police killings of unarmed black men sparked waves of public outrage including the current national demonstrations against
racism sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The Guardian identified about $87m in local and state spending over the last two
decades by the unions. That includes at least $64.8m in Los Angeles, $19.2m in New York City and $3.5m in Chicago. Records show that most
spending occurred during the last 10 years as contributions and lobbying dramatically increased in most jurisdictions. At the federal level, police
officers and their unions have spent at least $47.3m on campaign contributions and lobbying in recent election cycles, according to Maplight
data and US Senate and US House records. “The power of their money runs very deep,” said Hamid Khan, director of Stop LAPD
Spying, a grassroots anti-surveillance watchdog group. “[Local governments] have become rubber-stamp bodies in which police power is never
challenged.” Governments have become rubber-stamp bodies in which police power is never challenged Hamid Khan, Stop LAPD Spying The
totals include payments to city council members and state legislators, as well as lobbying costs. The amount that police unions have spent
during these periods is probably even higher as incomplete state campaign finance data makes it nearly impossible to pin down the true figure.
Several unions contacted by the Guardian did not respond to requests for comment. But Tab Rhodes, president of the Los Angeles County
Professional Peace Officers Association (PPOA), wrote in a recent letter to its 8,000 members that the union needed more money to “establish
collaborative relationships” with lawmakers. Though the PPOA and sheriff’s department have spent more than $10.4m on political
contributions in recent years, Rhodes is soliciting $2m more in annual donations from members. Political spending is one of two tools police
unions use to influence politicians. Industry observers who spoke with the Guardian stressed they also effectively portray reformers as “soft on
crime”, and lawmakers have feared being branded as such. However, public sentiment has shifted hard against police in
the wake of
Floyd’s killing, and now many expect to see a jump in political spending to block renewed reform efforts. “Law
enforcement is going to spend its money defensively – instead of pushing for changes in the law that work to their benefit, their primary goal is
one of self-protection,” said Dan Schnur, a professor of political communication at the University of California, Berkeley, and campaign finance
reform advocate. The shocking images of Los Angeles police violence during the Floyd marches were preceded by decades of similarly dramatic
and unsettling attacks on often peaceful civilians. The incidents are tied to deep controversies over racial profiling and a range of other
serious systemic internal problems at the LAPD. “Problems are constantly exposed but nothing happens
because there’s zero oversight at all,” Khan said. “That goes to show the power of the police unions – people don’t want to
touch any of this and the police get more money and resources.”
 Nurse Unions Bad
nursing is fundamentally different than other union unionized jobs – it relies on
individuality and a moral high ground that has to place the patient over the nurse –
unionization prioritizes the paycheck over the patient which causes mediocre and less
innovative care
Anne Shields 2k, registered nurse certified, sept/oct 2000, “The American Journal of Maternal/Child
Nursing”, Volume :25 Number 5 , page 233, https://www.nursingcenter.com/journalarticle?
Article_ID=472535&Journal_ID=54021&Issue_ID=54476

Unionization has no place in my practice as a professional nurse. The mandate of the Florence Nightingale Pledge to "devote
myself to the welfare of those committed to my care" is best served by a nurse who thinks and speaks independently . I

oppose anything that comes between the nurse and the patient , for that can erode nursing's professional

freedom and status. All healing professions are first and foremost servants of the patient. In my opinion, it is the
patient who is missing from the American Nurses' Association's (ANA) pitch for collective bargaining, including contract negotiations,
grievance handling, data collection, standards, leadership development, political action, and litigation. When economic considerations take

priority over patient care, we are no longer set apart from trades in our honorable tradition of service.
Ethically and morally, the needs of the patient must always come before the needs of the nurse. Unionization of

professional nurses is an oxymoron. Our struggle to establish nursing as a profession carries with it a
relinquishment of self-interest and a dedication to a moral high ground. How amazing that nurses bristle at the use of
Unlicensed Assistive Personnel (UAPs) yet enthusiastically join a union for truckers, meatpackers, or foodworkers! Collective bargaining by the

ANA is a flagrant conflict of interest; a labor union and professional association represent divergent
goals and should not exist under the same umbrella. The reality of a workplace is subtly structured by the natural leaders on staff who
model "the way things are done here." Unions make it difficult to individually reward these silent leaders, who are the

true interface between nurse and patient. A supervisor deserves the freedom to compensate exceptional nurses
without the constraints of a contractual agreement. Likewise, nurses satisfied by "good enough" should not
be rewarded-or even retained-regardless of their seniority or title. Union agreements impede
managerial freedom to accept only the best. In our profession, the stakes of borderline incompetence are too high:
managers must have the authority to decisively advocate for the patient without fear of union
repercussions. Unionization of nurses does not promote quality care. The expense of negotiation and contract
administration-over and above wage and benefit costs-is passed along to the patient. Thus, unionization tilts the allocation of resources

toward the "economic and general welfare" of the nurse and away from the patient. Nursing strikes
devastate patient care and necessitate the use of alternative providers who may or may not provide the
same standard of care. Innovative patient care is the result of the give and take of experienced nurses with new
graduates; fresh perspectives and enthusiasm are powerful catalysts for change. Unfortunately, some working nurses are
able to hide behind the protection of union contracts; excellence may thus subtly slide into mediocrity.
Unions discourage individual initiative. Even the jargon "collective voice" grates on an independent thinker. From what I have seen, labor
unions are usually male-dominated organizations with leaders who are more interested in political action committees and
maintaining power than in the real needs of rank and file members. Haven't we as nurses had enough of male-dominated
health care? I can speak for myself, and the last thing I need is protection by a union leader far removed from the bedside who may or may not even be a nurse. A
high-acuity unit may invigorate one nurse but overwhelm another; weekend shifts may stress one nurse but allow another to complete advanced education.
Offering options without union rigidity keeps the system as fluid as our patients' problems. Flexibility is
power. Union guidelines are a hindrance when tailoring work schedules to the ever-changing desires and needs of a nursing staff and the ability to cover all
shifts to adequately provide patient care. The higher wages of unionized workers in the United States are often touted as a reason for

unionization of nurses. However, in my opinion, we should look beyond the paycheck. The intangible rewards of
nursing cannot be negotiated at a bargaining table. I believe the survival of our profession is dependent on
refocusing on the rewards at the bedside-such as our privileged presence at the moments of birth and death-rather than wages
and trade union activities.

nurse unionization and strikes destroy community hospitals and significantly reduce
the quality of care – theyre just a business ploy and not even represented by actual
nurses
Alene Burke et al 20, master of science in nursing, registered nurse, 3/1/20, “Do Unions Benefit or
Harm Healthcare & Nursing Industries?”, https://www.registerednursing.org/do-unions-benefit-harm-
healthcare-nursing/
In spite of overall union membership decreasing in the U.S. over the past 30 years, the field of healthcare has seen a steady increase in representation. Organized
labor has targeted the field of healthcare to increase membership dues even in right-to-work states. As registered nurses are an important cornerstone of the
healthcare industry and provide the preponderance of direct patient care, one must ask the question if unions, or collective bargaining units, are benefiting or

harming healthcare? While many industries are leaving their union roots in the past as globalization and technological advances outpace the represented
worker, nursing union membership is steadily rising. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20.4% of nurses belonged to a collective bargaining unit, which is
significantly higher than the national average of 13.1% across the U.S. Nurses and healthcare workers were granted the right to unionize by the National Labor
Relations Act nearly 40 years ago, a controversial move considering the "essential" public nature of nurses to provide care in various settings. Since that time,
numerous labor unions have targeted nurses to unionize under the guise of improving patient outcomes. There is no single labor union that represents nurses
across the nation. Unions such as Service Employees International Union represent nurses as well as many employee groups such as janitors and airport workers.
Unions such as National Nurses United and state organizations like the California Nurses Association encourage nurses to join as they claim to be
nurse-focused. However, most of these unions are neither organized nor led by nurses. Many union
business representatives are labor lawyers who are unfamiliar with nursing practice or healthcare . This reflection

of the leadership can cause the assumption that so-called nursing unions, or those representing nurses, are more interested in the

power of membership dues. Nurses in a collective bargaining unit pay as much as $90 per month for union representation. Given the number of
nurses working in represented organizations, unions are a lucrative business. The power of having a union negotiate for the nurses can be

appealing to many nurses, considering that nurses in union roles are paid 20% higher than nurses in non-union
facilities. However, when a union decides to go on strike, many nurses are faced with losing significant
wages during the strike as well as their own personal ethical dilemma of leaving their patients to
replacement nurses who are unfamiliar with their patient population. Patient outcomes decline
significantly during a nursing strike and the cost to the organization can be detrimental . Organizations have
reported losses of over $46 million to train and replace the nurses for large strikes. These costs, even the deaths reported during

strikes, are worn like a badge of honor for some nursing unions who boast of these outcomes to their constituents. Some smaller
community hospitals have had to close their doors to serving their communities, never recovering from
the cost of the nursing strike.
 Public Sector Unions Bad
Public sector unions do not have any benefits plus huge cost on state governments
and the taxpayer.
Schanzenbach and McGinnis 10 “The Case Against Public Sector Unions“ by John O. McGinnis, Max
Schanzenbach, published August 1st, 2010. John O. McGinnis is a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of
Law. Max Schanzenbach is the Benjamin Mazur Professor of Law, at Northwestern University School of Law.
https://www.hoover.org/research/case-against-public-sector-unions

The idea of eliminating union privileges in the public sector may seem like a radical one. But
society has changed greatly from the era in which industrial unions were born, and, in any
event, public sector unions raise substantially different issues than those in the private sector . In
the early 20th century, workers were less educated and less mobile, and were indeed subject to exploitation by private companies, some of

which had monopoly power in local labor markets or regularly employed private violence. To balance the bargaining power between such

companies and their workers in such a climate, the federal government provided the employees with the mechanism of collective bargaining.

But the potential benefits of unions in the private sector are very attenuated and probably nonexistent in the public sector. First,
public
employees are typically protected by civil service statutes that provide an important measure of
job security and protection from arbitrary hiring and firing decisions. These statutes also tend to
regulate promotion and compensation decisions. The potential for a spoils system to arise or
for politicians to seek vengeance on opponents in government employ provide strong
arguments for such statutes. Their omnipresence, however, at the very least mitigates the need
for an additional layer of union protection. Second, governments typically face lower borrowing
costs and enjoy easier access to sources of direct financing (i.e., taxation) than private sector
employers, which insulates the public sector from the business cycle. Indeed, despite much talk
of layoffs in government, since the present recession began in 2008, private sector payrolls
have declined by over seven million, while government payrolls overall hardly budged. Third,
workers who prefer government employment typically have a variety of options (federal, state,
county, city) or possess skill sets that are transferable to the large private service sector. In
short, the potential social benefits offered by private sector unions are not present in the public
sector. The potential benefits of unions in the private sector are very attenuated and probably nonexistent in the public sector. The cost
of public sector unions, however, is very high. For a number of reasons, public sector unions are likely to
impose larger wage and benefits premiums than private sector unions, as well as creating additional
problems, like inhibiting democratic decision-making. Industrial unions faced natural checks on their own power — most importantly the power

of the free market — and the free market constrains super-competitive wages and benefits . Unionized companies must raise
capital and compete in the product market. For this reason, economists have suggested that unions can flourish
indefinitely only when a firm has the ability to raise prices above a competitive level, an increasingly rare circumstance in the private sector. By

contrast, state and local governments typically have the ability to “raise prices” through higher
taxes or worse services. The cost of moving from state to state is generally far higher than that
of switching products. States also face less stringent controls from financial markets . While state and
local governments do compete in some measure for residents and businesses, such a dynamic clearly takes much longer to play out in the

public sector relative to the private sector, or indeed only becomes realizable in circumstances like the present crisis. In particular, places with

significant local amenities (think California and New York) may be able to persist under a dreadful public sector because residents are willing to

pay, in terms of higher taxes and worse services, to enjoy the weather or cultural opportunities offered. This
dynamic transfers the
benefits of those amenities from taxpayers and consumers of public services to public sector
employees, a wealth transfer that is not, we suspect, one which most advocates of
redistribution would choose as a first (or even third, fourth, or fifth) option.