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	Workers Vanguard No. 1128	23 February 2018

UC Berkeley Cops Attack Black Unionist

Defend David Cole!

OAKLAND—At a February 1 rally on the University of California (UC) Berkeley campus called by Local 3299 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), campus cops brutally assaulted black union member David Cole, a 51-year-old dining hall worker. A video of the attack shows multiple cops grabbing Cole from behind, slamming him to the ground and grinding his face into the pavement, inflicting injuries that required hospital treatment. Cole was arrested and slapped with bogus charges of vandalism and resisting arrest. Unions representing UC technical workers, faculty, librarians, teaching assistants and student employees have joined with Local 3299 in protesting this racist, anti-labor attack.

The police assault took place minutes after the crowd of over 100 union members and supporters had moved into a Berkeley intersection at the entrance to the campus. As described by Local 3299 organizer Libertad Ayala, one driver tried to drive his car through the crowd, hitting a number of protesters. Another rally participant, a member of the Undergraduate Workers Union, told Socialist Worker (8 February) that the driver then got out of his car to demand the cops arrest Cole, who had been yelling, “Stop, don’t run people over, stop hurting us!” The cops then jumped Cole, later manufacturing the lie, echoed by the UC administration, that he had thrown his placard at the car and threatened the driver.

The 24,000-strong Local 3299 called the rally at Cal in support of its heavily minority service employees, patient care workers and others throughout the UC system. Union members have been working without a contract after being stonewalled by the administration in negotiations last year. While UC bosses grant themselves lavish raises and plan to jack up tuition again, they demand that these workers continue a five-year wage freeze as well as take cuts to their health and pension benefits. At the same time, the administration continues the union-busting practice of contracting out work at low, non-union wages.

The union timed its February 1 statewide rallies to mark the day 50 years ago when two black sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death on the job in Memphis, Tennessee. Their hideous deaths sparked a victorious nine-week, union-organizing strike by the sanitation workers. Martin Luther King Jr., who was in Memphis to support the strike, was assassinated there on 4 April 1968. In its statement protesting the police assault on David Cole, Local 3299 wrote: “At a peaceful protest honoring the generations long struggle of black workers who risked everything to win dignity and fair treatment on the job, the University of California decided to engage in police tactics more befitting of the Jim Crow South.” In fact, such police tactics have always been the norm throughout the country and throughout its history.

UC’s own statewide police force has a long record of brutal repression against radical students, unions and minorities. Today, their boss is UC president Janet Napolitano, who as Obama’s Homeland Security chief prosecuted the racist “war on terror.” If AFSCME or other unions strike, the campus cops together with their fellow thugs in blue will be mobilized to attack their picket lines. Yet the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy actively organizes such lethal enemies of labor and black people into the ranks of the unions. Nationally, AFSCME misleaders have organized tens of thousands of cops and prison guards, who are a central part of the capitalist state. Cops, prison guards, security guards out of the unions!

Some who have rallied to the defense of Cole have raised calls to reform the UC police or to hold them “accountable.” Such illusions are dangerous. Racist repression and union-busting is the job of the cops as the enforcers of capitalist class rule against the working class, black people and all the oppressed. As the assault on David Cole once again drives home, the fight against black oppression and the struggle of all workers against exploitation are inseparably linked. Defend David Cole! Drop the charges now!