SEIU Bureaucrats Embrace Cops

The response by the 1199SEIU union tops to the cop shooting of a black health care worker in North Miami in July starkly shows the nature of the pro-capitalist union misleadership.

Behavioral therapist Charles Kinsey was trying to help his patient, a severely autistic man who had wandered from a mental health center into the street. Cops soon showed up with assault rifles. As a video of the lead-up to the shooting shows, Kinsey was lying on his back with his hands in the air, his patient calmly sitting on the ground playing with a toy truck. Despite his composed plea, “Sir, there is no need for firearms,” the cops opened fire, striking Kinsey in the leg. From his hospital bed he recalled: “I was more worried about [the patient] than myself.” He added, “As long as I’ve got my hands up, they’re not going to shoot me. This is what I’m thinking.... Wow, was I wrong.”

As the cops flipped over the bleeding Kinsey and handcuffed him, he asked: “Sir, why did you shoot me?” A cop responded, “I don’t know.” As black people across America do know, shooting at them is a reflexive response of the police. Kinsey’s skin color made him a target for these thugs of the racist, capitalist state.

Monica Russo, Florida-based executive vice president of health care workers union 1199SEIU, released a statement on July 21 condemning the shooting as another example of racist injustice. However, its demands are repulsive:

“We call on our brother and sister officers to stand with us in confronting the institutional racism and distrust that exists between police and communities of color.... The caregivers of 1199SEIU Florida, stand committed to calling on our brothers and sisters in the Police Benevolent Association, elected leaders, and members of the community to join us at the table.”

Not our “brothers and sisters,” police are part of the state, which in essence consists of bodies of armed men who defend racist capitalist rule. Private security guards are cop auxiliaries, many of whom are organized by SEIU. Neither have any place in the labor movement. The leadership of this heavily black and immigrant union works hard to sell the lie that our enemies are our friends: that cops are workers who can be made to serve us, and that the capitalist Democratic Party is on our side.

Instead, SEIU and all unions need leadership that will, as we noted in “Black People Under Siege” (WV No. 1093, 29 July), “turn the righteous anger against the rampaging cops into a struggle against the social order they defend, a struggle to make the working class the rulers of a new society.”