Organized Workers for Labor Solidarity (OWLS) invites you to join an on-line Solidarity Check-In, Friday, June 12th, 7 pm.
The featured topic is the call from key unions for the Martin Luther King Jr. County Labor Council to expel the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) from its ranks.
SEIU Healthcare 1199 NW and UFCW 21 presented a “Resolution Affirming Our Commitment to an Anti-Racist Union Movement” that sets a deadline of June 17 for SPOG to refashion itself as an anti-racist labor organization. If the resolution’s demands are not met, MLKCLC delegates will be given the opportunity to remove SPOG from its ranks.
The Highline Education Association has also sent a demand letter to the Council that SPOG ‘be removed from the Martin Luther King Jr. Labor Council.’ Their members “see the direct impact of policing and police brutality” on their students and families. “When SPOG can call itself part of the ‘labor movement,’ it is granted further protection against reform, and proponents of police reform can be painted as anti-labor or anti-progressive.”
As a labor organization that has supported numerous strikes over the years, OWLS has seen the role of police in helping employers break strikes by enforcing unjust injunctions that forbid picketers from blocking driveways against replacement scabs. As a diverse group OWLS members can testify to the brutal role of the police in upholding a racist, exploitative economic system.
Join this important discussion about labor’s role in the exploding movement to win racial justice.