Government Unions and the Left

A Muddier Picture Than You Think

The American left has two reflexes when it comes to government employee unions, and neither of them is analysis.

The first reflex is unconditional solidarity. Unions are labor, labor is us, and anyone who criticizes a union is either naive or doing the bosses’ work. The second reflex, more common on the libertarian left and among anarchists, is blanket suspicion: government workers are agents of the state, the state is the enemy, and organizing its employees just makes the machinery run smoother.

Both reflexes are wrong while at the same time capturing something real. The honest accounting of government worker organization sits in the tension between them, and the left that refuses to sit in that tension is not going to think its way to anything useful.

This article is an attempt at the honest accounting.

The Case For Government Worker Organization Is Real

Start with what is actually true: the state is a tool of capital.

It enforces property relations. It maintains the legal framework that makes exploitation possible. It deploys police, courts, prisons, and immigration enforcement when that framework is challenged. It manages the poor through means-testing, surveillance, and bureaucratic degradation rather than addressing the conditions that produce poverty. When it acts as an employer it does so inside a larger function. This means that government workers are laboring inside an institution that, at the structural level, exists to serve interests that are not the working class. Yet still they may benefit personally. Game theory.

That asymmetry is real. The civil service protections that exist in many government jobs are real too, but they are not the same as collective power, and they erode when political conditions shift. Teachers in right-to-work states, public health workers during austerity cycles, municipal employees when cities go bankrupt. These workers discover quickly that the state’s obligation to them is considerably more flexible than they were led to believe.

The government worker who organizes collectively to defend wages, working conditions, and job security against an employer that can change the rules legislatively, cut budgets politically, and break contracts through bankruptcy proceedings is doing something that makes sense. The case for organization is not sentimental. It is structural. The power asymmetry runs against ordinary government workers just as it runs against workers in private industry, and collective action is the rational response to power asymmetry regardless of who the employer is.

The left should start here, and remember it throughout, because the critique that follows is not a critique of government workers. It is a critique of what their organizations have become and why.

Where the Logic Fractures

Not all government work is the same, and the left’s failure to make this distinction is where the unconditional solidarity position starts to collapse.

A teacher produces educated people. A public health nurse produces healthier communities. A social worker produces stabilized families. A parks worker produces accessible public space. These workers are working class in the structural sense: their labor produces genuine social value, the conditions under which they produce it are controlled by an employer with vastly more power than they have individually, and they have every reason to organize collectively in their own defense.

A police officer produces compliance with the existing order. A correctional officer produces incarceration. An ICE agent produces deportation. A prosecutor produces convictions. These workers also sell their labor, but what their labor produces is the enforcement of the class structure itself, the apparatus by which property relations are maintained and challenges to those relations are suppressed.

The standard objection is that this misses the point: police produce public safety. But ask yourself an honest question. When you see a police officer, do you feel safer, or do you feel anxious? For a significant portion of the American population, particularly the poor and nonwhite, the answer is anxiety, and that answer is not irrational. It is an accurate read of what police presence has historically meant for those communities.

Public safety and policing are not synonyms. One is a genuine social good. The other is an institution whose relationship to that good is contingent, uneven, and for many people effectively nonexistent. The communities with the least police accountability do not experience more safety. They experience more policing.

The feeling of reassurance tracks closely with class position, and that correlation is not accidental. Affluent communities receive a qualitatively different kind of policing. In wealthy neighborhoods police function closer to the protective service model by responding to calls, deterring property crime, providing visible reassurance to people who have the social capital, legal resources, and political connections to make abusive policing costly for the department.

Poor communities, and particularly poor nonwhite communities, receive policing that is more heavily enforcement-oriented, more pretextual, more focused on compliance than on service. Stop and frisk, aggressive misdemeanor enforcement, warrant sweeps and civil asset forfeiture are not distributed randomly. They concentrate in communities that lack the resources to push back. Both the affluent resident who feels reassured and the poor resident who feels anxious are responding rationally to their actual experience of the institution. The safety that policing reliably produces is the safety that property owners need. That is not a coincidence. It is the function.

The Marxist framework the left claims to work from actually resolves this distinction cleanly: what matters is not whether someone sells their labor but what that labor produces and in whose interest. Applying that framework consistently means acknowledging that organizing teachers and organizing police are not the same political act. One builds working class power. The other fortifies the machinery that contains it.

The left has not wanted to say this plainly because it requires making judgments that cut across the clean line of union membership. It is easier to extend solidarity uniformly and avoid the argument. The cost of that avoidance shows up most visibly in the carceral system, which we will get to, but it runs through the entire analysis. A framework that cannot distinguish between the labor that builds society and the labor that polices it is not a framework. It is a refusal to think.

What the Incentive Structure Produces

Even where government workers are unambiguously working class, teachers, nurses, sanitation workers, transit workers, the organizations that represent them tend, over time, toward a particular kind of capture. Understanding why requires looking at the incentive structure rather than the character of the people involved.

A private sector union’s organizational survival depends on delivering real gains to its members. When a UAW contract produces wage increases and the members can see the result in their paychecks, the union justifies itself. When it fails to deliver, members ask questions. The accountability mechanism is direct and the feedback is fast.

A government union operates in murkier terrain. The employer, the state, can shift the cost of labor agreements onto taxpayers through taxation, defer it through pension obligations, or obscure it through the complexity of public budgeting. Members cannot always tell whether their leadership delivered or whether they got managed. The accountability mechanism is weaker, and the incentive for leadership to prioritize institutional relationships over member militancy is correspondingly stronger.

Over time this produces a leadership class that is ideologically comfortable, institutionally entrenched, and risk-averse in direct proportion to how much it has to lose. It produces leaders who have learned that their organizational survival depends more on maintaining relationships with Democratic Party politicians than on building the kind of adversarial power that actually moves employers. It produces an organizational culture that mistakes access for influence and influence for power.

The cost of those agreements is not borne by capital. It is borne by working class taxpayers, the same class the unions claim to represent, through regressive taxation, deferred infrastructure, and the slow defunding of the public services that working people depend on most. Government union leadership has won gains for its members by externalizing the cost downward onto the class as a whole, and called it a victory for labor.

The inter-union dimension of this problem is almost entirely absent from left analysis, and it is where the incentive dynamics become most visible. I was a member of the Alaska State Employees Association supervisors unit, and what I watched there was not union solidarity operating across the government workforce. It was one union pursuing its positional interests at the direct expense of the unions representing the workers its members supervised.

The specific pattern was outsourcing. The supervisors unit consistently supported contracting government work out to private firms even when, and this is not a close call, those contractors cost the state three times what state employees doing the same work would cost. The reasoning was nakedly positional: more contractors means more coordination work, more oversight responsibility, more justification for supervisory headcount. More supervisors needed, more dues paying members, stronger institutional position for the union.

The workers whose jobs were being contracted out lost. The taxpayers funding a threefold cost premium lost. And the supervisors union was pursuing a strategy that was self-defeating in the long run, since a shrinking overall government workforce eventually means fewer supervisors too. But the short-term incentive was clear and the union followed it with perfect fidelity to its own positional logic.

This is not a story about bad people making cynical calculations. The union representatives involved almost certainly believed they were doing right by their members. The incentive structure produced the behavior, exactly as it always does. But the effect was to pit one union against another along lines of positional power, with the union that had more proximity to management decision-making winning at everyone else’s expense. The solidarity framework had nothing useful to say about this because it has no tools for analyzing conflicts of interest between unions, only between unions and employers.

This is not a betrayal story. Individual leaders did not wake up one morning and decide to sell out. The incentive structure selected for this outcome the same way incentive structures always select for the behavior that serves the interests of those inside them. Put different people in the same structure and you get the same result on a slightly different timeline. The problem is institutional, not personal, which means the solution has to be institutional too.

The Carceral Obscenity

Everything in the preceding sections is complicated and requires careful argument. This section is less complicated.

Police unions are the most powerful opponents of accountability for state violence in America. They negotiate contracts that make it procedurally near-impossible to discipline or remove officers who kill people. They run political operations that punish elected officials who support oversight. They have aligned themselves, openly and repeatedly, with the most authoritarian tendencies in American political life, and the broader labor movement has largely tolerated this because the principle of union solidarity is treated as more important than the lives of the people those unions’ members are authorized to kill.

This is not a tension the labor movement has resolved. It is a contradiction it has chosen to live with.

AFSCME represents both social workers and correctional officers. The AFL-CIO has spent decades protecting the institutional position of police unions while the communities those unions operate in, disproportionately poor, disproportionately Black and brown, are the same communities the left claims to be organizing. The labor movement that endorses the same politicians who expand the carceral state, fund police departments at the expense of schools and public health, and prosecute political dissent is not a labor movement in any meaningful sense. It is a set of institutional interests that have learned to speak the language of solidarity while pursuing the agenda of stability.

The left cannot build a coherent politics around working class power while extending unconditional solidarity to the organizations most responsible for enforcing working class powerlessness. That contradiction has to be named and it has to be resolved, and resolving it means being willing to say that police unions are not labor organizations in the sense that matters. They are political organizations defending the institutional prerogatives of the state’s enforcement arm, and they belong outside the solidarity coalition entirely.

What a Coherent Left Position Looks Like

The coherent position is not anti-union. It is not a gift to the right, which wants to destroy all worker organization including the kinds that actually build working class power. It is a position that applies the same analytical standard to labor organizations that the left applies to every other institution: what do they actually do, who do they actually serve, and what are they willing to sacrifice to do it.

By that standard, the left should support government worker organization where the workers produce genuine social value and where the organization is actually accountable to its members and to the broader working class. Teachers deserve unions. Transit workers deserve unions. Public health workers deserve unions. The case is structural and it is strong.

By that standard, the left should extend no solidarity whatsoever to police and correctional officer unions, regardless of what language those unions use or what coalitions they claim membership in. The function of those organizations is the defense of state violence, and solidarity with them is solidarity against the people that violence is directed at.

By that standard, the left should subject government union leadership, even where the workers themselves are unambiguously working class, to rigorous political scrutiny rather than reflexive defense. Which politicians does this organization fund and why. What does it lobby for and against. When its members’ interests conflict with the interests of the working class communities those members serve, which side does it take. These are not hostile questions. They are the questions that any serious political movement asks of its institutional allies.

The Muddiness Is the Point

The situation is not going to resolve into a clean answer, because the underlying reality does not have a clean answer. A capitalism that uses the state as its enforcement mechanism creates genuine contradictions for anyone trying to organize inside that state. Government workers are simultaneously working class people with legitimate interests in collective defense and agents of an institution that exists to manage and contain the working class. Both things are true. The organizations that represent them are simultaneously expressions of labor’s instinct for self-defense and captured institutions that have made their peace with the class structure they were built to challenge. Both things are true.

The left that picks one side of these contradictions and ignores the other will keep producing analysis that is clean, satisfying, and wrong. The left that sits in the tension, supporting government worker organization where it builds working class power and critiquing it where it reinforces class domination, is doing something harder and more useful.

That discomfort is not a sign that the analysis has gone wrong. It is a sign that the analysis is finally taking the situation seriously.