This piece was shared by the TakeAction staff union in solidarity with Minneapolis Federation of Teachers educators and education support professionals.
We believe that students, schools, and teachers deserve full investment, and we know that we have enough to keep all of our community members safe and cared for. Safe and stable schools are a crucial piece of the safe and stable communities we all deserve. Solidarity forever!
Minneapolis educators are wrapping up the second week of their historic strike for safe and stable schools. After decades of disinvestment and two years of continued crisis, they’re continuing to hold the line for our students and our schools. The educators and staff who support our students every day are fighting for a contract that guarantees living wages for teachers (education support professionals currently make a base salary of just $24,000 a year) and support for students, including mental health resources and prioritization of culturally responsive staff for a student body that is majority Black, Indigenous, and people of color.
“We know in Minneapolis, because they did it in St. Paul, we don’t have a budget crisis — we have a values, a priority crisis,” said Shaun Laden, president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers’ education support professionals chapter.
At the same time, the Minneapolis Police Department is poised to secure a union contract that includes no changes to disciplinary policy, $7,000 bonuses in addition to a starting salary of $75,000, and intimidation measures to discourage journalists from filing FOIA requests. As educators strike for basic living wages and investments in our young people, the department that murdered George Floyd and Amir Locke, that brutalized peaceful protesters, that is bankrupting Minneapolis taxpayers, and that is objectively bad at solving or preventing violence is being rewarded with even more money and a contract that further protects officers from accountability. This contract is a display of carceral logic and white supremacy; it would continue our failed systems of reactive punishment, rather than proactive community investment, and it would disproportionately impact our poor neighbors and our neighbors of color. It’s violent and cynical, and it goes against everything that unions and the labor movement stands for.
The fact is that police unions are fundamentally different from labor unions, by nature of their contracts and because of the role that police have historically played in stifling worker solidarity and labor movements. In 2020, the LA Times reported that police union contracts frequently include language that “allow(s) 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.” Many of these provisions are included in, or are in the process of being added to, the Minneapolis Police Department’s contract.
While most labor movements celebrate collective power and work in solidarity to advance rights, wages, and quality of life for all workers, Pennsylvania State University Professor Paul F. Clark writes that “exclusively protecting the interests of their members, without consideration for other workers, sets police unions apart from other labor groups.” Throughout U.S. history, police departments have worked against working class people and protected the status quo on behalf of white, wealthy, and powerful politicians and business owners. Minneapolis’ own violent history of policing offers a clear example of this truth.
The MPD150 Report teaches us that the Minneapolis Police Department has historically sided with the wealthy and powerful to violently “harass, infiltrate, and attack labor groups, preventing them from building political power and organizing unions.” During the historic Minneapolis general strike of 1934, MPD “ambushed a group of seventy strikers, shooting them in the back with shotguns as they ran away and killing two of them.” An after-action commission found that “police took direct aim at the pickets and fired to kill. Physical safety of the police was at no time endangered. No weapons were in possession of the pickets.” These intentionally brutal intimidation tactics seem like they should have been left behind in the 20th century – and never been employed in the first place. But MPD has never stopped indiscriminately targeting peaceful demonstrators with violence.
On March 16, 2022, the city of Minneapolis reached a $2.4 million settlement with one of our neighbors, Soren Stevenson, who was blinded in one eye after being shot by a rubber bullet in the summer of 2020 as he protested the police murder of George Floyd. Stevenson described the incident, saying, “I did not riot, I did not vandalize, I caused no damage to people or property, did not even disobey police orders.” The police officer who shot him has been named in a second lawsuit that accuses him of partially blinding another peaceful protester within the same week. Nearly ninety years after the 1934 strike, what has changed?
The facts are clear: MPD’s brutality and contempt for the multiracial working class has become evermore entrenched and their violence and corruption is protected – and even sanctioned – by a union contract that serves police officers and a wealthy, powerful few at the expense of the rest of us.
It’s also important to remember that the 1934 strike didn’t end with the police murders of John Belor and Henry Ness, and that despite horrific police violence and corruption, the Teamsters won their strike because of massive, city-wide solidarity. Their victory led to more unions, more collective power for working people, and precedent-setting legislation protecting the power of workers to organize and bargain.
When we come together with collective love, care, and solidarity, anything is possible. As educators continue to hold the line for students and schools, it’s on all of us to show up and throw down with them to win the care and investments our young people and communities need to thrive. Here are six ways to act in solidarity with Minneapolis educators and stand up for investments in community – not more of the same violent, unaccountable policing:
- Join educators on the picket line. Demonstrate solidarity by physically showing up and holding space with educators at your local school’s picket line between 7:30 – 10:00 a.m. every morning.
- Donate to the strike fund. Educators are striking without pay – support them by donating to their strike fund.
- Share a meal. Sign up for provide food, coffee, or words of support to striking educators through this solidarity sign-on form.
- Speak out in solidarity. Tell the school board and superintendent Ed Graff to support educators and students, write a letter to the editor, or share MFT 59’s demands on social media.
- Organize for life-affirming public safety systems in Minneapolis. Join us on Wednesdays at 5:30 p.m. to connect with neighbors and organize for the community investments that keep us all safe, healthy, and cared for.
- Stay posted for opportunities to act against MPD’s new contract. Follow us on social media for updates and ways to take action.
Reading List:
- To get grounded in the fundamental differences between police unions and the rest of the labor movement, read Here’s how police unions aren’t like the rest of the labor movement by Professor Paul F. Clark.
- Read Javier Morillo’s take on how to democratize our relationship with MPD and learn about the fraught history of the Minneapolis Police Department’s union in this 2020 article.
- This isn’t the first time Minneapolis educators have risked it all and gone on strike for necessary investments in students and schools. Learn about the inspiring and precedent setting 1970 Minneapolis teacher strike in this article by Jon Collins.
- A year after eight women were murdered in racially motivated mass shootings in Atlanta, and as we continue to experience a series of highly publicized hate crimes against Asian American women, read Atlanta Spa Shooting Anniversary: More Police Funding Isn’t the Answer to Anti-Asian Hate by Michelle Ming.
