A.A. Roberts is a union member.
On Wednesday, July 22, at the intersection of South Baldwin and Williamson Street in Madison, Wisconsin, Corey Ruiz was murdered by Madison Police Officer Kiel Peterson. Early in the morning of Tuesday, Aug. 4, Madison and Wisconsin State police, alongside city workers, cleared the encampment.
Whenever there is police violence against members of our community, it is imperative that organized Labor Demands Justice for the victims of this brutality. This is because the police, in all their forms, whether state troopers, local departments, county sheriffs, ICE or Border Patrol, serve a central purpose: to keep the working class in line and protect property.
When the boss has the right to fire workers on a whim and when landlords are unchecked in their ability to raise rents, the working class, who are by and large renters, faces great precarity. There is greater and greater instability among workers as more and more of us live paycheck to paycheck and as vast numbers of people in this country cannot afford an emergency expense of a few hundred dollars. How many of us are but a handful, or fewer, of paychecks away from being homeless and at the mercy of police sweeps?
When workers organize together, form unions, and make demands upon our bosses for stability, the police serve to clamp down on our ability to leverage collective power. Should workers band together and fight for their rights collectively, the police will step in on behalf of the bosses and the landlords and break up picket lines and demonstrations. ICE terror serves to threaten our immigrant neighbors and keep them afraid from acting collectively. Every boss with immigrant workers has the ability to at least threaten, if not call ICE directly, should their workers dare organize a union.
If a worker is unfortunate enough, like so many are, to end up unhoused, they will see the violence of the police unleashed upon them. If a worker stands up against the precarity and poverty pressed upon them by a system built by and for the rich, the police stand at the ready to smash their most militant actions.
Every union worker may reasonably ask: but what about the police unions? Are they not our union brothers and sisters?
The basis of being a union brother or a union sister is solidarity. We act in solidarity against the bosses. Any union member who acts against fellow union members, by crossing a picket line for example, is no brother to their fellow worker. Police go further than crossing picket lines—they actively break them up. While I walked the picket lines with fellow members of the UAW in Mansfield, Massachusetts, during their strike of the Big Three automakers in 2023, it was the police who broke our lines to let trucks in and out of the facility. On the picket lines of Meriter Hospital in Madison in the summer of 2025, workers were surveilled endlessly by private security while MPD cars circled the block. The private security and MPD served two sides of the same purpose: protecting property and profits. Viral clips from the winter of 2025 Teamsters’ strike against Amazon showed NYPD officers arm in arm escorting scab drivers through masses of striking workers and supporters.
As Labor Demands Justice, it is crucial that we win over our unorganized siblings to the union movement. If we are unorganized, we are less able to resist and respond to instances of police terror and violence. We must also teach our organized siblings to not collaborate with the police. Too many times have unionized city workers been used as shields for police during encampment sweeps. This is true both here in Madison, when the vigil site for Corey Ruiz was swept on Aug. 4, and in cities across the country. We must follow the lead of the union bus drivers in New York who have refused to become prisoner transports for the police during moments of mass arrests at large demonstrations.
It is our duty as organized labor to demand justice, and also to act in solidarity with those resisting and demonstrating against the capitalists. Labor Demands Justice means that labor must act with solidarity. Refuse to do any work with the police. Do not aid their sweeps, do not aid their mass arrests. Do not drive that bobcat and load that dumpster, do not drive that bus and take protestors to jail.
All across the country, police are strikebreakers. Police occupy and terrorize our communities. They exact violence on the working class. For all these reasons and more, it is essential that Labor Demands Justice for Corey Ruiz, for Jacob Blake, for Tony Robinson, for Breonna Taylor, for George Floyd, for every person killed by those enemies of the working class known as the police.
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