One of the reasons I hate Oakland employee unions is because of their rabid, never-ending campaign to destroy the Oakland Police Department. Labor unions historically were friendly to cops. Their members, mostly White men in the construction, electrical, automotive and other labor-intensive trades, knew that the “thin blue line” of the police was society’s strongest bulwark against crime.
But years ago, unions spread to the government side of the work force, where people of color were getting hired in huge numbers following World War II. These new workers primarily had desk jobs (think of the Department of Motor Vehicles) where they shuffled paperwork and formed the advance guard of the gigantic bureaucracy that government had become. Big cities such as Oakland expanded their reach dramatically, hiring large numbers of unionized employees, while unions such as SEIU and IFPTE absorbed them into their membership, increasing their dues-based coffers and enabling them to become political players by making campaign donations to politicians friendly to their causes.
Here in Oakland, the unions have been on an anti-police vendetta for decades. No wonder Oakland politicians have been trying to defund OPD: the union paymasters that got them elected demand obedience. This explains Carroll Fife, Nikki Bas, Sheng Thao, Pamela Price, Rebecca Kaplan and so many other woke pols who have tried so hard to hobble the cops.
An egregious example of this anti-cop activity by unions is happening right now, with IFPTE and SEIU launching a massive propaganda campaign, called “Cut Waste Not Services,” in advance of the City Council considering a new budget. The two unions are demanding that major cuts be administered to OPD’s budget—on top of the cuts already made that have drastically reduced the number of sworn officers. The unions’ media campaign consists of accusations that, if the City Council fails to chop OPD’s budget enough, then Oakland will go to hell as “key services for children and seniors” are ended. The police department, the unions allege, is rife with “waste, fraud and abuse,” charges for which they offer not a shred of evidence. The core of their complaint is OPD spending on police overtime. A graph they released shows overtime spending doubling in the last decade.
Now, it’s true that Oakland spends a lot on police overtime, but take a minute and ask yourself why. The department is hundreds of officers short of the minimum number required to keep Oakland safe. Despite this handicap, OPD still manages to perform its basic functions, but the only way they can is through overtime. If overtime were eliminated, crime—already intolerable in Oakland—would at least double. The City Council has been warned for many years that their crippling of OPD would result in precisely this dilemma, but they’ve ignored those warnings. So hostile are they to OPD, and so in thrall to their union paymasters, that they’ve deliberately kneecapped OPD to near death, assuming that a future City Council would be able to fix the situation.
Well, the future is right now. Oakland is in a financial mess because of the City Council’s stupidity and budgetary incompetence. They have borrowed from Peter to pay Paul to fund all sorts of nonsensical social programs that don’t work and never could. And now that the butcher’s bill has come due, these damned employee unions are demanding that OPD be even further eviscerated, so that more “anti-violence” programs can be created. Do you feel safer knowing that far fewer police officers will be on the streets, but that a bunch of new “equity” programs will be created for makework jobs? I don’t. But SEIU and IFPTE are loving it. And as long as they maintain power, we’re all in jeopardy.
Steve Heimoff