To my coworkers who admire the Fraternal Order of Police President
Yeah, Catanzara is bold. Or is he really? I just hope that you might ask yourself these questions:
Does he really speak for the majority of FOP members?
Does he help them democratically choose what they do as an organization?
Does he help them organize to fight for better working conditions?
I don’t know the answers. Maybe an FOP member who regularly attends lodge meetings would know. But I cannot help but wonder.
I read that he held up a sign: “Catanzara for Mayor 2023”
Let that sink in.
Since we know that anyone who is mayor of Chicago will the boss of CTA workers, ask yourself another question:
Will a Mayor Catanzara be a good boss for CTA workers?
I doubt it.
A good boss—according to the rules of capital accumulation—saves the organization money. Labor is a huge cost burden and cutting those costs is their goal. That goal is the antithesis of our goal as union members.
Our goal is to fight for more full-time jobs with superior benefits and better working conditions. This makes the communities in which we live, stronger. There can be no compromise. However, in business unionism, compromise is the goal (that is another topic).
In my opinion, when a union officer seeks political office, they immediately discredit themselves as honored servants to the union membership.
Politicians like to be a boss. They like to control and deceive the masses for their personal benefit. They use hot-button topics like vaccine mandates to galvanize support for their campaigns.
Such men and women are easily compromised. We will never have enough money to bribe them.
Politicians are not the power we need to fight back. Our unity and ability to fight back publicly—and on the job—is what we need.
I agree: Catanzara seems braver than Boss Dixon and Boss Hill. The admiration that many of us have for him is actually a symptom of the disgraceful conduct by the Local 241 and Local 308 administrations. They often let our employer and mayor beat us to a pulp and walk away with their hands in the air, saying "We can't tell the CTA what to do!"
So seeing Catanzara hold the line against our boss feels good. I feel it too. It makes me smile, in fact.
Other than this apparent fearlessness that our presidents lack, I don’t trust him at all.
I especially don’t trust organizations that are historically tools of repression.
Not all men and women in the police/military are anti-worker or anti-Revolutionary. Many of us have been in or have relatives in the police department and military.
But when it is time to protect strike-breakers, they will be the ones to punish the strikers. Even in our peaceful protests in the Chicago Transit Justice Coalition, police are sent to intimidate us (often by our own union presidents). They were never hostile toward us. They were doing their job. However, the threat is implied by their presence.
In my opinion, police and military are historically unreliable allies for union workers.
I believe we must fight against mandates that punish our coworkers. We must condemn Boss Dixon and Boss Hill for selling us out to the Arbitrator and their friend, Mayor Lightfoot.
However, we also need to exercise great caution right now. Workers who are organized democratically should be the vanguard for Revolution. Not police, military or aspiring politicians.
View the video reading of this article here.
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