The strange logic of Judge Mitchell in his vaccine ruling defending the union rights of the FOP.
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Cop unions around the country are making a fuss about vaccine mandates.
“Cop unions.”
Putting those two words together in a sentence make my fingers stiff.
If I had to say them out loud, I would choke.
In Chicago, our Mayor Lightfoot has given cops until December 31 to show proof of vaccination.
Given that we are still in a global pandemic in which five million people have died, this doesn’t seem to me to be an unreasonable mayoral directive.
Under our mayor’s leadership, positive Covid numbers in the city are approaching just 1%.
It would be foolish to claim that vaccine mandates alone can rid us of this plague, but every reputable medical expert has argued that mass vaccination is the road out of the pandemic and vaccines significantly reduce spread and the emergence of another version of the virus.
Chicago Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara has told his members not to comply with Mayor Lightfoot’s very flexible vaccine mandate.
Most of Catanzara’s members have chosen to ignore his gum flapping.
For a while I have argued that the Illinois legislature should remove from issues of bargaining the things in the FOP contract that protect abusive cops from criminal prosecution.
With the prodding of the Black caucus, the legislature made some reforms in the last session. But the FOP contract’s due process language remains an obstacle to justice for abused citizens.
In the final analysis it is the FOP itself and not contract language that is the problem.
The FOP is not a union and is not a member of the labor movement and should not be defended as if they are.
A union is more than who represents members at the bargaining table. Being a union is about who represents workers in a social movement in alliance with others fighting for the same thing.
Catanzara and the FOP took the city to court to block Mayor Lightfoot’s mandate to vaccinate.
Yesterday, Cook County Judge Raymond Mitchell granted a partial restraining order against the mandate.
Mitchell essentially said this was a union issue and court decision should wait for arbitration.
Once again the FOP has chosen to hide behind the fraud of their claim to unionism.
Frankly, it was an odd decision by Judge Mitchell.
“’Obey now, grieve later’ is not possible” with the Dec. 31 vaccine deadline, he wrote. “If every union member complied ... they would have no grievance to pursue and there would be no remedy an arbitrator could award. An award of back pay or reinstatement cannot undo a vaccine. Nothing can.”
Undo a vaccine as a remedy?
Why would anybody want to undo a vaccine that saves lives during a pandemic?
Neither the pandemic nor the vaccine is the real issue for Catanzara.
Not really.
The Mayor is a Black, Lesbian progressive and that’s what this is all about.
If arbitration is what Catanzara wants, then arbitration is what he will get. The city’s lawyers are likely to ask for expedited arbitration and the FOP will likely lose.
Every challenge to vaccine mandates has lost.
Justice Come Down
by Minnie Bruce Pratt
A huge sound waits, bound in the ice,
in the icicle roots, in the buds of snow
on fir branches, in the falling silence
of snow, glittering in the sun, brilliant
as a swarm of gnats, nothing but hovering
wings at midday. With the sun comes noise.
Tongues of ice break free, fall, shatter,
splinter, speak. If I could write the words.
Simple, like turning a page, to say Write
what happened, but this means a return
to the cold place where I am being punished.
Alone to the stony circle where I am frozen,
the empty space, children, mother, father gone,
lover gone away. There grief still sits
and waits, grim, numb, keeping company with
anger. I can smell my anger like sulfur-
struck matches. I wanted what had happened
to be a wall to burn, a window to smash.
At my fist the pieces would sparkle and fall.
All would be changed. I would not be alone.
Instead I have told my story over and over
at parties, on the edge of meetings, my life
clenched in my fist, my eyes brittle as glass.
Ashamed, people turned their faces away
from the woman ranting, asking: Justice,
stretch out your hand. Come down, glittering,
from where you have hidden yourself away.