Among the many buildings torched this past week, one stands out as an odd target: the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, DC. While some have speculated that protesters set the lobby ablaze Sunday night because of the labor federation’s failure to pursue racial justice with sufficient gusto, the more likely explanation is that protesters saw it as just another fancy edifice.

That’s a tragedy. The headquarters of the country’s most important labor federation should be widely viewed as a symbol of racial and economic justice. That the union hall was of no special importance to the people rebelling is an indictment of the AFL-CIO. As the DC area local of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) put it in a press release yesterday, “Why did young black and brown workers, frustrated with constant injustice, not view the AFL-CIO as their natural ally with over a century of experience in the struggle for equality? Why did they not recognize that act as burning their own house?”

Some unions, including the ATU, have given a glimpse of the best of American labor — one at the forefront of fighting all forms of oppression. In Brooklyn, when the police attempted to use a city bus last week to transport arrested protesters, the bus driver stepped off and refused to drive it. His union backed him up. In Minneapolis, after a rank-and-file bus driver declined to transport police, his ATU local issued a statement affirming members’ right to refuse to assist police operations. The national Transport Workers Union (TWU), which represents workers from San Francisco to New York, issued a statement saying their drivers are under no obligation to act as police chauffeurs.