Free and Unfree Labor Alliance

By SETH SANDRONSKY

An injury to one is an injury to all. Putting these nine words into action were some unions in alliance with the 2018 prison labor strike in Canada and the US from Aug. 21 through Sept. 9.

The prison strikers, men and women in federal, immigration, and state prisons, stopped work, sat-in and boycotted. In this way, they followed in the path of the black freedom movement to overthrow Jim Crow segregation after WW II. The 2018 prison strikers articulated 10 demands, from ending prison slavery (a relic of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution aimed at stealing the labor of free blacks for private profit after the Civil War), to earning the prevailing local or state wage rates and receiving rehabilitation services. Supporters on the outside helped those inside.

In California, the Oakland Local of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee reached out to the United Auto Workers Local 2865, University of California Student-Workers Union, which represents 17,000-plus academic student employees, from readers, tutors, graduate student instructors, teaching assistants and research assistants across the nine UC campuses. We saw the prison strike as a socio-economic justice issue, Emily Yen, the president of Local 2865 and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at UCLA, told The Progressive Populist.

To this end, Local 2865 urged its members to contact state lawmakers in support of the 10 prison strike demands, while linking policies that fund incarceration and defund higher education. “In California, as state investment in public education has plummeted, more and more state funding has been spent locking people up. Incarcerated people have worked in a number of different areas, from making furniture for the UC in the 1980s, to fighting wildland fires today.”

It is worth noting that prison labor fighting California wildfires alongside local and state unionized workers receive as little as a dollar a day, and lack access to related apprenticeship programs upon prison release. The basic unfairness of this hyper-low pay labor system is creeping into public view in no small measure due to the people and property in harm’s way of climate change-fueled wildfires in and out of the Golden State.

(Not) working while imprisoned can be a fraught situation. We turn to Nazgol Ghandnoosh, Ph.D., a senior research analyst at The Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C. “Many incarcerated people want to work,” she told The Progressive Populist, “and some put in a lot on the line to participate in this strike.

“Some of the 10 strike demands are very close to home for people in university settings, e.g., the call for reinstating Pell grants (demand 9) in prisons so that people can make the most of their time there.

“Union members can also relate to the call for fair pay for work behind bars and for equal treatment — regardless of race or conviction offense. Many Americans now recognize the need for drug sentencing reform, but strike organizers are encouraging people to recognize that our country has also gone overboard when it comes to sentencing for violent crimes. People make mistakes in their youth, some are terrible ones that harm others and land them in prison. But with one of every seven people in prison serving a life sentence, we should heed the strike organizers’ call for ending “Death by Incarceration.”

The Industrial Workers of the World, North America, International Confederation of Labor-ICL/Confederación Internacional del Trabajo-CIT, Teachers for Social Justice, Illinois, UAW Local 4121, Washington and UNITE HERE Local 2, San Francisco also joined the national and global endorsers of the 2018 prison strike.

The AFL-CIO did not reply to a request for comment. To help us understand that, we turn to Brooke Terpstra, an organizer with the Oakland chapter of IWOC, and member of the national prison-strike media team.

“Most labor unions gave up any notions of “social unionism” long ago,” Terpstra told The Progressive Populist. “Maintained by a professionalized corps of staffers, the mainstream of organized labor is engaged in highly compartmentalized defensive actions, trying to protect their own shops, and not to engage in larger social battles.”

In his view, consciousness and ideology matter shape how free and unfree people relate to each other. “To question the legitimacy of incarceration is to question the legitimacy of the whole power structure,” according to Terpstra. “Belonging to a union doesn’t magically bestow an immunity to propaganda or to the cultural violence that disappears black, brown, and poor whites to prisons.”

Labor outside out of prisons cannot be free while labor in them suffers from ultra-low pay and harsh policies.

Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2018

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