America is built on prison labor. When will the labor movement defend prisoners?

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, around 60% of formerly incarcerated people struggle with unemployment. The ACLU has reported that there are over 800,000 incarcerated workers in state prisons. This does not include jails and detention center in the US. People are exploited for their labor, either working to maintain the prison, or reduce commodities for low pay, or no pay. In contrast, the state saves billions, and multinational corporations make billions. This episode of Rattling the Bars will explore these relations with one of the labor organizers of the year for Indy’s Times Magazine, Katherine Passley, a grad school organizer and co-director of Beyond the Bars in Miami, Florida. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, Katherine has ran successful campaigns in Florida prison system to lower the cause of phone calls and assist formerly incarcerated people in obtaining employment. Her efforts have saved millions of dollars for loved ones of incarcerated people.

Katherine Passley:

We managed to pass free phone calls inside of our jails, and not just free phone calls, but we wanted everyone to have tablets so that way they have unrestricted access to calling their family members, access to the libraries. We ended up getting pushback from our commissioners because we wanted movies for them. Like, come on now.

Mansa Musa:

And in the later segment, we will speak with author Kim Kelly about her book, Fight Like Hell, which brings to the forefront workers who have generally been left out of the history and imagination of the labor struggle.

Kim Kelly:

I’ve been heartened to see labor unions, some of the unions whose members have been trapped in these drags, speaking up for farm workers, for grad student workers, for people that are just being disappeared saying, “You can’t do that to our members.” There are people.

Mansa Musa:

But first, my conversation with Katherine Passley. Welcome, Katherine.

Katherine Passley:

Thank you so much, Mansa Musa. It’s amazing to be here.

Mansa Musa:

And I open up by acknowledging that you was Labor Organizer of the year. How did you feel about that? How did you receive that?

Katherine Passley:

I mean, I’m just grateful to all the folks that allow me to be a leader in their space and developing leaders as well. So, it came as such a joy, but also bittersweet, because it’s just like, we’re just scratching the surface, there’s so much left to do.

Mansa Musa:

The reality is that when our peers acknowledge our work, our work is the reflection of our work, and it’s a reflection of how we doing our work that get us these accolades, these boots on the ground. This ain’t you wrote a poem, or you wrote an essay. This is labor. So thank you for your contribution.

Let’s talk about how do you look at the correlation between the prison movement, labor, and social conditions that exist in society today?

Katherine Passley:

Yeah, I think it’s really interesting to know, this system is working exactly as it’s designed to do. When we think about converse leasing to what we’re dealing with now with modern day slavery, and that clause in the 13th Amendment that allows for people to become slaves once they’ve been convicted of a crime. And even folks that haven’t been convicted of a crime. Right now in Florida, in my city, in Miami, 60% of our jails haven’t even been to pretrial yet, they’re in pretrial. And they’re the ones that are the trustees that are giving out the place, that are doing all of this cleaning the jail and all of this labor for free, and they’re still innocent of what they’re being accused of. So, we understand jail to jail and prisons to be a form of labor control. They’re incarcerating surplus labor, for anyone that is politically attuned, understand, this is also a way to cheapen labor. The moment you get out, your labor isn’t valued as much because of your record.

So now you’re forced into temp industries, you’re forced into accepting minimum wage. Your disadvantages are similar to our brothers and sisters that are immigrants. And as a child of immigrant parents, my father who’s currently incarcerated, I understand that when we talk about abolition, we need to talk about labor. We need to talk about that intersection. And also, we need to bring to the forefront the fact that most of the struggles for folks that have been inside, and out, when we think about Attica, the revolt, we’re talking about people that were fighting for better working conditions. It was always about labor, and our time. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was also like, “These corporations are exploiting us. Let’s attack their money.”

So, it is always going to be about how we can take back our power from the current political structure, and the current economic structure. So it’s like, how do we fight capitalism, basically? So that’s what we’ve been doing here at Beyond the Bars, is trying to bridge these two movements, bridge the abolition movement with the labor movement. And there’s so many challenges, right? Because if you are convicted of a crime, you also can’t hold union leadership for 13 years and have legal standing. So it’s just like, okay, we want unions, but our voices can’t be represented in unions because of our record, but we know that that’s the only way for us to get upward mobility. And so it’s like, how do we get unions to now fight for our interests, knowing that that’s also in the best interest of unions that need density. They need us as well in order to… So it’s really marrying these two self-interests to get to that class union that we need. We need all of us together.

Mansa Musa:

Right. For the most part. Your major unions don’t look at prisons as an entity when it comes to labor movement or union. Do you have a view on that?

Katherine Passley:

Yeah. I think a good chunk of that is education. We need to educate and bring our union brothers and sisters into the mix to understand that historically temp workers, prison labor, like you’re mentioning cheap labor, has been used to kind of bust union strikes. So it’s just like there’s that tension of like, oh, these people have been used against us for so long that there isn’t this realization that, well, what would it look like if we were to bring those people into the union so that they can’t bust these union efforts?

So I think it’s going to take some creativity, and just the will to actually bring in our incarcerated brothers and sisters into the union fold in ways that just hasn’t been done before. And I think it’s hard for people to reckon with something that they haven’t experienced, or haven’t even tried. And I think we have the conditions now, and that are getting worse, where it’s just like, “We need to.”

Mansa Musa:

Right. And we look at the latest assault on labor workers from this government, and we recognize that in a hundred days, this government been in existence for a hundred days, in a hundred days they have managed to take people’s jobs, force people out of work, they decimated the middle class. Now most people got PhDs and certain skill set, they’re trying to get jobs at basically anywhere. My question here is, how do we make the connection between that right there and the fact that on top of that people are going to be released, and going to be put in the same pot competing for jobs with other workers, and are unskilled? How do you look at that?

Katherine Passley:

That is quite the question, because it’s just like when we talk about competition within the working class, the reality is it’s like, this many folks at the top that are making these rules and making these jobs, and then there’s thousands, millions at this point, of job opportunities for folks. And so it is just like, we really have to fight for not just any kind of job, but it’s just like, how do we shift who’s making the amount of money? And the reality is these heads of these corporations are making billions of dollars, millions of dollars, and then saying, “Okay, you are in competition with that person because that person is an immigrant and they’re trying to take your 725 job.”

So it’s just like we need to actually know who the actual culprit is. And this is why I say union is important, because bargaining is important. So it’s like, when folks come out, it’s just like, how do we fight for good jobs? And folks that are currently unemployed, all of folks that are looking for jobs, it’s not that there aren’t jobs available, it’s just that there aren’t good jobs that pay living wages. And it’s not to the fault of the working class. It’s really to the fault of the ruling class, the capitalist class, that are putting profit above all things. And it’s just like, well, we actually need this competition, because we want you guys to keep fighting amongst yourselves, versus actually turning and trying to fight us for better working conditions, and for better pay, and for livable wages, and for all of these things that are due to us if we were able to get together and actually fight for them.

So I think, if anything, we all need to strengthen our organizing skills, and bring in our folks, because it just doesn’t make sense for us to fight each other for what these bad bosses say we deserve. I think we need to start coming together and fighting for better jobs, better conditions. And we can get it. If we fight for it, we can get it.

Mansa Musa:

In March, I went to the University of Massachusetts Amherst to speak on a panel after a screening of the film Strike, with the filmmaker and one of the elder revolutionaries in the movie, Bobby Dellelo. Strike was a film and a documentary about how California prisoners struck using the hunger strike as a means to get the solitary confinement as it was being used in California prisons to become no longer used.

JoeBill Muñoz:

One of, I think, the dynamic things about the moment in time that we’re in, that the film really brings to light, but it’s oftentimes overlooked, is really the past 15, 20 years has been a real dynamic moment of prison struggle, beginning with a statewide prison strike that was called in Georgia back in the mid-2000s onto several rounds of national prison strikes that have been called really by different sensible organizations. We’ve seen really a heightened level of strikes and other forms of collective action behind bars. And the Pelican Bay hunger strike is kind of a signal example of that, but it’s unique in a lot of ways in that many of those strikes have also been work stoppages. They’ve been strikes where folks have refused to leave their cells.

Mansa Musa:

General practicing prison. Once you call a collective action and it’s understood that’s what it’s going to be, there’s consequences for calls in the picket line. There’s consequences, because you’re not arbitrarily calling an action saying, “Oh, oh, we want to call the strike because we want to enjoy it.” The issue that we calling this strike about is life and death. So if you cross this picket line, then you’re saying you with the enemy. And it’s understood, and it’s not a matter of everybody, people will be running around like, you cross the picket line like, no, it’s an understanding that the conditions are so bad that it’s behoove you to understand this, that people dying in the medical department, the garbage we’re being served, we ain’t making parole, we’re not getting out here, and we’re trying to get this changed. So we are saying the peaceful resolution for this is, don’t go eat.

Bobby Dellelo:

What struck me was the attitude that I’m dying here, so it don’t matter what I do. And I’ve escaped three times with a bunch of almost, and each time that I went over that wall, I took my life in my hands and said, “I’m going to be free, or I’m going to be dead, but I ain’t living like this rat hole.”

JoeBill Muñoz:

This is our 75th screening, in-person screening, which has been amazing. The film came out last April at a film festival, and then since then you make a film and you’re like, “Man, I hope my parents show up to watch it.” But the way it’s been embraced by folks of all stripes, we’ve been in churches, we’ve been in film festivals, we had the opportunity to take the film into Sandpoint in state prison and screen it there, into juvenile detention centers in California. And that work is just expanding.

Mansa Musa:

I highly recommend that you review this documentary and make your own determination on how effective this strike was, but more importantly, how simple it was to organize and get something done when the problem seemed insurmountable.

Recently, I sat down with labor journalist Kim Kelly, author of the book Fight Like Hell. I spoke with Kim about her chapter on incarcerated workers and other workers who I generally undermined as organizers and leaders in the labor movement. In this segment, I explore how the prisoner rights movement and class struggle connects as a social issue. You took the position that in your book primarily about labor, that you going to specifically put a section there about the prisoners, but more importantly about the prisoners, and you looking at them as workers. Why was that? Why did you see the need to do that?

Kim Kelly:

Because for some reason that I don’t really understand, not that many other people who’ve written labor books have. It makes the most sense in the world to me. Of course, if we’re going to talk about not only workers, people performing labor, my book focuses on marginalized workers, vulnerable workers, workers who have not been given the respect and the treatment they deserve throughout the centuries. Of course, I would write about incarcerated workers. They’re part of the movement, they’re part of the working class, they’re the most vulnerable population of workers we have. And it always sort of rankled me that I didn’t see that expressed in a lot of the writing about labor, and the books about labor that I was reading.

And of course, there’s some people like Dan Berger, for one, has done a lot of incredible work. Victoria Law too, incredible work talking about incarcerated workers. But it seemed like incarcerated workers in prison, that whole subject was kind of kept in its own little bucket, much like how we see, I think there’s this impulse to silo out different struggles, like women’s rights, and queer and trans rights, and labor rights, and racial justice, and prison issues. But they’re all connected, because sometimes the same person is experiencing all of those struggles at once.

And so when I got the opportunity to write this book and to do it the way I wanted, I was like, okay, of course I’m going to write about auto workers, and farm workers, and so many of the people that are in the book, but I’m also going to specifically make sure that I’m able to include people like disabled workers, who are also kind of siloed out in a complicated situation, and sex workers who are criminalized, who are also dealing with all these different layers of oppression. And incarcerated workers, because not only are they part of the working class that doesn’t get their due and doesn’t, I feel, get the level of solidarity and support that other workers do, it’s also just not telling the real history of labor in this country if you’re not focusing on the organizing efforts and the labor of people who are in prison. That’s just not the whole story.

Mansa Musa:

And you know what? I want you to unpack that, because you’re making a nice observation on how we look at labor movement. But more importantly, unpack why you think that we don’t have that, we don’t have a general attitude about labor. When we say union, we say AFL-CIO, we say certain, it’s the hierarchy, the union hierarchy. When we say labor, we got a certain attitude on what that institution look like. But as you just said, we got sex workers, you got disabled workers, you got, like before the United Farm Workers became unionized they call them migrant workers. And then when they became unionized, they got their just due in terms of who they were, and they were. Why do you think that in this country, because it’s in this country in particular, why do you think that in this country we had this tendency to put things inside, mainly around labor?

Kim Kelly:

So, I think there’s a lot of reasons, some more understandable than others. First, I think a lot of folks in this country just don’t know that much about the labor movement in general, right? Unless they’re part of a union, part of a union family, unless they go out and seek that information. Because as much as it’s this crucial aspect of our lives, of our society, union density, only about, I think it’s down to 10% of workers are in a union in this country, down from much higher percentages in previous decades. So, already there’s fewer people that have real life experience with unions.

And then, how many of them are reading history books, are looking into the political and cultural aspects of the movement? How many people are going to their middle school, or their high school, and learning about this history? Not that many. Even when I was getting interested in it as I was organizing with my first union, I come from a union family. I’m third generation. And even I, and I am a big history nerd, even I didn’t really know that much about it until I went looking for it. And then I kind of had to take what I could get, because I wasn’t approaching it in an academic sense. They’re obviously labor historians, and researchers, academics. That’s a whole different ball game. They know more than I ever will. But there’s only so many of them.

All that to say, I feel like the labor movement is just not as well known in general. And then on top of that, the labor movement itself, especially when we’re talking about these bigger bureaucratic kind of entities like the AFL-CEO, and its predecessor, the AFL, sometimes they were perpetuating some of this exclusion, this oppression. I mean, for a very, very, very long time. Unions were segregated in this country. Black workers were not able to join unions. And there have been these threads of exclusion going back to the 1800s when the AFL supported the Chinese Exclusion Act, they intentionally decided they didn’t want to organize Latino workers. Women weren’t allowed to unionize for a very long time. There’s all these different aspects of the labor movement that are exclusionary. So that’s also kind of part of the stories that are told.

So now when you see a politician going on, whatever, news, and saying, “Oh, the working class,” they mean a guy like my dad: a white guy with a beard and a hard hat, and bad political opinions. They don’t see someone like you or someone like me as part of the working class, as part of labor. Even though if you look at the actual data and the actual reality, the person who is most likely to be a union worker in this country is a black woman who works in healthcare or the service industry. That’s what the present of future looks like. And that’s what the past has looked like too.

When I was writing the book, and even in just the other work I’ve done, I was always so interested in finding out those stories of the people that didn’t fit that stereotype, that easy stereotype, because that’s where the real stuff was happening. Back in 1866, I believe, when the Washerwomen of Jackson, one year after emancipation, a group of black washerwomen in the south, they organized the first labor organization in Mississippi. That is labor history, and that’s black history, and that’s women’s history. And that’s just one story. How many other stories are like that? I packed a bunch of them in the book, but there’s so many more out there. And if you want to understand labor in this country, you have to look below the surface, because otherwise you’re just not going to get the real story, and you’re going to not care as much about the people that have done all the work.

Mansa Musa:

How did you see that, the impact that had on the prison populations throughout the country? Because you cite some marquee cases. And I remember, we attempted Eddie Conway, we attempted to unionize in the Maryland system. And all this came from the attempts that was being made throughout the country.

Kim Kelly:

Yeah. As you know, California is kind of where it kicked off in Folsom with the PU, Prisoners Union. So obviously, prisons have been a site of rebellion, and resistance, and dissent organizing since people started being thrown into these places. But it was really in the 1970s when organizing just kicked off in a big way. Like I said, California, it kind of lit that spark with this push to unionize, to push for better working conditions and higher wages at all, right? But better wages as workers. And as you know, it spread throughout the country. And there was just this really dynamic and widespread effort, and an amount of interest around unionizing specifically. And there were in a variety of institutions across the country, incarcerated workers organized their own unions. And this was happening at the same time that a ton of people organized around black power, and brown power. Outside the walls, there was women’s lib; there were the first stirrings of the liberation movement; there was Vietnam, anti-war movement. There’s all these movements happening at the same time.

And of course, people, even if they’re inside, they still know what’s happening outside. Just seeing the way that organizers connected those issues inside and outside, I mean, one of the most consequential rebellions in prison history, Attica, when I was researching this, I learned that the year prior to that rebellion, there had been a strike in the machine shop of that facility that was led by Jorge Nieves, who was a brown panther. And throughout that organizing, that organizing takes a while. A place doesn’t just erupt. Throughout the organizing those conversations about the way they’re treated, the working conditions that are happening in that machine shop, it seems pretty clear that, cause and effect, that first strike led to a much bigger rebellion. And that’s a little piece of the history that I think is lesser known, that a strike led to this kind of monumental event. And it just makes you wonder how many other labor-focused, work-focused bits of organizing, bits of rebellion, led to these bigger events.

Mansa Musa:

Right. Rattling the Bars was intentional about showing the labor movement and its relationship to the prison industrial complex. But more importantly, we were intentional in bringing real life people into this space. People that are in this movement, people that are organizing, people that are moving around the country trying to abolish the prison industrial complex as we know it, by removing the 13th Amendment is one of the ways they’re trying to do it. But we’ve seen from these segments how labor, the prison industrial complex, prisoners has come together to eradicate the prison industrial complex and the 13th Amendment.

We ask that you look at these segments and make your determination on how you think this reporting was, how important this information was, and more importantly, what views you had on expanding or offering your critique on what we can do to improve this reporting. We ask that you continue to support the real news in Rattling the Bars, because guess what? After all, we are the Real News.