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A prison strikes organized in two dozen states and involving hundreds of prison laborers, sparked off solidarity actions over the weekend around the world.
The strike was planned on the 45-year anniversary of the Attica prison riot, which ended in the death of 29 mostly Black and Puerto Rican prisoners but momentarily shut down work and sent ripples across the country highlighting the injustice of prison labor.
Today, almost 1 million inmates are forced to work either for free or for cents an hour, producing products that are sold on the mass market, contracted by multinationals like Post-it, McDonalds, British Petroleum, Victoria’s Secret, Renault, Yves Rocher and L’Oreal.
Most labor inside prisons, however, exists to help the facility running, which in the case of private prisons, feeds into the profits of their owners as they save on having to pay the minimum wage.
U.S. law permits forced labor for people convicted of a crime, leading in the exploitative situations seen in prisons.
“That’s why none of these protections, such as worker protections, apply to prisoners,” Alex Friedmann, the managing editor of Prison Legal News, told CBS News.
Many prisoner rights advocates consider the use of forced labor of inmates to be akin to slavery.
“Prisoners are forced to work for little or no pay. That is slavery,” read a statement from the IWW Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, which helped organize Friday's strike.
“They may have replaced the whip with pepper spray, but many of the other torments remain: isolation, restraint positions, stripping off our clothes and investigating our bodies as though we are animals,” added the statement.
Coercion, either through physical violence or punitive measures, is often used against prisoners if they do not work or do not work to expectations.
Bringing light to their own companies reliant on prison labor, to prison conditions at home and detention policy for immigrants, reportedly activists in Serbia, Lithuania, Spain, France, Britain, Greece, Germany, Sweden, Australia and Canada held sit-ins, waved banners and banged on prison walls to add onto pressure to end U.S. prison labor.
“The world is a giant high-security prison,” wrote activists in Lithuania, which has the highest incarceration rates in Europe. “Impoverished by predatory markets and repressed by merciless states; we are left without choices.”
Serbian organizers also wrote that, “In the northern plains of Serbia, at the gates of Europe, stands a fortress wall equipped with heat cameras, towers, attack dogs, concertina wire (the bastards), drones, police, military and racist militias. … The system that keeps people apart profits politically and economically from this exclusion but the will to move freely is stronger than their walls and cannot be stopped.”
Saturday, about 800 protesters chanted outside of the Yarl’s Wood detention center near Bedford, U.K., to shut down the facility, where they say immigrants and refugees are denied basic civil rights.
In the U.S., dozens of prisons participated in the strike, several ending in lockdowns, “disturbances” and repression from guards.
The Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, which organized the national action with contraband phones, wheatpaste and letters, reported sit down strikes and hunger strikes, including in women’s prisons and Guantanamo.
Earlier in the week the Holmes Correctional in Florida had a head start, with 400 inmates smashing the prison facility and taking over four dorms on Wednesday. A fire in a Nebraska prison also drew attention to understaffing.
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