All in all, 2022 was a banner yr for organized labor. 1000’s of staff in all kinds of industries unionized; they pushed again in opposition to union-busting campaigns from oligarchs and company hit males; they went on strike and protested unfair remedy, from California to Alabama and all over the place in between. Public assist for unions shot up to 71 percent, and the worryingly under-resourced Nationwide Labor Relations Board was inundated with extra union election petitions than it may deal with. Members of Gen Z, the youngest technology of staff, are even more pro-union than their millennial dad and mom, and so they aren’t shy about talking up. All of that mixed momentum isn’t slowing, both. The approaching yr is already poised to be one other large second for the working class.
A number of the seeds planted in 2022 will start to bear fruit in 2023, as unionized Starbucks and Amazon staff head to the bargaining desk and the Teamsters, now armed with formidable new management, proceed gearing up for a long-expected showdown with the United Parcel Service (UPS). In Alabama, incarcerated staff in 5 completely different jail amenities made historical past with a three-week-long strike that drew much-needed consideration to their brutal working and dwelling circumstances. They confronted brutal retaliation in consequence; meals have been lowered, household visitations have been suspended, harsh new “safety measures” have been enforced, and prisoner activist Kinetik Justice was thrown into solitary confinement. The Alabama staff had identified the dangers getting in, however selected to battle again anyway. Whereas the continuing surge in power round organized labor has undoubtedly reached staff all around the nation, the actions that these Alabama staff specifically took have set the stage for the primary large strike of 2023.
On January 6, incarcerated staff throughout Pennsylvania will launch a statewide strike in solidarity with the Alabama strikers, and in protest of the inhumane insurance policies to which they and different incarcerated staff are subjected by the state of Pennsylvania and the U.S. carceral system writ giant. They introduced their intention to strike with a November 26 communique that was circulated on social media and throughout the broader abolitionist neighborhood. Organized below the title Subaltern Peoples Abolitionist Revolutionary Collective (SPARC), the employees outlined their calls for whereas castigating the Pennsylvania Division of Corrections (PA DOC). “The PA DOC is the enemy of public security,” they wrote. “It’s the enemy of human decency.”
Most of Pennsylvania’s prisons are positioned in rural, majority-white areas, removed from main inhabitants facilities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Consequently, incarcerated folks wrestle to keep up connections with their households whereas the revenue their labor creates is pumped into communities removed from their properties. “There’s a purpose why PA state prisons aren’t positioned close to Philadelphia or Pittsburgh: to verify the areas with the very best populations of Black & Brown folks don’t reap the financial advantages of mass incarceration,” SPARC wrote. Because the communique notes, the agricultural areas between the large cities are sometimes dismissed or denigrated as conservative backwaters — the identical type of stereotyping that impacts the Deep South, together with Alabama. SPARC referenced this mentality as effectively, emphasizing a reference to the strikers down south by writing, “If it should be Alabama in between, then LET’S GIVE THEM ALABAMA!”
SPARC’s calls for echo these of previous jail strikers, from the 1971 Attica Insurrection to the huge nationwide prison strikes of 2016 and 2018 in addition to their Alabama brethren. The unifying consider all of those actions — and within the many different strikes, protests and acts of resistance which have taken place in prisons and central amenities all through the centuries — is a straightforward request for humanity. The strikers need to be handled as folks, to be acknowledged because the human beings that they’re and handled with primary decency, compassion and respect. Their record of calls for reveals a deep want for reference to family members and the world outdoors the partitions. Requests for video visits, simpler entry to communication units, and household picnic days sit alongside financial considerations like higher wages and ending the lack of jobs, like mail sorting and commissary, that should be out there to incarcerated staff however are being outsourced to distributors like Safe Pak.
It’s clear that, like so many different unions, SPARC will not be solely involved with so-called bread-and-butter financial points. The collective can be calling for materials enhancements to members’ high quality of life, each on and off the job, and for sweeping reforms to the state’s legal punishment system.
Pennsylvania has the very best incarceration price within the Northeast, and presently imprisons 96,000 people in jails, prisons, immigration detention and different central amenities. Black persons are vastly overrepresented in Pennsylvania’s jail inhabitants however make up solely 12 percent of the state’s total inhabitants.
The strikers are demanding an finish to sexual harassment and sexual assault inside girls’s amenities, and an finish to all harassment and racism inside all amenities. Pennsylvania lawmakers lately handed laws aimed toward barely improving conditions for pregnant folks incarcerated inside girls’s amenities, the place the whole inhabitants has risen by 966 p.c since 1980, however the risk of assault and abuse by staff stays a relentless menace to prisoners of any gender.
SPARC can be calling for the passage of Senate Bill 835 (“the Geriatric Invoice”) which might create a mechanism for aged or sick prisoners to petition the parole board for launch and compel the PA DOC to offer extra services to growing old prisoners, like helping them with petitions for launch, record-finding, and monitoring their care. Roughly 27 percent of individuals held in Pennsylvania’s state prisons are over the age of 55; there are such a lot of aged folks incarcerated in Pennsylvania that, in 2021, the PA DOC created a new unit particularly to deal with sufferers with dementia and related types of reminiscence loss.
As well as, SPARC is demanding that the meals served be edible, a easy plea for sustenance that nonetheless remained a international idea to the PA DOC till a minimum of 2016, when it ceased serving its revolting “food loaf” as punishment.
The upcoming SPARC strike will likely be a take a look at for the newly revitalized labor motion. Will the identical labor leaders, politicians and media shops who’ve cheered on organizing wins at Starbucks and Amazon and supported strikes at universities, coal mines and strip golf equipment present the identical assist to the incarcerated staff of Pennsylvania? Hopefully, the outdated labor adage “an harm to 1 is an harm to all” will ring true, as a result of if the aim is to construct energy and transfer ahead as a motion, we cannot leave anyone behind — particularly our weak fellow staff contained in the partitions.
