Prisoners Strike, Say No To Slave Labor - 27:32
Prisoners, Say No To Being Used As Slave Labor and
Withhold Their Labor
Power In Nationwide Strike
with
Cole
Dorsey and Michael Forest, Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee,
Industrial Workers of the World
Prisons can’t run without inmates, in more ways than one.
Prisoners wash floors, work in the laundries and kitchens, and provide a
large amount of the labor that keeps their facilities running. In return,
they earn pennies per hour
or even no pay at all. That’s sparking what may
have been the largest prison strike yet as inmates across the country
stopped working on Sept. 9. The strikers are calling for an end to forced
labor and what they call “prison slavery”. And, it’s no coincidence that
they picked Sept. 9 as the strike date: It was the 45th anniversary of the
Attica rebellion, when prisoners at the Attica Correctional Facility in New
York demanded their rights in one of the most significant civil rights
occurrences of the century.
"I'M BEGINNING TO BELIEVE THAT `U.S.A.'
STANDS FOR THE UNDERPRIVILEGED SLAVES OF AMERICA" wrote a 20th-century prisoner from Mississippi in a letter detailing
the daily violence he witnessed behind prison walls. His statement resounds with a long tradition of prisoners, and particularly African-American prisoners, who have used the
language and narrative of slavery to describe the conditions of their imprisonment. In the year 2000, as the punishment industry becomes a leading employer and producer for the U.S. "state," and as private prison and "security" corporations bargain to control the profits of this traffic
in
human degradation, the analogies between slavery and prison abound.
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