The Need for Prisoners to Join the IWW
By Ali Khalid Abdullah
Prisoners throughout the USA are working for slave wages for their captors. They are working in these state and federal death camps as cooks, dishwashers, porters/janitors, painters, clerks, teachers aides, and in various factories within the prisons for pennies per hour. Prisoners are making millions of dollars for their captors, not even realising the importance of their won potential power. Yet, prisoners have power, but it is displaced and unrealised.
Prisoners are working hard under harsh conditions that exhaust and tax their emotional and psychological being and health. While they are given no paid vacations, no overtime pay, no sick pay, no health insurance and no retirement plans. They have become Amerikka's newest exploited labour market. The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) has expanded over the nation as prisons have mushroomed and become warehouses for slave labour, with huge profits on Wall Street for private and state interest groups.
If prisoners banded together in solidarity, there could be an end to this Americanised sweatshop labour exploitation.
In the past there were prisoners in North Carolina and in the State of Texas who attempted to organise their labour to get recognition either by a union or as a union of their own. However, they were defeated in the courts. Why? Because these brave pioneers did not have the full weight and support of their fellow workers and revolutionaries on the outside. They were unable to reach out into the minds of the average citizen, who is ignorant of what's going on out there. The average citizen simply does not stop to think what is happening to prisoners or what is happening to all that money from selling the products of prisoners' labour. They do not question the physical conditions and psychological conditions under which the prisoners work, all the public knows is what officials tell them.
Now is the time prisoners all across the nation can make a difference. They should contact the
Industrial Workers of the World and become members. I am convinced that if prisoners were to link up with the IWW (the only anti-authoritarian, revolutionary, anti-boss union in America today) that a difference could and would be made. The prisoncrats would no longer have the ability to control the livelihoods of prisoners by forcing them to work as slaves. They could no longer tell prisoners that they would be punished if they quit their jobs, losing good time for standing up to tyranny and harassment. But to achieve this, prisoners must become consciously aware of their situation and desire to fight back in a manner that could produce positive results.Therefore, fellow prisoners, I urge you to contact your local IWW Chapter of the National HQ and join the IWW today. Become members and friends and develop the interest of fellow workers and supporters so that prisoners can make a difference. Just imagine if all prisoners went on strike. If no prisoner went to work. What would happen? Heads of state government would be coming down the pike to find out what prisoners wanted. Then, prisoners, united in action and cause, could proudly refer them to the IWW spokesperson representing them in the name of Wobbly solidarity