Incarcerated Workers’ Self-Organizing Contributes to Abolition Movements against Global Apartheid

Abstract

Incarcerated workers across Canadian prisons have organized and conducted strike actions. These actions, however, have been rejected by the Canadian state, on the basis that the incarcerated workers are not legally employees. The court ruling ( Guérin et al. v. Canada 2018), while accepting evidence of the prisoners’ material hardships from their low pay and from reprisals for striking, excluded them from the legal protections of employees and thus devalued the prisoners’ labour. The self-organizing efforts reveal the levels of inequality experienced by incarcerated workers in the ruling order of global apartheid, “in which race and mobility feature as primary variables for which heightened security and militarization are the answer” ( Besteman 2020 , 1). This article discusses the effects of prisoners’ organizing in the larger context of social justice. In so doing it examines cultural texts that document interactions between organizers inside and outside prisons and their contribution toward alternatives to carceral cultures. This article argues that the cultural production by prisoners and their supporters express the conditions in which prisoner self-organizing is necessary for larger social transformation. The creation and nurturing of collective relationships with one another, both within and across prison walls, clarify common grounds for liberation struggles, and connect envisioned freedoms to overthrow the various forces that enclose communities and hold significant numbers of us captive.