Working class solidarity must include incarcerated workers

Every year, hundreds of incarcerated workers, including children, fight the wildland fires that ravage Oregon. They earn well below minimum wage, with reporting from the Portland Mercury in 2020 indicating incarcerated firefighters earned less than $10 per day. The program comes with large cost-saving benefits for the state of Oregon, but the workers face significantly higher risks than the average incarcerated worker or even firefighters with stronger federal, state and union safety protections.

One of these workers was Brianna Marie Boyd. While serving a five-year sentence at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, Boyd was a member of the fire crew.

“I never made more than $20 a day, and sometimes earned as little as $80 a month,” Boyd said. 

Workers have long utilized collective action to gain protections and improve their working conditions. But for incarcerated workers, the right to unionize is excluded. As with farmworkers and other vulnerable labor populations, U.S. law excludes incarcerated workers from legal protections for collective action or the right to refuse to work.

Unlike for farmworkers, unions do little to secure protections and improve working conditions for incarcerated workers. Unions like the United Farm Workers and Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste organize farmworkers without legal protections and are widely supported by the labor movement.

The Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World, is the only union attempting to organize incarcerated workers en masse, with 21 locals in 16 states. There are 1,566 state prisons across the United States and nearly 100 federal prisons.

From firefighting and construction work to cooking, cleaning and hospice work, incarcerated workers are doing labor every day that would typically be represented by some of Oregon’s largest and most powerful public employee unions. Legal barriers may prevent unions from entering prisons, but unions exist because workers organized before there were any legal protections, and they have always been in the business of reshaping the labor economy.

Even if unions broadly aren’t interested in organizing incarcerated workers, incarcerated workers are. Sterling Cunio, an artist, author, activist, community organizer, and former incarcerated worker, organizes inside maximum security prisons.

“We did solidarity work around solitary confinement reforms, hospice reforms, education access,” Cunio said. “We led a campaign to abolish slavery from the Oregon Constitution.”

In 2022, Cunio helped pass Oregon’s Measure 112, which removed language in the Oregon Constitution that allows the use of slavery and involuntary servitude as criminal punishments.

Prisons are a ripe landscape for labor organizing, and it’s already happening, whether unions are involved or not.

“It’s constant,” Cunio said. “It’s not as prevalent as maybe it could be because they squash it,” he said of the corrections system. “They can make it really hard on people that advocate for something they don’t want them to have, but people do it anyway.”

If incarcerated workers could tap into well-resourced, organized unions, they could accelerate and radically shift the dynamic between incarcerated workers and the carceral system. Imagine unions clearing incarcerated worker debts and fines that correction officers tack on as punishments. Imagine unions taking collective action in response to conditions within prisons. Imagine unions lobbying to ban punishments for collective action and removing requirements for state prison inmates to work full time.

The shift starts with education.

“The biggest barrier to progress is stigma,” Cunio said. “These are people coming from our society, our community, and over 90% of the people inside are coming home. When you get people in there and you work with them like slaves and you’re not paying them anything, and then you bring them right back out here with no cushions, no resources to re-integrate, you’re contributing to crime and homelessness.”

While the imprisonment cycle may be profitable to law enforcement unions, it ultimately harms all working-class people.

“Unions should care (about incarcerated workers) if they care about safe societies,” Cunio said. “Very little crime is committed by somebody when they first get out. You see them come in at about 13 to 18 months, and it usually involves some type of destabilizing effect, loss of a job, something that others may be able to absorb if they have some type of savings or assets or resources.”

Boyd is a prime example. While in Coffee Creek, Boyd had the opportunity to join the Union Pre-Apprenticeship Construction Training, offered by the Ironworkers Local 29, Bricklayers Local 1, and Cement Masons Local 555. These unions are taking a first step towards organizing in prisons, offering incarcerated workers the opportunity to train and enter a union apprenticeship upon release. Incarcerated workers in the program are still paid below minimum wage by Coffee Creek, but have a higher chance of leaving the facility with career stability.

“The union has given me the opportunity to earn a livable wage and have benefits and opportunities that many non-union workers don’t have,” Boyd said. 

What if these benefits were extended to incarcerated workers? 

“(Prisons) have their rhetoric about how people are learning this skill and learning work etiquette and so on and so forth,” Cunio said. “Prisoner labor runs the institution. There’s no deficit in skill.”

Incarcerated workers may benefit from training in some cases, but they don’t need it. They need living wage jobs, debt forgiveness, safe working conditions and, ultimately, abolition.

As unions grapple with a desperate need to grow to survive, organizing incarcerated workers and ending mass incarceration is, at a bare minimum, a practical solution. 

A third of American adults have a criminal record. That’s a third of adults who at one point in time weren’t in the traditional workforce, causing a “chilling effect on the labor movement,” Andrew Bilodeau, a law student at UCLA School of Law, wrote in his article for the The Law and Political Economy Project, “Toward Labor Unions for Incarcerated Workers: An Organizing Strategy.”

Unionized workers have the power to organize their collective power to back incarcerated workers — we could fight for our fellow workers to improve their conditions, increase their wages, and eventually dismantle the carceral system. When we build our power and “solidarity” on top of an underclass, we leave a critical rot that will eventually eat away our strength and topple any progress we claim to gain. 

To prioritize the most exploited among us — the incarcerated workers, the farmworkers, the homeless workers, the child laborers, the workers in other nations that manufacture the conditions of our cushy lives — would be the truest form of solidarity and the only path to working class freedom.

This article appears in September 9, 2026.