Earlier this year, the United Auto Workers (UAW) successfully organized 5,000 workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, making historic inroads for organized labor in the intensely union-resistant South. The impressive victory marked a wider shift in the terrain of struggle, with worker organizing, militancy, and power on the rise.
When the UAW won this important victory, Tennessee, like much of the country, had been experiencing tight labor markets. This simply means that job openings were plentiful but workers to fill those jobs scarce. Such macroeconomic conditions are generally favorable to labor. In November of last year, responding to these worker-friendly conditions in a different way, the Tennessee state government put out an Employer Guide for Hiring Justice-Involved Tennesseans. The guide advertises to employers that the annual reentry population of more than 15,000 Tennesseans can solve labor shortages and even increase business profitability. Many of these 15,000 make up the approximately 75,000 Tennesseans who, at any given time, are under some form of carceral supervision, where they face intense pressures to accept whatever work they can get. For large temporary staffing agencies such as EmployBridge, which operates in Tennessee as something like the polar opposite of the UAW, these individuals represent an ideal pool of vulnerable workers to draw on.
For those thinking toward racial and economic justice, an urgent question to consider is what the disparate realities in these two stories have to do with one another. How should we think about the criminal system in relation to today’s resurgent labor movements? What does collective labor power have to do with formal systems of state violence?
The mainstream political answer seems to be: Nothing. Worker power and criminal justice are separate issues. As labor leaders were given primetime speaking slots to kick off the 2024 Democratic National Convention, a symbol of labor’s growing political power, the party’s newly adopted platform affirmed its commitment to a carceral status quo. Echoing President Biden’s Safer America Plan, the platform calls on Congress to allocate $37 billion toward supporting law enforcement and “funding 100,000 additional police officers for accountable community policing.”
A genuine commitment to racial and economic justice, by contrast, requires reckoning with the converging spheres of criminal punishment and work. As labor organizing has increased, so too has coordination between carceral institutions and business. While such partnerships are typically framed as win–win for both employers and system-involved people, they are better understood as part of a larger, multilayered strategy to maintain a subordinated workforce.
In a forthcoming article, I make the case that today’s criminal system functions as an expansive labor governance institution. This in turn is a key mechanism by which it underpins our racialized political economy. Specifically, the system plays important roles in rationing total available employment, and channeling and sorting people into precarious work.
The idea of rationing begins from the premise that, in capitalist economies, unemployment is a labor market norm, not an aberration. Thus, unless a state makes universal employment or a jobs guarantee a cornerstone of its economic policy—which the United States certainly has not—total available employment is always being rationed.
Under U.S. racial capitalism, the criminal system serves to legitimize, obscure, and distribute the pain of this structural dynamic. Unemployment is often a precursor to criminal system involvement, and people with criminal histories remain disproportionately unemployed, even when the economy runs hot. Through stigmatization, the erasure of incarcerated people from labor force statistics, and an emphasis on the individual, criminalization and incarceration blur the enduring structural reality of unemployment.
Yet the system, in contradictory fashion, also creates jobs. It can thus be understood as a jobs program, and is often promoted as such: police, prosecutors, corrections officers, parole officers, court staff, and others are all jobs generated by the criminal legal system. But this too should be understood as a form of employment rationing. A carceral jobs program depends on a reliable supply of joblessness, and other forms of economic precarity, to produce subjects for criminal punishment. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “justice, public order, and safety” activities employ around 2.6 million people. This isn’t a particularly impressive number when considered against other industry categories, but that seems to be precisely the point. The winners are relatively few, the losers many. What’s more, this jobs program depends on the unpaid, or drastically underpaid, work of incarcerated people themselves. Their labor maintains the facilities that hold them captive, keeping the system churning.
Equally important to grapple with is the criminal system’s role in facilitating subordination through labor. In other words, how the system incorporates people into labor markets, rather than excludes them. This happens through processes I call channeling and sorting.
More from our decarceral brainstorm
Every week, Inquest aims to bring you insights from people thinking through and working for a world without mass incarceration.
Sign up for our newsletter for the latest.
Newsletter
By channeling, I refer to how the system generally pushes people toward non-unionized, poorly compensated, temporary, contingent, and otherwise precarious work. Labor’s recent gains have not erased the overwhelming reality of precarity which many workers face. Even with increased labor militancy and organizing, union density remains near record lows. And despite historic wage growth, the labor share of national income has in fact declined, reflected in the experiences of many workers who have made wage gains but still struggle to make ends meet. Meanwhile, reactionary courts place limits on desperately needed legal reforms that would empower workers. In this world of precarious work, encounters with the criminal system shape the paths through which tens of millions of people move through labor markets. Disqualifying background checks, collateral consequences, conditions of supervision, the need to pay off fines and fees, and the basic challenge of returning to “free” society encourage system-involved people to accept the most readily available (i.e., least desirable and thus least discriminating) work. We can add to this equation the crimmigration system, through which millions of undocumented workers are absorbed into the labor market as nominally “independent contractors,” even as employers exercise enormous control over the exploitative conditions of their work.
In contrast to this general push, the idea of sorting focuses on the direct bridges between the criminal system and the “free” economy. Institutions such as work release, parole, and reentry (what I call linking institutions) play a more direct and precise role in enabling labor subordination. Take, as an example, the situation in Alabama, where retail and service-worker unions have joined incarcerated workers in a lawsuit against state officials and private employers participating in a work-release program. The plaintiffs argue that by maintaining horrific prison conditions, threatening disciplinary action for refusing to work, and routinely denying parole, these officials have conspired to reproduce a system of modern-day convict leasing. This arrangement of hyper-exploitation harms incarcerated people, and it also dramatically weakens the leverage of the unions.
While this is among the more extreme examples of how linking institutions facilitate labor subordination, other more mundane arrangements are widespread. Nonprofit reentry institutions may, for example, partner with employers whose profits depend on a subordinated workforce, as do many non-union construction firms. And a parole officer might send someone under their supervision to a temporary staffing agency, acting on the theory that any job is good enough, and that market participation is the strongest evidence of “rehabilitation.”
In 2021, as U.S. labor markets tightened severely, business elites converged around a consensus for criminal system reform. Within a period of a few months, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and the National Association of Manufacturers—three of the most powerful business lobbies in the country—each separately made a case for removing the “barriers” to employment that system-involved people face. Passing so-called “clean slate” or “ban the box” legislation was among their main objectives. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan and chair of the newly formed Second Chance Business Coalition, published a New York Times op-ed in which he argued that people with criminal histories could “fill the millions of job openings across the country.”
There are several ways to critique this business case for reform. Historically, these three business lobbies in particular have sought to undermine labor movements and constrain worker power. One need only consider the Chamber of Commerce’s current slate of Major Initiatives, which includes “Fighting Big Labor’s Agenda at the NLRB,” “Preserving the Independent Contractor Model,” and “Stopping the PRO Act” (the PRO Act is proposed federal legislation that would protect unions from some anti-union “right to work” laws). Liberalizing labor markets for people with criminal histories aligns with this agenda, as adding more vulnerable workers to the labor pool reinforces the structural primacy of employers. Even better that their experiences with criminal punishment (and the threat of future punishment) make them less likely to organize in the workplace, and more tolerant of harsh working conditions.
In 1943 Polish economist Michal Kalecki anticipated that employers would increasingly undertake such moves as prosperous nations moved closer to full employment. According to Kalecki’s theory, as an economy moves toward full employment, workers grow emboldened and more militant, while employers attempt to maintain discipline in the workplace and defend their profit shares. After decades of buildup, today’s sprawling criminal system has become a critical frontier in this contest. Indeed, the prison–industrial complex has already shape-shifted around this reality. Private prison companies such as CoreCivic and GEO Group increasingly focus on offering reentry services. CoreCivic has even boasted to its shareholders how successful its reentry-focused lobbying has been. Business groups have also taken leading roles. The Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, for example, was recently tasked with developing the state’s “Prison-to-Work Pipeline” program. The rapid growth of these types of arrangements makes possible large-scale coordination between the criminal system and employers.
If one needs evidence that business elites’ interest in reentry is not motivated by a desire for racial and economic justice, note their ongoing support for the criminal system’s most punitive elements. Less than six months after his op-ed was published, Dimon, alongside other chief executives who had joined the Second Chance Business Coalition, expressed support for New York mayor Eric Adams’s “crime reduction” strategy. The strategy included plans to reinstate a notoriously violent plainclothes police unit and expand pretrial incarceration, even as a well-documented humanitarian crisis raged on at Rikers. Not long after this, the Chamber of Commerce threw its formidable weight behind the moral panic around retail theft to successfully push for tougher criminal laws across the country, and to undermine progressive prosecutors who had, in the Chamber of Commerce’s way of seeing, shown insufficient commitment to carcerality. Supporting greater punitiveness on the front end, while calling for liberalization on the back end, only strengthens the criminal system’s role as a channel through which workers are disempowered as they move about the economy.
In the 1970s, civil rights and labor groups put forward a radically different vision: a federal job guarantee. Their proposed legislation would have established a legally enforceable right to a job, as well as planning mechanisms to make such a right a reality. Ultimately, only a watered-down version of the bill became law. The decade concluded with economic shocks and monetary policy moves which, together, ushered in a devastating period of high unemployment, particularly for Black workers. In the aftermath of this economic turmoil, mass incarceration accelerated.
The criminal system that emerged now imposes its own sort of planned economy, which we can understand as a foil to the idea of a job guarantee. Under a job guarantee, the state would act as employer-of-last-resort, ensuring a baseline of material security. The criminal system, on the other hand, channels and sorts workers-of-last-resort to preserve a profoundly uneven distribution of economic power.
The job guarantee—and its related visions of collective action, state obligation, and human flourishing—are well worth revisiting. Such a program wouldn’t be without ground to stand on. From the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration to contemporary international programs, there are numerous precedents to draw on to construct a job guarantee for today.
As we await the emergence of a coalition capable of enacting such transformative legislation, it’s imperative that today’s labor movements see the carceral state as a central concern—not just as a related progressive value, but as part and parcel of the struggle for workers’ rights. There are some isolated signs of this sort of social analysis breaking through, like the lawsuit in Alabama which retail and service workers joined. And in New York, during the heated 2023 state budget negotiations around bail reform, New York City’s largest labor union, DC 37, which represents 250,000 current and retired public employees, opposed Governor Kathy Hochul’s efforts to strengthen bail laws, linking that fight to the struggle of workers more generally.
Such actions, if adopted by labor organizations more broadly, will make it harder to reproduce the carceral status quo. A labor movement which understands the criminal system’s role in shaping power in the workplace could help build and sustain new collective formations. These are needed as a countervailing force, against the growing coordination between capital and the carceral state.
Image: Marija Saric/Unsplash
