New York prison guard strike: Which side are we on?

It is generally a good class impulse to solidarize with workers on strike. With capital on one side and labor on the other, workers are usually striking to get a bigger portion of the wealth that they alone created. Which side are you on? We’re on the workers’ side.

But that is not, and should not be, an automatic response in every single strike. For example, there were racist “hate strikes” in auto plants in the 1940s against Black workers being promoted to assembly line jobs. The United Auto Workers union refused to defend those workers when they were fired. 

In 1968, the United Federation of Teachers held a citywide strike in New York City that was opposed to Black community control of public schools in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. Workers World Party and its youth organization at the time, Youth Against War and Fascism, denounced the strike as racist.

Workers World has never supported strikes of police, prison guards or border guards, because they are not part of the working class but serve as an essential component of the repressive capitalist state apparatus. Their “job” is to protect property and enforce the white supremacist, xenophobic, misogynist, transphobic, anti-LGBTQIA2S+ and ableist status quo. Oppressed communities consider official police to be an armed force occupying their neighborhoods.

Which side are we on? We’re on the side of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Donald Brooks and countless known and unknown casualties — overwhelmingly poor, working class and of color — of cop and prison guard brutality. 

The police and guard organizations — misnamed “unions” — are on the other side. These organizations represent the racist killers in grievance hearings and help them evade even the slightest disciplinary action. 

Groups like the Fraternal Order of Police and the Police Benevolent Association should not be affiliates of the AFL-CIO. Unions such as the American Federation of Government Employees and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees need to disaffiliate their units that represent cops and guards.

No support for New York prison guard strike!

We offer no solidarity whatsoever with the wildcat strike of prison guards which began Feb. 12 in New York State. Not only are the guards demanding more staffing, pay increases and higher overtime pay, but they are demanding repeal of the state’s 2021 Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act. HALT limits the arbitrary, repressive use of solitary confinement against prisoners.

Nikko Colon, incarcerated at the Wyoming Correctional Facility, asked: “They’re asking to repeal the whole bill? Would they like to repeal the scientific evidence [that it’s] torture?” (The Marshall Project, Feb. 22)

Unlike the guards, incarcerated workers are part of the working class, often working for a small fraction of the minimum wage — which is already too low. When incarcerated workers revolt and take over all or part of a prison, as they did at New York’s Collins Correctional Facility right before the guard strike and most recently at Riverview Correctional Facility, we support them as much as we do any other legitimate labor struggle. 

When the Attica, New York, prison rebellion began in 1971, Workers World wholeheartedly supported the prisoners, whose demands included recognition as workers and the right to form a union.

That’s who’s side we’re on!