Making Labor Work

(Excerpt) 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?