The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

My name is Mansa Musa. I’m a former political prisoner, member of the Black Panther Party. And prior to being released from prison, I served 48 years. Now I’m the host of rallying the bars on the Real News Network when we think of labor and labor movement in this country. More importantly, when we think of the quote from Marxist, when Marx say, workers of the world Unite. Was Marx talking about only workers of a certain ethnic group? Was Marx talking about all workers throughout the world, all walks throughout the United States? Joining me today is Katherine Passley. Katherine Passley is one of the labor organizers of the year for in these Times magazine and co-director of Beyond the Bars in Miami, Florida. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Catherine has ran successful campaigns in Florida prison system to lower the cost of phone calls and assist formerly incarcerated people in obtaining employment. Her efforts have saved millions of dollars for loved ones of incarcerated people. Welcome, Katherine.

Katherine Passley:

Thank you so much Mansa Musa. It’s amazing to be here.

Mansa Musa:

And I open up by acknowledging that you was the labor organizer of the year in these Times magazine. How do you feel about that? How did you receive that?

Katherine Passley:

I mean, I’m just grateful to all the folks that allow me to be a leader in their space and developing leaders as well. So it came as such a joy, but also bittersweet because it’s just like we just scratching the surface. There’s so much left to do.

Mansa Musa:

But the reality is that when our peers acknowledge our work, our work is a reflection of our work and it’s a reflection of how we doing our work that get us these accolades, these boots on the ground, these boots on the ground. This ain’t, you wrote a poem or you wrote an essay. This is sweat labor. So thank you for, for your contribution you write for in these times. Let’s talk about how you look at the prison movement, labor and social conditions that exist in society today.

Katherine Passley:

Yeah, I think it’s really interesting to note this system is working exactly as it’s designed to do. When we think about canvas leasing to what we’re dealing with now with modern day slavery and that clause in the 13th Amendment that allows for people to become slaves once they’ve been convicted of a crime, and even folks that haven’t been convicted of a crime. Right now in Florida, in my city, in my Miami, 60% of our jails haven’t even been to Pretrial. They’re in pretrial, and they’re the ones that are the trustees that are giving out the place, that are doing all of this cleaning, the jail and all of this labor for free. And they’re still innocent of what they’re being accused of. So we understand jail and prisons to be a form of labor control, right? They’re incarcerating surplus labor for anyone that is politically attuned. Understand it’s also a way to cheapen labor. The moment you get out, your labor isn’t valued as much because of your record.

So now you’re forced into temp industries, you’re forced into accepting minimum wage, and your disadvantages are similar to our brothers and sisters that are immigrants. And as a child of immigrant parents, my father who’s currently incarcerated, I understand that when we talk about abolition, we need to talk about labor, we need to talk about that intersection. And also we need to bring to the forefront the fact that most of the struggles for folks that have been inside and out, when we think about Attica the revolt, we’re talking about people that were fighting for better working conditions. It was always about labor and our time, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was also like, these corporations are exploiting us. Let’s attack their money. So it’s always going to be about how we can take back our power from the current political structure and the current economic structure. So it’s like how do we fight capitalism basically? So that’s what we’ve been doing here at Beyond the Bars, is trying to bridge these two movements, bridge the abolition movement with the labor movement. And there’s so many challenges, right? Because if you are convicted of a crime, you also can’t hold union leadership for 13

Mansa Musa:

Years and have

Katherine Passley:

Legal standing. So it’s just like, okay, we want unions, but our voices can’t be represented in unions because of our record, but we know that that’s the only way for us to get upward mobility. And so it’s like how do we get unions to now fight for our interests, knowing that that’s also in the best interest of unions that need density. They need us as well in order to, so it’s really marrying these two self-interests to get to that class right union that we need. We need all of us together.

Mansa Musa:

And that’s a good observation about finding that commonality between the element because in Alabama they had, and the conditions being horrendous in terms of labor and the prison industrial complex, straight up plantation style labor, no, right. To not work. They use extortion in every sense of the word. But what happened was, to your point about finding a commonality, the prisoners sued the state of Alabama because they was outsourcing prison labor. And the unions joined in the suit with them because they were saying that you using prison labor, you’re outsourcing prison labor and you using this to prevent us from, to stop us from being able to get jobs and get benefits from a union. So they say, well, you’re taking cheap labor and circumventing workers in society from being able to work because you got this pool of cheap labor in the prison system. But talk about why is it that, and I told you earlier, we’ve been doing this story line on prison labor. Why is it that unions overall don’t have a recognition of prison labor? Why is it that that’s not on their agenda overall? Do you have a view on that?

Katherine Passley:

Yeah, I think a good chunk of that is education. We need to educate and bring our union brothers and sisters into the mix to understand that historically temp workers, prison labor, you’re mentioning cheap labor has been used to bust union strikes and bus. So it’s just like there’s that tension of like, oh, these people have been used against us for so long that there isn’t this realization that, well, what would it look like if we were to bring those people into the union so that they can’t bust these union efforts? So I think it’s going to take some creativity and just the will to actually bring in our incarcerated brothers and sisters into the union fold in ways that just hasn’t been done before. And I think it’s hard for people to reckon with something that they haven’t experienced or haven’t even tried. And I think we have the conditions now and that are getting worse where it’s just like we need to,

Mansa Musa:

And we look at the latest assault on labor or workers from this government, and we recognize that in a hundred days they have managed to take people’s jobs, force people out of work, they decimated the middle class. Now most people, we got PhDs or certain skillset they’re trying to get jobs at basically anywhere. My question here is how do we make the connection between that right there and the fact that on top of that people are going to be released and going to be put in the same pot competing for jobs with other workers? How do you look at that? How do you look at this competition that’s being developed by fastest?

Katherine Passley:

Yeah, that is quite the question because it’s just like when we talk about competition within the working class, the reality is it’s like this many folks at the top that are making these rules and making these jobs. And then there’s thousands, millions at this point of job opportunities for folks. And so we really have to fight for not just any kind of job, but it’s just like, how do we shift who’s making the amount of money? And and the reality is these heads of these corporations are making billions of dollars, millions of dollars and then saying, okay, you are in competition with that person because that person is an immigrant and they’re trying to take your 7 25 job. And so we need to actually know who the actual culprit is. And this is why I say union is important, because bargaining is important. So it’s like when folks come out, how do we fight for good jobs? And folks that are currently unemployed, all of folks that are looking for jobs, it’s not that there aren’t jobs available, it’s just that there aren’t good jobs

That pay living wages. And it’s not to the fault of the working class. It’s really to the fault of the ruling class, the capitalist class that are putting profit above all things. Well, we actually need this competition because we want you guys to keep fighting amongst yourselves versus actually turning and trying to fight us for better working conditions and for better pay and for livable wages and for all of these things that are due to us if we were able to get together and actually fight for them. So I think if anything, we all need to strengthen our organizing skills and bring in our folks. It just doesn’t make sense for us to fight each other for what these bad bosses say we deserve. I think we need to start coming together and fighting for better jobs, better conditions, and we can get it, get it. If we fight for it, we can get it.

Mansa Musa:

And I was looking back on the major unions and how they’ve been co-opted to a large extent by the system and how the civil rights movement, every movement that was organized around social justice, the labor movement supported it. Dr. King was going down to Memphis to talk to the Memphis sanitation workers about them wanting better paint and better jobs when he was assassinated during the march on Washington. Unions was out front. But you don’t see that now in terms of organizing around social conditions such as onslaught of what’s going on with workers right now. You don’t see the massive reaction that you had before. And I wonder if, and maybe you can address this from your perspective, I wonder if it’s because the major union have become so elitist in their perspective that they can’t make the connection between social issues everyday people’s lives versus their membership.

Katherine Passley:

I really appreciate this question because it is like how do we address complacency within our movement especially? Exactly. Exactly. I mean, I would say yes, right? If we as the members allow the heads, then they will act in that way. We’re all in this same economic system in the same economic base. So if we want to actually remove the economic base, that means we’re in constant struggle. So I would say are the leaders getting complacent or have been complacent over time? Yes, because the members have gotten complacent. We have to constantly struggle. When you become a member, you constantly have to make sure you’re getting your political education. You need to always agitate. We’re still under this system, so we’re always going to have to fight, and we’re going to have to fight for leadership to make sure that they are fighting for our interests and not the boss’s interests. And I think for a very, very long time, especially the left, which we’ve seen has been like, okay, well, if it’s not our issue, then we don’t worry about it. Right?

Mansa Musa:

Exactly.

Katherine Passley:

It’s just not true. All of these issues should be our issues and not just what’s happening here, but what’s happening globally. So it’s just like if we are complacent about terrors that are happening in foreign soil, then we’re going to be complacent about terrors that are happening in our own backyard, in our jails, in our prisons. And so I guess I say this to everyone that’s in unions, that’s in worker centers, that are in even nonprofit groups, because even nonprofit groups has the same issues. It’s about listening to the people and the people get the education you need. Understand when George Jackson writes blood in my eye and he talks about the situation in the jails and he talks about how we need to constantly rip from inside of the belly of the beast. What does that mean? What does it mean to constantly be in struggle? And that’s what it’s going to take. It’s just going to take for us to call our leaders in to call our brothers and sisters in and be like, Hey, yo, what are we doing? And being strategic about it.

Mansa Musa:

And you know what? You can be employed today and unemployed tomorrow, and then now when will you be unemployed? Tomorrow you’re going to be in prison the day after that because of the situation you find a person find themselves in. So it’s no such thing as a sense of security in this country right now when it comes to labor, when it comes to unions, and when it comes to the movement. Talk about some of the things some of y’all accomplishment y’all have made beyond the laws in terms of some of the things y’all have been able to get done that has an impact on the prison industrial complex and helping to dismantle it by virtue of Viva changing the policy, minimizing something or just outright eradicating the policy.

Katherine Passley:

Yeah, yeah. I think when we started, it was a group of women and men that just wanted to kind of be heard, and they were just like, well, we have this laundry list of issues.

Mansa Musa:

Right

Katherine Passley:

We get out, we can’t get a job. The phone calls inside are so hard, I can’t stay connected with my family when I get out, I get out with thousands of dollars in fines and fees. I think our members at the time had a list of demands and we’re like, well, all right, we got to get together and fight for these things. And so the first thing we fought for was to get free phone calls. We drop them from 14 cents to 4 cents in Florida. That’s no easy. That’s no easy. Our governor is

Mansa Musa:

Interesting. Oh yeah, it is interesting.

Katherine Passley:

Just say the least. The least. Listen. And so we’ve seen the biggest, especially since a lot of folks don’t consider Florida the south or the deep south,

Mansa Musa:

Where as

Katherine Passley:

Literally the south as you can get and have experienced a lot of just anti-human policies and a lot of preemptions. So when we dropped it to 4 cents, we continued. We wrote an ordinance in-house with members, with my co-executive director who’s also an attorney, and wrote that ordinance and managed to pass free phone calls inside of our jails, and not just free phone calls, but we wanted everyone to have tablets so that way they have unrestricted access to calling their family members access to the libraries. We ended up getting pushback from our commissioners because we wanted movies for them. Come on now

Mansa Musa:

They’re just

Katherine Passley:

Like, why do criminals need movies? And we’re just like,

Mansa Musa:

Why not?

Katherine Passley:

Why can’t they have these things and access to books and develop

Mansa Musa:

And security risks?

Katherine Passley:

And so we also, right after winning that victory for our incarcerated loved ones decided to attack the fines and fees.

And when I’m telling you members were coming out with thousands of dollars of fines and fees, that restricts your voting, that restricts everything, does so much things. And so we also ended up writing an ordinance and winning that as well, eliminating over a hundred million dollars in fines and fees and debt for our incarcerated loved ones. We continued to fight. We’re like, well, we now address some of these things for folks coming out now. They’re saying that they come out, they can’t get a job, and if they get a job, they can’t get a good job to sustain themselves. And so we need to bring this fight to the bosses. And so we’ve been organizing. We also have political education that’s held by one of our members and continuing to build. We had a member that’s right now at his job fighting to get just fans in the warehouse where he works at. And so it’s just like these small basic things, but their skills that we’re teaching our loved ones, if you truly believe that you deserve better, pay, better conditions, then you need to learn these skills to be able to fight,

Mansa Musa:

Right, advocate for

Katherine Passley:

And bring it to your boss in order to get them. So we’ve been doing that. We’ve been connecting with unions right now, 32 bj, which is SEIU, and finding those cross sections. It’s like, okay, now we have members that are doing these brush fires. They’re organizing at their workplace, they’re getting their coworkers together, they’re fighting for little things here and there, but they need a union to back them so that way they can start. So it’s just like, okay, we’re teaching them the skills and then passing them on to unions that have interest in unionizing those work areas so that way our folks have that protection and have that access to unions.

Mansa Musa:

I want our views and our listeners to understand this, that these know small feats, because when you’re talking about the telephone system, it’s a massive amount of profit that was being made from that system on prisoners throughout this country. I’m located in Washington dc. I was incarcerated in Western Maryland, and the phone call was $5 a minute. For one minute you was paying $5. And so it forced everybody to try to, the system we was trying to work out was trying to get a local number because any number that wasn’t local, it cost $5. And because of y’all work and other people’s work in that area, I remember when I had got my sentence reduced, I was in a transition spot and I seen somebody they had put on the wall that FCC had said that phone calls, they mandated phone calls had to be a certain amount, which was affordable in and of itself. But talk about some of the things that going forward with some of the things that y’all are doing now.

Katherine Passley:

So we just had a pretty big victory. We stood with some folks from AFLs because they were trying to repeal the labor pool act. Like I mentioned a little earlier, a lot of folks that come out, they go into temp agency and temp work.

And so we had a really bad actor, which is Pacesetters. Yeah, we’re going to call him out. And they were backing a bill to kind of remove any way to hold them accountable to bad conditions that they were doing at their labor halls, their labor pools. And so the bill pretty much lied. It was saying like, oh, we have this duplicative law because we have state OSHA that protects when we don’t have state osha. Actually, Florida doesn’t even have the State Department of Labor. So you don’t even have a place where you can go and say, Hey, they’re stealing my wage, they’re doing this or that. We went up there with our members, we debunked a lot of the fallacies that were being presented by this bill and by it being backed also by the strongest lobbyist, which just happens to be also over our homeless trust here.

So that says a lot in itself, but that’s no here nor there. And so members were meeting with our state reps running from different parts in the capitol and speaking in front of the house and actually winning that actually killing a bill that would’ve taken away their rights to temporary to permanent positions, water in the labor pool chairs, really basic stuff. They were trying to take away transparency in their deductions from their checks. So they were just like, oh, the bill was just like, we don’t care if whether you’re being deducted and if you’ve ever done temp work, you know that some of these places, they’re not supposed to deduct your safety gear, but they do

Mansa Musa:

Wage deaf

Katherine Passley:

And just this is the first step. And so winning that proved to our members, one, this is the legal side and the policy side of things, it’s just one tactic. And we need to have in our pockets as many tactics as possible, grass tops and grassroots. We need to know how to do the boots on the ground work, but we also need to be able to address policy stuff as well. And so we’re now becoming, or I think have been now since our inception, we’re about to be five years this year, Dylan like, Hey, we’re getting established there. So we’re really establishing our expertise on mixing these models and winning both these on the ground fights and these policy fights. We had one of the representatives talk down to one of our members and it’s just like, well, why don’t you just get a job? Why are you still at an agency after two years as if

Mansa Musa:

I got this opportunity, I want to work here. If I had the preference of going down to Wall Street and working there, I prefer to stay in the temp. I would get real,

Katherine Passley:

Right? And the other crazy thing is that folks don’t talk about is just like when you get out, it’s not like you’re out free. And most of our folks are on heavy surveillance through probation

Mansa Musa:

And

Katherine Passley:

Have to do probation check-ins at eight in the morning, two in the afternoon. If they wanted a regular nine to five, how impossible that would be. Some folks are on house arrest, community control, they have to be extremely job. They have to get, has to be extremely flexible, which is another reason why most folks go to temp agency because of that flexibility and that makes them so easily to be.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, and the reality is for us returning is if you returning on condition parole, one of your parole criteria is you have to work. So if I left with no marketable skill and the system of temp agencies existed, give me employment, that’s going to be my condition. I’m going to work there. I need an income. It’s not the best income, but it is an income. I’m forced into these circumstances. So that’s part of the system where a person, the conveyor belt, you coming right back because if you got obligations, imagine somebody got child support, like y’all dealt with the fines. Imagine somebody got finance obligations or fines and they work in a temp agency. They barely getting minimum wage. The monies that they getting got to go towards either helping them pay whatever bills they paying, wherever they live at or paying their own bill to survive in society.

So we definitely take our hats off with that challenge coming out. Two things, when I got out, two things that I was confronted with. One was a place to stay and a job and I had place to stay and I got a job when I was in the shelter. So I got a job and I had did 48 years before I got out. So every penny I was getting I saving because I knew that in my head was I had to have an income and I had to have a savings in order to be able to be stable. But talk about how artists can get in touch with you and keep up track on some of the things that y’all are doing and how they can support.

Katherine Passley:

Yeah, I think a great way is to follow us on Instagram beyond the bars, ma, to follow our website at www.beyondthebars.org. And there’s a link at the bottom that says, sign up for our newsletter. And all you have to do is put your email in there. I wish I could say we can move this without any dollars, but if folks wanted to donate and feel inclined to donate, by all means, please do. We make sure we break bread at every meeting. All of these things, I mean a lot of us volunteer and make do with what we do because we are going to fight regardless. But any way that folks can support, we’re more than appreciated.

Mansa Musa:

Thank you. And Katherine, you rattled them bars today. We like George Jackson say they hear a rumbling of our feet when you rattling the bars today, you definitely gave our audience education about the correlation between the labor union prison movement, but more importantly, you gave our audience some good insight into how to advocate and how to be effective in advocating how to attack policies, how to change procedures, how to get quality for the least of us. And we really appreciate that and thank you for coming in. Thank you for having me. We remind our audience to continue to support the real news and rallying the bars. We ask that you support us by making whatever contributions you can make, but more importantly, we want you to support us by giving us your views. Tell us what you think about these programs that we’re doing. Tell us what you think about this particular podcast. What’s your views on labor? Do you think prisoners have a right to be treated human? Do you think that the 13th Amendment is the catchall for prison industrial complex and therefore everybody should be treated like a slave? We look forward to hearing them because guess what? We are acting the real news.