Origins & Founding: 2014-15
The story of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) is one of relentless resistance born in the cells and workshops of America’s prisons. It is a modern chapter of a centuries-long fight by imprisoned and enslaved people to be recognized as equal human beings. From the uprising at Reeves County Detention Complex in 2009 to the mass strikes of 2010-2013 in Georgia and California, a social force was re-awakening and uniting captives of the state across lines of social division.
IWOC was officially founded on July 31, 2014, as a section of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), to be a vital outside solidarity network dedicated to supporting the prisoner-led struggle to abolish prison slavery.
Making the Nation Look: 2016-18
The prisoner movement’s power was proven on September 9, 2016, the 45th anniversary of the Attica uprising. In response to a call by incarcerated organizers in Texas, which was then picked up by the Free Alabama Movement (FAM), IWOC helped coordinate outside support for a national prison strike that became the largest in US history, with an estimated 72,000 people participating across at least 24 states, as well as other countries. The strike was a direct challenge to the 13th Amendment’s “exception clause,” which permits slavery as punishment for a crime. In the decrepit Holman prison in Alabama, the strike was wall-to-wall. Guards quickly grew frustrated with having to do the jobs usually done by prisoners, and themselves stopped coming to work. According to FAM organizers, by the third day of the strike at Holman, the warden was pushing the lunch cart. “Dee” in South Carolina, who assembled furniture for less than a dollar an hour, framed their refusal to work in clear terms:
“Slavery is inhumane, no matter its disguise.”
– Dee
Across the country, the incarcerated library workers at the Central California Women’s Facility joined the strike in solidarity.
The resistance continued to build. In 2017, a strike partially inspired by events in the U.S. swept through prisons in Brazil. In early 2018, under the name Operation PUSH, prisoners across Florida prisons went on strike on Martin Luther King Day. Later in 2018, following a deadly guard-instigated fight at Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina, IWOC supported the call by the prisoner group Jailhouse Lawyers Speak for another national strike. Beginning on August 21st, incarcerated people across at least 17 states, again withheld their labor, with some going on hunger strike, and this time articulating 10 clear demands. These included paying incarcerated workers the prevailing minimum wage, restoring their voting rights, and ending flagrant racial discrimination in sentencing.
These strikes highlighted how prison labor generates billions for government and private companies while paying wages as low as $0.12 to $0.40 per hour, for those who are paid at all. Both national strikes likely caused total losses in the millions of dollars, and resulted in harsh retaliation for many participants.
Our spirit of international solidarity was exemplified by IWW/IWOC member Anna Campbell, who had joined the YPJ (Women’s Protection Units), and in the spring of 2018, and who laid down her life during the Turkish attack on the Syrian city of Afrin while civilians were being evacuated. She is remembered with love. Her comrades in the UK continued their shared efforts to expose the expansion, deaths in custody, and other opaque and authoritarian practices of the UK prison system. Anna’s reflection on the challenges of building lasting social movements in the face of widespread complacency underscores the profound commitment necessary for successful social struggle:
“It’s not possible to achieve long term progress in Europe because most people don’t want to have long term commitments.”
Her own ultimate commitment, and the ongoing solidarity work of her comrades, stands as a direct answer to this challenge.
Facing Peril, Growing Power: 2019-2022
In the months after both prison strikes, IWOC dedicated itself to aiding those who faced retaliation. Despite these risks, the fight expanded from labor strikes to include legal advocacy and local campaigns, like the successful 2019 effort to stop the use of prison labor by the local government in Gainesville, Florida. In Rush City, Minnesota, a labor strike got a bad new commissary policy canceled and an abusive guard taken off assignment.
The COVID-19 pandemic created a new crisis behind bars, and IWOC again became a critical channel for advocacy, fighting for the safety and early release of vulnerable incarcerated people. We distributed information on the novel virus to prisons across the United States, and helped imprisoned people advocate for improved conditions in this new context, including helping them gain access to the 2020 economic stimulus. During the tumultuous summer of 2020, we shared news of the protests in the streets with our incarcerated members, and helped people new to the movement who we met in the streets gain a better grasp of the overall liberation struggle. In the fall of 2020, Atlanta IWOC mobilized in solidarity with the Ware Prison Rebellion in southeast Georgia.
In the summer of 2022, California IWOC successfully used public pressure to get the administration of the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) to meet two rounds of demands from incarcerated firefighters. At the tail end of 2022, people incarcerated in Alabama launched a surprise statewide strike, drawing attention to severe and racist over-sentencing. This showed the lasting organization and solidarity present among those imprisoned by the state of Alabama.
Also in the summer of 2022, a beloved incarcerated member in the UK, Taylor, took his own life after spending 14 years in prison for a conviction that was originally supposed to only give him 4 years. An inquiry into his death is ongoing.
Into the Age of Uninterrupted Crisis: 2023-25
As the many crises of our world continued to intensify, IWOC continued our solidarity efforts. We supported the re-entry into society of multiple long-time incarcerated comrades during this time. California IWOC got the administration of San Quentin State Prison (SQSP) to fix avoidable issues with their water system twice, once in 2023 and again in 2024.
While IWOC and IWW have consistently stood with the struggle for Palestinian emancipation, the level of urgency increased in 2023, when the occupation unleashed a genocidal response to the armed break-out from Gaza which some evocatively described as a modern-day Ghetto Uprising. We supported the movement to stop Cop City in Atlanta, in which a fellow IWW member, Tortuguita, was murdered by police.
In the spring of 2024, the Free Alabama Movement initiated a 90-day strike in tandem with the state’s legislative session, and succeeded in getting the particularly egregious issue of state organ harvesting addressed, although it reportedly still happens.
In the fall of 2024, IWOC was contacted to aid a work slow-down at a textile workshop administered by the California Prison Industries Authority (CalPIA), California’s public slave labor leasing agency. With our help, these incarcerated men won their modest demand of being able to leave work on time make it to commissary to spend the meagre wages they earned, and publicized it. Rather than face renewed collective action, CalPIA reassigned the overseer, who tried and failed to undermine the new arrangement. The prison system has since retaliated by firing an organizer and bringing more prison personnel into the room during its ritualistic strip-searches.
In the UK and Ireland, IWOC continued to hold numerous educational events and demonstrations regarding the mistreatment inherent in the prison system. At times dedicated public support was given to specific imprisoned people in order to highlight how political and egregiously cruel the UK’s prisons can be. During these recent years, IWOC in the UK has helped comrades re-enter society. In 2025, IWOC issued specific demands to the UK prison system around both economic and human rights issues.
From 2024 to 2025, IWOC supported and drew public attention to the struggle against abusive practices and conditions at Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison, where there was a hunger strike in 2024, and where, in 2025, incarcerated men resorted to setting themselves on fire as a method of protest. In fact, self-immolation is a far more common form of protest in US prisons than is widely known, and IWOC has also confirmed and publicized cases of the same thing occurring in Illinois prisons.
In 2025, IWOC member Nate Lindell won a case against the Wisconsin DOC that stripped them of their ability to blanket deny all public records requests for guard body camera footage.
This history – and much more – is the foundation for our continuing fight. It has been assembled from whispered plans, smuggled communications, and acts of collective refusal. From the national prison strikes of 2016 and 2018 to the ongoing organizing in prisons across the globe, we are building a legacy of resilience for whatever future may come. Oppression is brittle, but the drive for freedom and dignity is unbreakable. Prison slavery, legalized in the United States by the 13th Amendment’s exception clause, still stands, but our history proves that collective acts of resistance can force it to crack.
The struggle continues.