Leaders from Beyond the Bars (BTB), Jobs to Move America (JMA), and United Southern Service Workers (USSW) before their panel on New Organizing at the National Convening on Real Reentry, April 3, 2026.

Every conviction has an aftermath. This month, we share insights from the National Convening on Real Reentry, hosted by Beyond the Bars and Columbia Labor Lab, where labor and decarceral leaders gathered in New York City to build a coordinated strategy for Real Reentry and a long-term labor agenda to engage the 114 million people in this country with a criminal record.

View all photos from the convening

We begin with our own member organizer, Chris Jackson, who has been on the front lines of the fight for quality jobs in South Florida.

Organizer Spotlight: Chris Jackson

Chris Jackson has been working in the temp industry for nearly 30 years. Born and raised in Miami, FL, he was recruited into Beyond the Bars by a member who lived in his neighborhood during the organization’s early years. Chris’s vast experience working at construction sites via temp agencies has provided crucial strategic insights for our organizing campaigns, while his outgoing nature has helped recruit countless fellow workers (he really does seem to know everyone). He is currently a member lead for the Turf and Solidarity teams and helps manage the court support calendar. Chris recently celebrated his 50th birthday with the Beyond the Bars family and we couldn’t be happier to be in the movement with him.

Listen to Chris's story

Chris shared what drives him to organize. The following essay situates that work in a national context, exploring how the worker organizations that gathered at the National Convening on Real Reentry are building power for workers with records across industries.

National Convening on Real Reentry

Across the country, we are seeing the rise of authoritarianism alongside the consolidation of corporate power. These forces are not new. They are rooted in a long history of racial capitalism, from slavery and settler colonialism to the modern carceral state. Today, they shape the labor market by criminalizing entire communities and funneling them into the lowest-wage, least protected sectors of the economy.

On April 3, 2026, Beyond the Bars, in partnership with the Columbia Labor Lab, hosted the first-ever National Convening on Real Reentry, to identify and share concrete models to expand quality jobs and strengthen worker power.

The convening was organized around a single question:

Underlying every panel was a deeper reframe. Reentry is not just a social service issue—it is a labor issue. The exclusion of workers with records from stable, union jobs and their concentration in precarious work weakens standards across industries and limits the power of the broader working class.

For decarceral organizers and reentry advocates, the task is to treat labor as a core site of change, organizing alongside workers to build power, not just access.

For labor organizers, the task is to bring workers with records into the center of strategy, raising standards and expanding union pathways.

Below is a summary of each panel and the commitments that emerged.

Panel 1: Reentry as a Core Labor Issue

Facilitator: Alex Han (May Day Strong) | Panelists: Adam Reich (Columbia Labor Lab), Maya Ragsdale (Beyond the Bars), Justice Favor (Mason Tenders’ District Council)

Incarceration creates a system of exploitation, not just exclusion. Billy Pearson (USSW) described earning pennies while incarcerated, then just $2/hour after release. Maya Ragsdale (Beyond the Bars) traced how workers with records are funneled into the temp industry, where wages are so low they pull down standards across the labor market, as Adam Reich’s research demonstrates.

Traditional reentry metrics miss this entirely. They count placements, not whether those jobs are safe, stable, or dignified. That has to change. Success should be measured by job quality—wages, conditions, and the power to defend both—not just whether someone is placed somewhere. But raising the bar on measurement also requires raising the floor on what jobs are actually available to workers with records.

No single union can absorb the full scale of exploitation. But if more unions are in the fight, and if community-based organizations use their leverage to push work toward high-road employers, we can start to shift the terrain. That means directing development toward unionized jobs with real standards, not lowest-bidder “local hire” schemes with no wage standards. It means fighting for stronger Project Labor Agreements, expanding the share of work covered by union contracts, and building cross-sector partnerships that match the scale of the problem.

Those partnerships have to run both ways. Labor brings what decarceral organizations don’t: wages, benefits, and enforceable contracts. Decarceral organizations bring what labor lacks: wraparound support—somatics, housing, mediation, mental health—that allows workers not just to access jobs, but to stay and grow in them.

Neither can scale this work alone, but together, we can.

Panel 2: Apprenticeship Pathways into Union Jobs

Facilitator: Adam Reich (Columbia Labor Lab) | Panelists: Gyasi Headen (Pathways to Apprenticeship), Wayne Richardson (NJ LECET), Michelle Fussell (Iron Workers International)

Union apprenticeships are one of the clearest pathways into stable, middle-class careers. Standalone certifications and skills training programs, on their own, rarely are. The difference isn’t just training; it’s connection to a union pipeline. The strongest pre-apprenticeship programs prepare workers to enter, stay in, and strengthen their union.

Pathways to Apprenticeship (P2A), developed out of LIUNA Local 79, is a leading example. Their five-week pre-apprenticeship for workers with records integrates trade preparation with union culture, labor history, and political education. Participants rank the industries they’re most interested in, and the program is grounded in a clear understanding of what union membership offers: higher wages, collective power, and a legacy rooted in civil rights struggle.

That model is now expanding into New Jersey through the New Jersey Laborers-Employers Cooperation and Education Trust (NJ LECET), where Wayne Richardson is building a statewide pipeline for workers with records, connecting training directly to real union opportunities. The program combines OSHA 30 certification with deep exposure to labor history, union expectations, and the realities of life across the trades.

The Iron Workers are advancing a parallel approach. They are pushing this model upstream, bringing registered apprenticeship programs directly into prisons, with active programs now in 13 states and continuing to grow.

Across both models, there is a shared orientation: workers are not treated as future employees alone, but as future union members and potential organizers.

These programs work. And they should be scaled. But scaling training alone is not enough. As Michelle Fussell (Iron Workers) put it:

We don’t have a skilled workforce problem. We have a pipeline problem.

Communities across the country need energy systems, bridges, housing, and infrastructure. The demand for skilled labor is real. But without long-term project planning and job certainty, training pipelines have nowhere to send their graduates. Workers can complete pre-apprenticeships and still end up back in unstable, low-wage work if the jobs aren’t there.

If apprenticeships are going to deliver on their promise, decarceral organizations have to fight alongside unions not just for training pipelines, but for project pipelines—public and private investments that guarantee a steady flow of union jobs. That means long-term infrastructure commitments, stronger Project Labor Agreements, and intentional alignment between workforce development and economic development.

Panel 3: Union Worker Co-ops and Shared Ownership

Facilitator: Govind Srivastav (Beyond the Bars) | Panelists: Deborah Olson (Co-op Rhody), Kim Britt (ChiFresh Kitchen), Camille Kerr (VOLTS), Andre Dev (Community Cannabis Network of Rhode Island), Anh-Thu Nguyen (DAWI)

A cooperative is a form of employee ownership built on two core principles: workers own the business and share in its financial success, and the workplace is democratic—one worker, one vote. ChiFresh Kitchen, a co-op started by six formerly incarcerated women in Chicago, shows what that looks like in practice. As Kim Britt (ChiFresh Kitchen) described it, being part of a cooperative means using collective power to run the business together: when worker-owners review the budget, every person shapes how revenue is used.

For workers with records, that structural shift matters. The co-op model bypasses the background-check gatekeeping that screens formerly incarcerated workers out of jobs. It replaces “will you hire me?” with “we own this,” converts wages into equity in communities long excluded from wealth-building, and puts workers in the role of decision-maker rather than supplicant—the opposite of how the carceral system has positioned them.

Co-op Rhody shows how grassroots organizing can build union-supported cooperatives in new industries. And this fusion of co-ops and unions isn’t new. From the Knights of Labor in the 1890s to more recent efforts by USW, UFCW, and SEIU, worker co-ops have long been part of labor’s strategy to build power.

The opportunity to expand that model is urgent. The country is in the middle of a “Silver Tsunami,” as baby boomers retire and small and mid-sized businesses are sold or shut down at scale. Many of these businesses, union or not, could be sold to the workers who run them and converted into co-ops. The alternative is the same cycle that has hollowed out work for decades. As Deborah Olson (Co-op Rhody) put it:

Our pensions are invested into private equity. Private equity buys out the businesses. Private equity puts us out of a job.

Worker-owned cooperatives offer an exit from that cycle. When workers own the business, it can’t be sold out from under them or stripped for parts. Building a union-cooperative pipeline now is one of the most concrete ways to intervene. And building it intentionally, with formerly incarcerated workers as owners, helps upend the carceral economy at the same time.

Panel 4: Legislation, Public Dollars, & Strategic Enforcement

Facilitator: William Suarez (Beyond the Bars) | Panelists: Karla Mayenbeer Cruz (GNY LECET), Becky Simonson (1199 SEIU New England), Sheila Maddali (GLOW), Brittany Alston (Philly Black Worker Project), Maya Ragsdale (Beyond the Bars)

For workers with records, the temp industry is the floor of the labor market. It’s unsafe, unstable, and often pays far below minimum wage. As Maya Ragsdale (Beyond the Bars) said,

One Beyond the Bars member took home $50 after ten hours of work after all the deductions were taken out of her paycheck for safety equipment, transportation, and more.

That kind of arithmetic becomes routine when an industry is built to absorb the most desperate workers and let standards collapse around them.

Coalitions are pushing back. Temp Worker Bill of Rights have been adopted in Illinois and New Jersey, setting a wage and safety floor for an industry that has long operated without one. In Philadelphia, the Philly Black Worker Project’s All Due Respect campaign is pushing further through the Dues Act, which would designate formerly incarcerated workers as a protected class, raise the wage floor in the city’s low-wage industries, and create union employment pathways for temp workers, addressing job quality at the front end of release rather than after the fact.

In Florida, Beyond the Bars has been working to defend and expand Florida’s Labor Pool Act, the 1995 law that provides industry-specific protections for blue-collar temp workers. After defeating an attempted repeal, the organization is pushing for stronger protections: eliminating conversion fees, which run $10,000 to $30,000 when a host employer tries to hire a temp worker directly, and requiring agencies to register with the Florida Department of Commerce to stop the “fly-by-night” practice of closing under one name and reopening under another to evade accountability.

Another level is public money. Construction projects rely on heavy public subsidies, and affordable housing in particular cannot be built without them. Every one of those subsidies is a chance to attach wage and benefit standards to the work, and every one without those standards is a missed opportunity to raise the floor.

The same principle drives the work Becky Simonson is doing at 1199 SEIU New England are doing through the Justice Reinvestment Coalition. Public sector unions, the coalition argues, have a particular role to play in rejecting the framing that “government should do less.” Through coordinated pressure on state departments of corrections, the coalition has won $18 million returned to healthcare during incarceration and $500,000 directed to fund formerly incarcerated workers’ salaries as nonprofit providers, and is advancing a longer-term framework that calls for the closure of prisons themselves.

As Sheila Maddali (GLOW) emphasized, legislation is only half the fight. Laws on the books mean nothing without compelled compliance. Building worker power strong enough to hold employers accountable, regardless of whether the state chooses to act, is the deeper project behind every legislative win in this fight.

Panel 5: Opportunities for Union Leadership and Members

Facilitator: Jasson Perez (Just Impact Advisors) | Panelists: Bridgette Simpson (Barred Business), Sam Williamson (32BJ SEIU), Tamir Rosenblum (Mason Tenders District Council), Infinite George (GNY LECET)

Improving labor standards for workers with records is, as the panel framed it, a civil rights correction. The carceral system is built to teach people that they cannot turn to each other for survival or solidarity. Unions teach the opposite.

The first move is contract language. Beyond the Bars developed a template Collective Bargaining Agreement toolkit designed to give union negotiating committees ready-made language that protects workers with records. The model pulls from existing practices within some of the largest and most powerful unions in the country: Sam Williamson discussed 32BJ SEIU’s contract language that protects immigrant workers with active Department of Homeland Security cases from employer discrimination, and the same structural approach can be adapted for workers still under court supervision.

The principle, as one panelist put it: is to create the most rights with the fewest pen strokes.

The second move is shaping hiring practice itself. Workers in contract positions routinely lose jobs because employers run background checks, surface convictions from years or even decades ago, and use them to disqualify hires. Barred Business passed the first municipal ordinance in the country designating people with conviction records as a protected class. Unions can do the same inside the contracts of every employer they bargain with.

The third move is leveraging tools that already exist. Section 3 of the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 (12 U.S.C. 1701u), administered by HUD, creates hiring obligations for publicly funded construction projects, which is an opening for workers with records that requires no new legislation, just unions willing to use it. Project Labor Agreements (PLAs), the pre-hire agreements between unions and contractors on public works, include equal opportunity plans requiring membership from underrepresented demographic groups. Workers with records belong in those provisions explicitly.

When unions adopt this kind of language, something shifts. A new class of people enters the fight to defend it. The decarceral movement gains a labor base with infrastructure to train organizers at scale, while the labor movement gains organizers it never had before.

Panel 6: Organizing in Industries That Rely on Workers with Records

Facilitator: Katherine “Kat” Passley (Beyond the Bars) | Panelists: Will Tucker (Jobs to Move America), Larry Hodge (Jobs to Move America), Shannon Franks (New Flyer of America / IUE-CWA), Laurel Ashton (USSW), William Suarez (Beyond the Bars), McKenzie Joseph (Beyond the Bars)

The final panel repeatedly returned to one principle: Whole Worker Organizing, or the practice of building relationships of care with workers, engaging workers’ lives beyond the worksite, and treating them as people whose work is one part of a larger life rather than as labor units who happen to belong to a workplace.

Three worker organizers modeled what Whole Worker Organizing produces. Billy Pearson, McKenzie Joseph, and Shannon Franks shared their experiences moving from incarceration through employment into organizing and pulling their coworkers into the fight along the way. None of those trajectories would have been possible if the unions and organizations they joined had treated them as transactional (or “paper”) members. Whole Worker Organizing is what makes the difference between a worker who attends a meeting and a worker who organizes one.

Panelists also discussed their organizing models. Will Tucker and Larry Hodge of Jobs to Move America (JMA), for example, presented JMA’s CBA² model: Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) followed by Collective Bargaining Agreements. The sequencing matters. Community Benefits Agreements negotiate commitments from employers about how they will treat their workforce and the surrounding community, including hiring practices, wage standards, environmental protections, and neutrality clauses that let unions organize without retaliation.

JMA won CBA language at New Flyer that includes ban-the-box and inclusive hiring provisions, and is now pushing for similar commitments at Hyundai. The CBA becomes the foundation the eventual Collective Bargaining Agreement is built on. The “Good Neighbors” corporate campaign applies the same logic upstream, highlighting the gap between employers’ public-facing role in the community and how they actually treat workers, building leverage for stronger contracts before a workplace organizing drive even matures.

Communities shape workplaces, and workplaces shape communities. Whole Worker Organizing acknowledges that relationship. These organizations’ organizing models operationalize it, and their campaigns leverage it.

Together, they form the playbook for organizing in industries where workers with records are the spine of the labor force, and where workers with records—when organized—become the next generation of labor leaders themselves.

Panel 7: Closing Plenary—Institutional Commitments

Facilitator: Jasson Perez (Just Impact Advisors) | Panelists: Katherine “Kat” Passley (Beyond the Bars), Bernard Callegari (LIUNA)

The work described throughout this convening does not happen in a vacuum. Throughout our history, policing, incarceration, and state violence have been used to suppress our movements, discipline labor, and protect concentrated power, deployed against every struggle for justice this country has produced.

Organizing criminalized workers has always been urgent. Today it is also defensive. The carceral state is expanding and being turned against dissent itself. The organizations in the room have spent decades building the relationships, institutions, and muscle memory for organizing under these conditions. Expanding that work at scale is essential if our movements are to survive what’s coming.

Organizing requires art. It’s how we turn survival into analysis and isolation into collective identity. In honor of National Poetry Month, we close with Kat the Poet’s “Hunger Games.”

Hunger Games

[J]ustice has always

looked like us—

when we stand

too close together

to be counted.

* * *

We are the ones

who make fire

from eviction notices.

Who turn commissary crumbs

into communion.

* * *

So if you hear singing—

low, steady, unafraid—

that is not surrender.

That is hunger

turning into strategy.

Hunger turning into strategy. That is what this work asks of all of us. Here are actions you can take in celebration of May Day to take your first step.

Coming Up

People’s Hearing (Wednesday, April 29 | 9am)

A public testimony space where workers and community members share lived experiences of labor exploitation and system harm. Food and child care provided. Transportation reimbursements up to $50 available. Register here and write “Revival” in the notes.

Organizing Revival Bootcamp (Thursday, April 30 | 9am)

A skill-building training to strengthen organizing capacity, campaign strategy, and member leadership development. All trainings are available in English, Haitian Creole and Spanish. Food and child care provided. Transportation reimbursements up to $50 available. Register here and write “Revival” in the notes.

May Day Screening/Action (Friday, May 1 | 10:30am/1:30pm)

Day begins at 10:30am with a screening of “Without Shade, Without Rest” at Coral Gables Art Cinema followed by a short panel. Then the March for Planting Justice at 1:30pm—a mass mobilization led by WeCount! demanding dignity, labor protections, and fair wages for plant nursery workers. Register here and write “Revival” in the notes.

Organizer in Training Graduation (Saturday, May 9 | 6pm)

Join us at our offices as we celebrate the graduation of fellows Cece Pinder, McKenzie Joseph and Ronald Clayton from Beyond the Bars Organizer in Training (OIT) program! Contact your organizer to join.

As new leaders step forward, we’re grounding that momentum in the ideas, history, and strategies shaping the work ahead.

What We’re Reading

Kim Kelly, Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor (2022)
A people’s history of the labor movement that centers the workers most often written out: women, Black workers, immigrants, incarcerated workers, and others on the margins of formal unions. Kelly shows that the labor movement has always been at its strongest when it organizes those pushed furthest out—and that today’s fights are part of a much longer lineage of resistance.

John Fabian Witt, The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (2026)
Witt tells the story of the Garland Fund, an early 20th-century experiment in “radical philanthropy” that invested in movements for free speech, racial equality, and working-class power. At a time of extreme inequality and repression, the Fund backed ideas that were once fringe but later became mass movements. It’s a lesson on how movement funding can shape whether those ideas remain marginal or remake society.

Take Action

If our work resonates with you, the most important thing you can do is fuel it.

Donate Now

You can also learn more at beyondthebars.org, stay updated at @beyondbars_mia on IG and X, or sign up to volunteer.

Every paycheck has a history. This month, we trace the economic architecture of American labor: how risk has been systematically assigned to workers and managed to protect capital. We open with one of our own, McKenzie Joseph, who is organizing against it.

Organizer Spotlight

In the video above, McKenzie speaks about incarceration, temp work, and why he joined Beyond the Bars.

McKenzie Joseph is a Haitian American member of the Turf Team and a Fellow in the Organizers-in-Training program. A formerly incarcerated temp worker, he’s been organizing his coworkers at his worksite, building a worker network from the ground up, developing his own leadership, and bringing others along with him. Last week, he traveled to Atlanta with hundreds of workers for the 2026 USSW Annual Summit, “The Future Belongs to Southern Workers,” where he connected with organizers across the South and brought back lessons to strengthen the work at his job.

Listen to McKenzie's story

McKenzie’s story is 400 years in the making. Below, Kat traces how the American economy has always assigned risk downward, and who has been made to bear it.

The Economic Architecture of Control

By Katherine Passley, Co-Executive Director

American labor history is often presented in separate chapters. Slavery. Reconstruction. Jim Crow. The prison boom. The rise of contingent labor. Yet beneath these eras lies a continuous economic structure. When examined closely, a pattern emerges that links them together.

The pattern centers on controlling labor, extracting value, insulating capital from risk, and shifting vulnerability downward onto workers, particularly Black and immigrant workers.

Slavery and the Financialization of Human Life

Under chattel slavery, enslaved people were legally defined as property and fully integrated into the financial infrastructure of the United States.

Enslaved people were assigned multiple layers of value throughout their lives. Their price fluctuated based on age, gender, reproductive capacity, skill, and health. There was “market value,” but also life cycle value and even postmortem value. Enslaved people were appraised repeatedly, their bodies converted into numbers that could be traded, inherited, or leveraged.

Insurance deepened this financialization. Slaveholders purchased life insurance policies on enslaved people, especially those hired out in dangerous sectors such as mining, railroads, and factory work. Insurance companies required documentation of age and physical condition. Premiums were calculated using actuarial tables that estimated life expectancy and occupational risk.

These actuarial tables were built from incomplete data and shaped by racial assumptions about Black health, endurance, and mortality. Companies varied widely in how they assessed risk. Some charged higher premiums for enslaved workers in industrial settings. Others adjusted rates based on age or perceived physical strength. The calculations were inconsistent across firms and often reflected racialized beliefs about biological difference.

Life insurance policies on enslaved people were part of a broader financial strategy that supported southern industrial growth. Insurance reduced uncertainty for slaveholders. If an enslaved worker died while hired out, the owner could recover financial losses. This encouraged investment in riskier but more profitable labor arrangements.

Enslaved people were routinely used as collateral for loans. Banks extended credit backed by human property. Enslaved bodies stabilized lending markets and facilitated territorial expansion. The collateralization of human beings helped fuel the growth of American finance.

What makes this system especially significant is that it merged racial hierarchy with emerging actuarial science. Enslaved people were categorized, measured, and priced according to statistical frameworks that claimed objectivity while reinforcing racial ideology. Risk assessment became a tool of racial ordering. The violence of slavery was translated into the language of underwriting.

Sharecropping and the Redistribution of Risk

Emancipation ended formal ownership of bodies, but it did not end the economic demand for disciplined and controlled labor. Sharecropping emerged as the dominant agricultural system across the South. Freed people worked land owned by white landholders. Credit was extended for seed, tools, housing, and food. At harvest, debts were deducted before any profits were distributed.

The landowner controlled the books. Illiteracy, manipulated accounting, inflated supply prices, and high interest rates were common. Environmental risk such as drought or flooding compounded financial instability. Many families completed the season in debt and were legally or practically bound to the land for another year.

Under slavery, insurance protected the slaveholder’s capital investment. Under sharecropping, risk was transferred almost entirely onto the worker. The landowner retained control of land and credit. The worker bore market volatility and environmental uncertainty. The structure evolved from ownership to indebtedness. Labor remained subordinated.

Criminalization and Permanent Risk Classification

After Reconstruction, Black Codes and aggressive policing restructured racial control through criminal law. Convict leasing transferred incarcerated people to private corporations for labor in mines, farms, and industrial sites. Mortality rates were high, and oversight was minimal. Labor was extracted through state authority while corporations absorbed profit. This system laid groundwork for the modern carceral state.

In the era of mass incarceration, a criminal record shapes access to employment, housing, credit, and insurance. Individuals with records are frequently categorized as high risk by employers and insurers. They may be denied coverage, charged higher premiums, excluded from bonding programs, or screened out of stable employment altogether.

The language of insurability remains strikingly similar to nineteenth century practices. Individuals are evaluated through risk profiles. Categories are applied. Statistical generalizations substitute for individualized assessment. The framework presents itself as neutral while reproducing structural inequality. The underwriting of enslaved bodies has evolved into the underwriting of criminalized status.

Detention and the Structuring of Labor Vulnerability

This economic logic extends beyond prisons. Wherever the state exerts total control over a person’s movement and autonomy, economic vulnerability intensifies. Immigration detention confines individuals in ways that restrict access to stable employment and heighten precarity. Institutionalization of people with disabilities has historically limited autonomy and exposed residents to exploitative labor arrangements under paternalistic frameworks. Veterans are often publicly honored while facing significant barriers to stable housing, employment, and healthcare, treated as instruments of national defense during service and marginalized afterward.

The Temp Industry and the Modern Outsourcing of Risk

Today, the temporary staffing industry reflects this long trajectory of risk shifting. Employers rely on staffing agencies to limit liability and reduce responsibility. Workplace injury, unstable hours, lack of benefits, and sudden termination are absorbed by workers. Formerly incarcerated people, immigrants, and others marked as high risk are disproportionately directed into contingent roles.

The continuity is clear. Slavery converted human beings into insured capital. Sharecropping bound labor through debt. Convict leasing extracted criminalized labor through state power. Mass incarceration produced permanent risk branding. Temporary labor institutionalizes precarity by outsourcing vulnerability.

Portions of the working class are repeatedly categorized as risky, unstable, or disposable. Financial systems price that risk. Institutions normalize it. Workers are denied full control over their labor and full participation in economic security.

At Beyond the Bars, organizing is about challenging this architecture of risk classification and risk shifting. It is about building systems in which workers are treated as human beings entitled to stability, dignity, and power, instead of liabilities to be managed.

Theory is only as good as the organizing behind it. Here's what we've been moving this month.

Since the Last Work Release

Worker Organizing. A lot is happening on this front, and we’re intentionally keeping more of this work close until our official campaign launch. When it does go public, this community will be the first to know. In the meantime, if you’re interested in salting, contact william@beyondthebars.org.

Worker Advocacy. Our bill to strengthen Florida’s Labor Pool Act, SB 1112, passed the Senate floor unanimously (34–0) on March 13th, with nearly two dozen of our members mobilizing to Tallahassee. While the bill ultimately stalled in the House and did not pass this year, our Senate sponsor, Senator Ileana Garcia, has already committed to re-filing next session. We’ll be back.

Worker Support. We’re preparing to launch a clothing exchange in April to meet immediate needs of our members when they’re released from jail or need clothing to attend an interview. Please email info@beyondthebars.org if you have clothing to donate.

Cross-Movement Solidarity. We joined USSW in Atlanta for their 2026 Annual Summit, “The Future Belongs to Southern Workers”, gathering with hundreds of workers across the South for a powerful few days of strategy, culture, and collective vision for a worker-led future.

Fuel our work

Here’s what’s coming up this month.

Coming Up

Migration Justice Circle (Thursday, March 26 | 3:30 PM)

Join us for a Migrant Justice Circle, where we’ll come together to share, learn, and support one another. We’ll discuss Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and how to respond collectively, followed by a space for reflection and conversation around immigration justice. Co-hosted with Fanm Saj. Haitian Creole and Spanish translation will be provided, and food will be served.

RSVP: https://www.mobilize.us/flcet/event/924219/

Building power requires both action and analysis. Here’s what’s influencing how we’re thinking about our work.

What We’re Reading

Steven Pitts, Organize… to Improve the Quality of Jobs in the Black Community, Berkeley Labor Center (May 2004)

A foundational report on the crisis of bad jobs in the Black community and the need to shift from service-based responses to organizing that transforms labor market conditions.

Jaz Brizack, Get on the Job and Organize (Apr. 29, 2025)

Drawing on campaigns at Starbucks, Nissan, and Tesla, Brizack makes the case that winning the right to organize is the foundation for everything else, and that worker-led campaigns, not top-down strategy, are what build real power.

Maximillian Alvarez, Is “Salting” the Future of Organized Labor?, In These Times, (Aug. 1, 2025)

A conversation with Jaz Brizack on salting as a strategy for organizing from within: building worker committees quietly, developing leadership on the shop floor, and launching campaigns strong enough to withstand employer retaliation.

If our work resonates with you, here are ways to take action with us.

Take Action

• Fuel the Work → Donate now

• Learn More → beyondthebars.org

• Stay Updated → @beyondbars_mia

• Take Action → Sign up to volunteer

This issue of The Work Release is dedicated to the memory of our brother Akeel Nizam Williams, who recently passed. His life and leadership are a testimony of brilliance, kindness, and dedication to personal and structural transformation. The picture above was his favorite, and showed him how he always was: thoughtful, learning, and engaged.

In Memoriam: Akeel Nizam Williams

Akeel was a leader in every sense. He was a core part of the Beyond the Bars family. He joined our organization in its earliest years, helping build it from the ground up. Every single one of us quickly grew to love him and his family. He was a profoundly gentle and kind person, and also someone who took up position after position in our organization, canvassing alongside other members, leading education spaces, making signs and prepping materials at the library before actions, graduating from our Organizer-in-Training program, and showing up to facilitate workshops, wearing his BTB shirt with pride.

He explained in the video above why collective power is so important:

“No one knows your problem until you bring light to it. That’s what we’re here for. You might not be able to be heard by yourself, but if you come as a group, we prove you can get heard. We done made miraculous changes at Beyond the Bars.

It’s getting everyone to understand that your life story is extremely important. We’re taught that because we’re felons we don’t mean nothing. We’ve been bamboozled.

Once you understand your rights, it’s so hard to see people go through this stuff. Just to know I won’t go through this isn’t enough. I don’t want my kids or my neighbors to go through it. That’s what we’re here to do.

Once you start, it’s a bug; you won’t want to stop.”

Listen to Akeel's Testimony

Akeel was also a Rising Leader with our partner organization, the National Coalition of Occupational Safety & Health (National COSH), and a member of the Mass Liberation Project community, where he participated in the Black Intensive Groundwork (BIG) training.

Akeel inspired everyone around him. As one of our partners wrote: “He was someone who inspired so many of us through his determination, authenticity, and deep commitment to this movement. We will truly miss him as such a powerful and inspiring worker-leader.”

We hold his family and loved ones close during this time and ask our community to check in on one another.

Rest in peace, Akeel. We miss you. You will never be forgotten.

At our 5th anniversary celebration this year, a poetry slam, Akeel was honored with the Founder’s Award. In that spirit, we share this piece by two of our members, a performance about providing testimony at government hearings to support our legislative work, where so many of us, Akeel included, raised our voices together.

We Are Not Disposable

Collaboration by Alfredo (A) and Kat the Poet (K) from Beyond the Bars Published in It’s Lit: Word of Mouth, An Inaugural Chapbook.

K:
They told us
the cost of survival was silence.
That if we worked hard enough, bent low enough,
maybe
Just maybe we could buy back our dignity,
discounted,
with no warranty.

A:
No guarantee, of equal opportunity
Dumbfounded,
We lost the possibility of civility
Astounded,
Their face when they see dreads and tattoos in their waiting
rooms asking to be seen

K:
We were never supposed to make it to the Capitol.
Never supposed to raise our voices past the steel bars they
tried to build inside our throats.
They thought if they labeled us “temporary day laborers,”
we would forget we are day makers,
building cities brick by bruised brick,
tired hands touching the sky
for a wage that won’t even reach the rent.

We honor Akeel’s spirit by continuing the work he helped build. What follows is an update on where that work stands, in the Capitol, in our workplaces, and in our communities.

Clayton offers powerful testimony to members of Florida’s Commerce & Tourism Committee on January 29th.

From the Capitol: SB 1112 Passes Two Committees Unanimously

Our members showed out. SB 1112 has now passed two Senate committees unanimously, first the Commerce & Tourism Committee (9-0) on January 29, and then the Appropriations Committee on Transportation, Tourism, and Economic Development (13-0) on February 12.

At both hearings, Beyond the Bars members traveled to Tallahassee. Not a single person testified in opposition. Dozens waved in support, including the Florida AFL-CIO and the Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy.

Here’s what our members told lawmakers:

Clayton Blackford spoke from the heart about how placement fees hold families back:

“When [we] get out of prison, [our] families who have done nothing wrong are dependent on [our] ones that were incarcerated to support them, to be able to insure them, to be able to show them a future. How can this be done when we’re held back by this Labor Pool Act? ... The families that depend on us ain’t done nothing wrong. They’re just like you.”

At the second hearing, Clayton returned to Tallahassee to provide additional testimony:

“If this is passed and that company wants to hire you, they got to pay that $10,000 to $14,000 placement fee. That’s why they don’t want to hire you. That’s why you can’t get health insurance on your family and the children. [ . . . ] Don’t everybody deserve a second chance?”

Jasmine Williams shared her own experience returning from incarceration and turning to temp work:

“I faced discrimination, unsafe conditions, and large deductions tied to placement costs—costs that ultimately hurt workers trying to rebuild their lives. I am here not just for myself, but for the many workers who don’t have the ability to stand here today.”

Claude Parfait, a formerly incarcerated temp worker who was severely injured on the job, kept it direct:

“For workers like me, these changes mean safety without fear. They mean dignity on the job. They mean law works the way it is supposed to.”

Jean Tuffet, Beyond the Bars’ Policy Lead, laid out the practical case: placement fees can cost employers more than $15,000 to hire a minimum wage worker who they initially employed through a temp agency. One of our members was working at a local university doing janitorial work, and the employer wanted to hire him on, but couldn’t because the placement fee was simply too expensive.

Senators on both committees responded with strong support. Senator Bracey Davis told our members: “You are not a product of your worst day.” Committee Chair DiCeglie, shared his own experience of hiring temp workers into full-time roles at his sanitation company: “Folks do deserve a second chance. ... I just want to thank you for being a champion for the individuals, for Floridians that need a champion.”

The bill’s sponsor, Senator Ileana Garcia, closed by saying: “All of you know that I’m always up for a good fight, and they’re worth it.”

• SB 1112: https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2026/1112

• HB 1287: https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2026/1287

Read coverage in the Orlando Weekly

To understand why this bill matters, here’s what you should know.

Amending the Florida Labor Pool Act (FLPA)

The FLPA was passed in 1995 “to provide for the health, safety, and well-being of [labor pool workers] throughout the state and to establish uniform standards of conduct and practice for labor pools in the state.” It was championed by labor leaders, legal aid lawyers, religious groups, and other advocates who documented exploitative conditions faced by workers.

As it stands, Florida’s Labor Pool Act (FLPA) is one of the only laws in the state that protects blue-collar temp workers, many of whom are people with criminal records trying to re-enter the workforce. But the law has major gaps that leave workers open to abuse.

Too often, labor pools exploit people who have few other options. Workers are denied stable jobs because of exorbitant “placement fees” labor pools charge employers who want to hire workers, fly-by-night temp agencies pop up and disappear with no accountability for violations of the FLPA because labor pools aren’t required to register with the state, and workers are left without real options when their rights are violated.

Our amendments:

• Protect workers’ freedom to accept full-time work by banning placement fees altogether: “No labor pool shall charge a placement fee to the third-party user to whom the laborer is referred for temporary work if that third-party user chooses to employ the laborer permanently.” This matters because workers should be able to move into steady, permanent jobs without agencies profiting from keeping them stuck in temporary work.

• Protect health and safety standards and fair pay through registration requirements by requiring all labor pools to register with the state. Agencies must provide basic labor hall standards (bathrooms, clean water, seating) and pay at least minimum wage after deductions. The creation of registration requirements helps us hold labor pools accountable, while also allowing the public and the state to better understand the industry’s size, sectors, workforce, and conditions.

• Strengthening enforcement by requiring courts to award reasonable attorneys’ fees to successful plaintiffs. Workers can sue in civil court for up to $1,000 per violation with additional damages for harm suffered, but attorneys cannot recover their fees, leaving workers without access to legal help. Adding an attorney’s fees provision brings the FLPA in line with other employment laws and ensures the law is not just on paper, but actually enforced.

What you can do to support Florida’s labor pool workers

• Bring business owners to the table. Help us identify and prepare employers willing to share their stories about placement fees they may have been charged. Respond to this email if you have contacts.

• Donate to support the campaign. Mobilizing to Tallahassee costs about $500 per worker.

Fuel our work

In addition to this legislative momentum, here’s what we’ve been moving since the last Work Release.

Since the Last Work Release

Worker Organizing. We launched a new organizing committee focused on a temp agency with a nationwide presence and heavy concentration in the South, where we already have density, relationships, and power. Worker leaders have confirmed leadership roles on the committee, with responsibilities that include salting at the agency. We’re building toward a fellowship launching in March to deepen our members’ organizing skills and leadership.

Worker Advocacy. Our amendments to the Florida Labor Pool Act cleared their second Senate committee unanimously. SB 1112 passed both the Commerce & Tourism Committee and the Appropriations Committee on Transportation, Tourism, and Economic Development with full bipartisan support. Members traveled to Tallahassee for both hearings to testify.

Worker Support. We provided court and jail support, helped members navigate travel permissions with their probation officers, and supported members with resume building and job placement. We also provided relocation assistance, made legal referrals to Legal Services of Greater Miami (LSGMI) for habitability issues, and assisted with emergency needs like car repairs and bail. Member-leaders stepped up across the board, helping fellow members get employed at key employers, holding restorative circles, and making sure people had rides to meetings.

Cross-Movement Solidarity. We continued convening preparation for our upcoming Worker’s Assembly. Details are shared in our upcoming events.

Organizational Development. We continued to collaborate with Building the Base to deepen our member-leadership structure and began exploring a name change to better reflect the scope of our work. More on that to come!

Read press features of our work since our last newsletter.

In The Media

Maya Ragsdale, “I Was Just a Body”, Inquest (Feb. 5, 2026)

The carceral system and the temp industry reinforce one another, forming a closed circuit where punishment and profit blur. The carceral system maintains control through the threat of incarceration; the temp industry through the threat of unemployment. Together, they keep workers suspended in the “temp trap,” one missed paycheck away from going back to jail.

McKenna Schueler, “Florida lawmakers unanimously advance bill to expand protections for temp workers“, Orlando Weekly (Jan. 29, 2026)

Coverage of our first committee hearing, featuring testimony from Beyond the Bars members and the unanimous 9-0 vote in support of SB 1112.

As we move into March, here’s what’s coming up.

Coming Up

Know Your Rights as a Tenant: Eviction Diversion Project (Feb 21, 2026 | 10:00 AM–1:00 PM)

Free event to learn how to defend your rights as a tenant in Miami-Dade County and how to access legal assistance. The Miami-Dade County Office of Housing Advocacy will also be present with rapid relocation assistance and ERAP resources. North Dade Regional Library, 2455 NW 183rd Street, Miami Gardens, FL 33056.

To RSVP, contact the Miami Workers Center at (786) 833-7078 or evictiondefense@miamiworkerscenter.org.

South Florida Workers Assembly (Feb 22, 2026 | 2:00–4:00 PM)

Workers across Florida are building a Workers Assembly to connect workers across the state. We are co-leading the effort. Join the Miami Chapter at our office!

Members, contact your organizer for details.

Non-members, email katherine@beyondthebars.org to join.

What We’re Reading

Stephanie Luce, How to Spread the General Strike Beyond the Twin Cities, Labor Notes (Jan. 30, 2026)

What happened in the Twin Cities that made it possible for organizations to pull off such a successful strike? And what can be done to make such actions succeed in other parts of the country?

Chris Mills Rodrigo, ‘Unlike Anything I’ve Ever Lived Through Before’: Labor’s Role in Minnesota’s ICE Resistance, Inequality (Jan. 28, 2026)

A conversation with Kieran Knutson, president of CWA Local 7250 in Minneapolis.

Also on our shelf: Blood in My Eye by George Jackson and The Southern Key by Michael Goldfield.

If our work resonates with you, here are ways to take action with us.

Take Action

Fuel the Work → Donate now

Learn More → beyondthebars.org

Stay Updated → @beyondbars_mia

Take Action → Sign up to volunteer

A few months ago, we released The Temp Trap: A Blueprint for Organizing Workers with Records in the Temp Industry, our groundbreaking report on the relationship between the carceral system and temp agencies.

In the last two issues of The Work Release, we unpacked how punishment continues after prison and how temp agencies profit from instability. This month, we turn to Part III: Florida’s regulatory landscape, and why the fight for job quality can’t depend on policy change alone.

Florida’s Legislative Landscape

Adapted from PART III of The Temp Trap by Maya Ragsdale and Katherine Passley

Florida is home to one of the largest temp labor markets in the country and one of the most hostile states for workers trying to assert basic rights. Weak enforcement, sweeping preemption laws, and employer-friendly labor policies create an environment where exploitation is rampant.

For temp workers, especially those with records, this structure creates a pipeline into low-wage work where retaliation is easy and instability is built into the job. And, levers to policy change are often blocked. Even when laws protecting working people exist, they are frequently not enforced.

Below, we break down the key legal barriers that make it so difficult for workers to win power through legislative change in Florida, as well as what we can do to build worker power that can compel change directly from the corporations that profit from precarity.

Florida’s Labor Pool Act and Its Limits

At the center of Florida’s regulatory framework for our base is the Florida Labor Pool Act (FLPA), a 1995 law providing rare, industry-specific protections for blue-collar temp workers who find work through labor pools. The Act assures minimum wage and pay transparency, caps predatory fees, and guarantees workers the right to accept permanent employment with host employers, and other basic workplace protections.

The FLPA remains an essential safeguard, but it falls far short of ensuring dignity or safety for most blue-collar temp workers. It relies exclusively on private enforcement, with no dedicated state oversight, and achieving robust reforms - like those enacted in 2023 under Illinois and New Jersey’s Temp Worker Bill of Rights - remains politically difficult in Florida’s current climate. Compounding this, the state’s sweeping preemption policies prevent local governments from adopting stronger standards.

That’s why Beyond the Bars is pursuing targeted amendments this session with Sen. Ileana Garcia and Rep. Chambliss, in coalition with the South Florida AFL-CIO, filed as HB 1287 / SB 1112. If passed, the amendments would: (1) ban placement fees when host employers directly hire temp workers, (2) require annual registration of labor pools with the Florida Department of Commerce, and (3) strengthen enforcement by mandating attorney fees and costs for prevailing parties.

• HB 1287

• SB 1112

We’re advocating to strengthen the FLPA because we believe in raising the floor. But the broader lesson is clear: in a state where reform levers are routinely blocked and enforcement is weak, worker power can’t depend on legislation alone.

Public policy is the floor, not the ceiling. It takes organizing strong enough to change what employers can get away with, whether or not the state chooses to act.

The State Blocks Local Power Through Preemption

State-level preemption, a legislative power exercised by a state government to prevent or override laws passed by its own lower-level governments, like counties and cities, has become a defining feature of Florida’s state legislature. In the past five years, state legislatures have used preemption to block dozens of local efforts to strengthen worker and tenant protections locally.

Take, for example, WeCount!’s Que Calor campaign to protect outdoor workers in Miami-Dade County from excessive heat. Research estimates that over 70 percent of heat-related deaths coincide with a worker’s first week on the job. In 2024, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation that prevented local governments from passing their own heat protection standards. This effectively blocked efforts in Miami-Dade County, which had been preparing to pass the nation’s first municipal heat standard, including heat safety education, mandatory water breaks, and shade provisions for 100,000 agriculture and construction workers.

Florida also prohibits local governments from mandating fair scheduling, requiring paid sick or family leave, or setting stronger labor standards for public contracts. These restrictions make it nearly impossible for counties and cities to establish fairer standards for temp agency workers, even when employers and local officials agree protections are needed.

By concentrating power at the state level and stripping it from local governments, labor standards become increasingly disconnected from local need, leaving workers with records trapped in a race to the bottom.

Who’s Enforcing Employment Laws? (Almost Nobody)

Nothing illustrates Florida’s weak worker protection infrastructure more clearly than the persistence of wage theft. Florida has one of the nation’s highest rates of wage theft, disproportionately affecting low-wage workers. Workers in the state are much more likely to be paid less than minimum wage, and industries such as construction and warehousing, which rely heavily on temp labor, are among those most affected.

Since 2003, the Department of Labor has recorded approximately 8,300 wage theft violations affecting 6,239 workers in Florida’s temp industry. Many of these cases involved hundreds of incidents per investigation. Altogether, these cases resulted in just over $4.1 million in recovered wages and just over $312,000 in civil penalties.

That comes to an average of fewer than 300 Florida workers per year who have been able to recover some wages through the federal wage and hour process.

Despite the scale of the problem, Florida’s capacity to enforce labor laws is woefully inadequate. The state has no Department of Labor. The Attorney General, its only office authorized to enforce the minimum wage, rarely acts. Workers can file complaints with the U.S. DOL, but relying on the federal agency alone leaves enormous gaps. The DOL’s resources are stretched across 50 states and millions of workplaces, making proactive, industry-wide investigations nearly impossible even under labor-friendly federal administrations.

State Supervision as Control

For many workers with records, Florida’s supervision system is one of the main forces shaping the labor market. Probation and other forms of state supervision require people to work, but impose rigid rules that make stable employment harder – for example, mandatory check-ins during business hours, travel restrictions, fees, and constant monitoring.

This creates a situation where workers’ legal rights exist on paper but are difficult to exercise in practice. In a temp agency job, for example, where assignments can end without explanation, speaking up about wage theft, unsafe conditions, or harassment can mean more than losing income. It can trigger a cascade: missed payments, missed appointments, a technical violation, and reincarceration.

In this way, supervision functions as an invisible tool of workplace discipline, expanding employer control and making retaliation even easier, especially in temp work where job stability is already built to be temporary. As one worker told sociologist Gretchen Purser, temp work can feel like “still doin’ time.”

Why We Organize Beyond Legislative Reform

Taken together, these overlapping systems reveal how Florida’s regulatory architecture privileges employer flexibility over worker security. They explain why even major advocacy victories, like the defense and expansion of the FLPA, are insufficient on their own to transform the industry.

Understanding Florida’s regulatory landscape helps clarify the real terrain: reform is necessary, but it is not sufficient. If we’re serious about economic freedom and decarceration, we have to build worker power that can compel change, not just request it. That means organizing directly at the point of profit: the temp agencies and the corporations that use them, to win standards that law doesn’t guarantee and enforcement won’t deliver.

Read more from The Temp Trap

As we build power with temp workers across Florida, we’re uplifting one member each month whose leadership embodies why this work matters.

Member Shoutout

Jamark spoke with NBC 6 South Florida during their MLK Day highlight. Note: His name is misspelled in the segment.

This month, we’re celebrating Jamark, who recently took up a new leadership role with Beyond the Bars as part of our union team, serving as a union contract liaison and helping strengthen the pipeline into union jobs for workers with records.

During the MLK Day Parade, Jamark was featured on NBC 6 South Florida, speaking about the connection between the labor movement and Dr. King’s legacy.

Jamark is also a proud AFSCME Local 199 member and county maintenance worker, supporting Miami-Dade’s Parks & Rec Department and other county offices, doing the essential clean-up and upkeep work that keeps our county running.

Here’s what we’ve been moving since the last Work Release.

Since the Last Work Release

Worker Organizing

We launched new organizing teams to create a stronger structure for developing our members’ leadership. We formed turf-based teams focused on select temp agencies that primarily place workers with records, training worker-leaders to organize strategically where we already have density, relationships, and power. Alongside the turf teams, we launched a Public Policy Team to drive our legislative priorities, a Political Education Team to strengthen analysis across the organization, and Coordination Teams to support communication and member engagement.

Worker Advocacy

Our amendments to Florida’s Labor Pool Act (FLPA) were filed in the Florida Legislature as sister bills: SB 1112, sponsored by Sen. Ileana Garcia (R), and HB 1287, sponsored by Rep. Chambliss (D). Both bills have been assigned to committees in their respective chambers. We also began co-teaching LAW868: Seminar and Practicum with Prof. Donna Coker at the University of Miami School of Law, helping build the research infrastructure for an upcoming campaign to eliminate probation supervision requirements that undermine people’s ability to maintain stable employment while under supervision.

Worker Support

We provided urgent crisis response and stabilizing support to 17 members navigating reentry. This included direct assistance and referrals, including support with furlough requests so an incarcerated person could attend a funeral; eviction prevention and relocation support for members experiencing housing insecurity; referrals to job development training; assistance applying for public benefits; food pantry and essential needs referrals; and notary services. We also supported members through two restorative circles to help prevent conflict from escalating.

Cross-Movement Solidarity

We presented alongside FWD.us at the AFL-CIO’s MLK Conference on a panel titled “The Price We All Pay: The Impact of Mass Incarceration on Working Families and Labor Organizing,” featuring powerful reflections from member-leader Cece. With Jobs with Justice, we advanced FIFA-related advocacy to secure access rights to the temp workers contracted for FIFA events and expand workshops to temp workers, while pushing for civil citations and public health approaches instead of arrests. Finally, we showed up for MLK Day with a full day of action, starting with a Day of Service at the Freedom Lab and continuing through the MLK Parade.

Organizational Development

Our team held a staff retreat and planning sessions to align on priorities, strengthen internal systems, and prepare for 2026. We also launched our new website to help more workers find us, more partners connect with us, and more people understand what it looks like to build worker power at the intersection of labor and decarceration. Check it out, explore the updates, and share it with a friend.

Check out our new website

Here are select features of our work in the media since our last post.

Beyond the Bars In The Media

The Real News Network, Parole, punishment, profit: Temp industry traps returning citizens by Mansa Musa (Jan. 19, 2026)

Mansa Musa speaks with Katherine Passley and Maya Ragsdale about how Florida’s temp industry traps the most vulnerable workers and operates as a profitable and punishing extension of the prison system.

Labor Notes, From Temp Trap to Union Jobs: Building Pathways for Workers with Criminal Records by Maya Ragsdale (Dec. 17, 2025)

Maya’s op-ed argues that mass incarceration and the explosive growth of the blue-collar temp industry have together created a “temp trap” that funnels people with criminal records into low-paid, dangerous, precarious work. It lays out an organizing strategy for unions and worker groups to break that trap by targeting host employers to win multi-employer standards, while building direct pathways into stable union jobs.

The Guardian, Florida workers with criminal records trapped by temp agencies, report finds by Michael Sainato (Nov. 18, 2025)

Read Michael’s exclusive coverage of our Temp Trap report. He writes, “Beyond the Bars is calling for changes to probation requirements; more stringent standards and regulations of temp agencies and host employers; improved protections and organizing rights for workers at temp agencies; expansion of training programs, apprenticeships, and union jobs; and a crackdown on abuse of subsidies of these temp systems.”

As we move into February, here’s what’s coming up.

Coming Up

General Body Meeting

Feb 8, 2026 | 3:00–5:00 PM

Members-only meeting to come together, share updates, and move our work forward.

Members, contact your organizer for details.

South Florida Worker’s Assembly

Feb 22, 2026 | 2:00–4:00 PM

Workers across Florida are building a Worker’s Assembly to connect workers across the state. We are co-leading the effort. Join the Miami Chapter at our office!

Members, contact your organizer for details. Non-members, please email katherine@beyondthebars.org to join.

Collective Centering

Every Wednesday | 12:30–1:30 PM

Join Mass Liberation’s weekly space to ground, reflect, and practice collective care.

Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81435201797

What We’re Reading

Jacobin, “Working-Class Social and Economic Attitudes: An Analysis” by Jared Abbott, Dustin Guastella, Carson Kindred, and Sean Mason

A new report from Jacobin and the Center for Working-Class Politics shows that ​​working-class voters are far more open to progressive politics than Democrats assume. They’ve grown more socially liberal over time and remain strongly pro-worker on economics, especially on wages, job security, and protecting universal programs like Social Security and Medicare.

In These Times, “We Are Facing a Tsunami of Hate”: Amid ICE Crackdown, Unions and Community Groups Call for Minnesota Shutdown in 10 Days by Amie Stager and Sarah Lazare

Following the ICE murder of Renee Good and an assault on the state by federal immigration forces, a labor-community coalition is calling for residents to refuse to work, shop or go to school on January 23.

Here are ways to take action with us.

Take Action

• Share the Report → bit.ly/TheTempTrap

• Stay Updated → @beyondbars_mia

• Learn More → beyondthebars.org

• Take Action → Sign up to volunteer

• Fuel the Work → Donate now

Last month, we released The Temp Trap: A Blueprint for Organizing Workers with Records in the Temp Industry, a landmark report exposing how the temp industry works and laying out a strategy to organize workers with records to win dignified work. This month, we’re diving deeper into Parts II and IV of the report: the inner workings of the temp industry itself and how to build power within it.

Inside the Temp Industry

Adapted from Part II of The Temp Trap by Maya Ragsdale and Katherine Passley

The term “temp industry” refers to a network of corporations that recruit, hire, and supply workers to host employers for short- or long-term job assignments. Temp agencies serve as the “employer of record,” managing payroll, insurance, and other administrative functions in exchange for a fee paid by host employers, which control workers’ day-to-day labor. Host employers often rely on this arrangement to distance themselves from hiring decisions, shift legal liability, avoid unionization, and drive labor costs as low as possible.

Temp agencies generate revenue by charging host employers a markup on a worker’s hourly wage, typically ranging from 20 to 50 percent for blue-collar jobs. For example, a host employer may pay a temp agency $21 per hour for a worker’s labor, while the agency pays the worker $14 per hour, retaining the remaining $7 to cover overhead and profit. In practice, this fee is borne by workers themselves and reflected in lower wages, fewer benefits, and the so-called “labor savings” temp agencies promise to employers.

This system did not emerge by accident. The temp industry was deliberately structured in the mid-twentieth century to institutionalize labor “flexibility” for employers by sidestepping unions, benefits, and long-term commitments to marginalized workers. Precarity is built into its design. Workers can be let go at a moment’s notice, moved between worksites, shifted across industries, and left suspended in the gray zone between their official employer, the temp agency, and the company that directs their daily labor, the host employer.

These fragmented employment relationships make it difficult to know where to ground organizing and enforcement strategies. The labor movement has long taught us to focus on where money and power ultimately lie, with the large client companies that set the terms for the contractors and suppliers they hire. This remains sound wisdom, especially since most temp agencies lack the name recognition and financial leverage of their clients.

At the same time, ignoring the inner mechanics of the temp industry itself would be a mistake. Understanding how the industry actually functions reveals additional leverage points that can be used to strengthen worker power and disrupt a model built on precarity.

With that said, here’s how the industry really works.

Make Temp Workers Report to Two Bosses . . .

In a traditional employment relationship, the employer of record both directs the work and benefits from it. This includes deciding how the work is done, reaping the profits it produces, and investing in the tools or infrastructure needed to sustain it. Temp agencies, however, claim the legal status of employer while exercising little control over the conditions, methods, or outcomes of the work itself.

This arrangement allows host employers to avoid responsibility under labor and employment laws by asserting that the temp agency, not the client, is the legal employer.

These blurred lines are a deliberate feature of the temp industry, not a bug. The three-way employment relationship between the temp worker, the temp agency, and the host employer enables abusive practices that allow both employers to drive down labor standards, evade accountability, and exert near-total control over workers. This is especially true for workers with records who are highly dependent on temp agencies for employment.

This arrangement functionally leaves workers reporting to two different bosses, creating confusion, stripping away rights, and opening the door to abuse. If a worker is injured on the job, who is responsible, the host employer that controls the workplace or the temp agency listed as the employer of record for workers’ compensation purposes? And if a worker is not paid for all the hours they worked, who is liable for wage theft, the agency that processed payroll or the host employer that directly benefited from their labor?

. . . Then Exploit That Confusion

Temp agencies and host employers routinely exploit this triangular employment structure to maximize profit while shielding themselves from responsibility. The industry faces little oversight, having successfully lobbied to exempt itself from most state regulations. While governed by federal statutes like the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), many agencies deliberately operate with minimal assets, leaving workers unable to collect damages even when they win in court.

In practice, this lack of accountability allows modern temp agencies to function much like nineteenth-century labor brokers who funneled immigrants into dangerous, exploitative work.

Workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance systems are especially vulnerable to abuse because they have not evolved to address widespread temp work. Both systems rely on experience-rating models, meaning higher injury or layoff rates lead to higher premiums. But in temp work, responsibility follows the employer of record, the temp agency, even though injuries occur under the host employer’s supervision.

This loophole allows host employers to benefit financially without improving safety. Injuries to temp workers can effectively disappear from their record for insurance purposes. At the same time, because temp agencies are penalized for injuries that occur under host employers’ supervision, they have an incentive to discourage workers from filing workers’ compensation claims in order to keep their insurance premiums low.

The experience of Andrea, a Beyond the Bars member, reflects this dynamic.

Andrea aspired to become a medical assistant and earned a certification in the field. She was hired at a private clinic but fired after a background check revealed her criminal history. Eventually, she found work through a temp agency at a medical lab.

One day, while processing a urine sample in an autoclave, the machine malfunctioned and splattered her face with fluid. She later learned the patient had herpes.

“When I reported this through the temp agency, they told me… I have to report it through [the host employer],” she said. “When I told [the host employer], they said… I’m not an employee of theirs, I’m an employee of the temp agency. We were going back and forth, and I ended up paying for [my doctors’ visits] myself.”

In short, host employers are rewarded for outsourcing danger, while temp agencies are rewarded for suppressing claims. The result is predictable. In Florida, temp workers are 50 percent more likely to be injured than permanent employees. A 2010 study in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine found that injured temp workers also lost more work time on average.

Erect Obstacles to Permanent Work

At the center of the temp industry is one of its most persistent myths, that temp work is a pathway to permanent employment. For workers trying to rebuild their lives, this promise can be seductive.

But temp agencies have a financial incentive to keep workers temporary. As the American Staffing Association noted in 2022, “Employees are a staffing agency’s most important asset.”

To lock workers in, agencies charge host employers a placement or conversion fee before allowing a temp to be hired directly. These fees typically range from 20 to 50 percent of a worker’s first-year salary. For a worker earning $15 an hour, a 20 percent fee can exceed $6,000, often discouraging permanent offers.

Michael, a Beyond the Bars member, experienced this firsthand. A host employer wanted to hire him, offering better pay and hours, but the temp agency’s placement fee killed the deal.

“Y’all don’t own me. I work for ya’ll, but y’all don’t own me,” Michael reflected later. “So why can’t I go to a better company to better myself?”

Taken together, these practices create an industry designed to keep workers temporary and replaceable. What appears to be a bridge to opportunity is instead a revolving door. Understanding this structure is the first step toward reshaping it in workers’ interests.

Read more from The Temp Trap

Understanding how the temp industry works is only the first step. Building the power to transform it is the next.

Building Pathways to Stable, Dignified Employment

Adapted from Part IV of The Temp Trap by Maya Ragsdale and Katherine Passley

Because temp agencies are often the only option for people with records reentering the workforce, building real pathways to stable employment is essential. Partnering with unions is the most powerful way to do this. Unions are the only large, dues-funded membership infrastructure in the U.S. with both the mandate and the capacity to improve job quality at scale.

Here are a few strategies unions can use:

• Organize temp workers. Unions can form temp committees, invite temps to meetings, monitor shop-floor treatment, and petition the NLRB to accrete temps in bargaining units. Temp workers at a New Bedford tire recycling plant unionized and are now represented by UFCW Local 328.

• Build pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs tailored to workers with records. LIUNA Local 79 in NYC and UNITE HERE in New Orleans run pre-apprenticeship programs that recruit workers with records into the building trades and hospitality.

• Create union worker co-ops and hiring halls for workers with records. UFCW Local 328 supported Rhode Island’s first worker-owned cannabis co-op, employing people harmed by the War on Drugs.

• Bargain for pathways into union jobs. SEIU Local 26 pushed Target to adopt “ban the box” nationwide. Other locals won contract language protecting members from termination due to incarceration. Others still require employer accommodation for immigration hearings, adaptable to workers dealing with criminal court mandates.

• Collect demographic information to tailor member benefits. Many unions already represent members with records and can tailor benefits to their needs, such as providing expungement or probation-termination support. United Steelworkers (USW) has been helping folks clear their records in Chester, South Carolina.

This work can be replicated and expanded across the country. With 114 million people, approximately one-third of the U.S. workforce, carrying criminal records, the opportunity is enormous. By integrating workers with records into organizing, recruitment, and retention strategies, unions can build power for millions while raising standards across industries that have long used criminal records to suppress wages.

Read more from The Temp Trap

As we build power with temp workers across Florida, we’re uplifting one member each month whose leadership embodies why this work matters.

Member Shoutout

Click the above video to listen to Ronald speak about his experience coming home after 25 years of incarceration and why he’s organizing with Beyond the Bars now.

This month, we’re celebrating Ronald Clayton, whose commitment to building worker power has been unstoppable. Ronald recently completed our organizing training on how to have effective organizing conversations through 1:1s and has been diving deep into No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, traveling all the way from Homestead to our office in Miami to discuss what he’s learning and how to apply it in the field.

Ronald also stepped up to conduct a site assessment and committed to mobilize to Tallahassee. Although parole restrictions prevented him from joining the trip, his dedication to the work and his growth as a leader in our organization set an example for all of us.

Ronald’s growth reflects the momentum we’re seeing across our base. Here’s what our members and staff have been building since the last Work Release.

Since the Last Work Release

Worker Organizing. We closed out the year with our final Worker Organizing Committee meeting, where members continued stepping into leadership roles. Worker-leaders shared updates from our Tallahassee mobilization, presented findings from The Temp Trap, and reported back on the commitments they set at the previous meeting. This month, 9 of the 11 members who committed to salting followed through. They worked at warehouses across Miami-Dade and Broward to do field research and build relationships with new workers on the job. We also wrapped up the Organizing 4 Power (O4P) Training with members, completing modules on key organizing language, foundational concepts, and organizing math. And our community came together for Caged Bird Arts, celebrating resistance, creativity, and five years of building worker power.

Worker Advocacy. Six Beyond the Bars members traveled to Tallahassee to meet with state legislators and share their experiences navigating Florida’s job market with a criminal record. Over three days, they met with 17 lawmakers from both parties, deepening relationships that will shape our 2026 legislative strategy.

Worker Education. We closed out the year with our final Cabral Club reading group, where members examined the economic history of Venezuela and what it teaches us about working-class power in the U.S. We discussed how decades of policies favoring the wealthy, including high-interest lending, inflation, and the dismantling of social protections, hollowed out the Venezuelan working class, broke faith in the traditional two-party system, and paved the way for a people’s movement to rise. Six members joined the conversation, drawing clear parallels to our own context in Florida and discussing what it will take to build a movement capable of shifting real power back into the hands of working people.

Worker Support. This month, members showed up for one another by providing court support for one of our members and by organizing a holiday turkey drive that provided meals to temp workers and their families throughout South Florida.

Cross-Movement Solidarity.

• We’re gearing up to host UNITE HERE Local 355’s HEAT team in our office starting January 12, expanding the support and organizing infrastructure available to our members. We also stood in solidarity with the Minnesota Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee and Central Florida Jobs With Justice in Orlando to demand that Disney take responsibility for abuses in its supply chain. Disney’s supplier, Anagram International, employs incarcerated workers, who are forced to labor for less than $1 an hour, to manufacture Disney character balloons. Disney sells these balloons for up to $45 per jumbo Mickey Mouse balloon.

• Beyond the labor movement, we continued building bridges across justice sectors. Our team spoke at the University of Miami School of Law’s Human Rights Symposium on a roundtable exploring gender-based violence in South Florida, highlighting how economic isolation, produced by both employer practices and the carceral system, is one of the most pervasive but least recognized forms of violence. We also presented The Temp Trap at the Umbrella of Hope reentry coalition, sparking conversations about the role of temp agencies in shaping the economic realities facing people returning home from incarceration.

Organizational Development. This month, we continued deep research into creating a unionized staffing cooperative, an alternative to a traditional temp agency that puts control back in the hands of workers. Shout out to AlliedUP and SEIU-UHW, who’ve led the way nationally in showing what a worker-centered staffing model can look like. Their example is helping us imagine what’s possible here in the blue-collar temp industry. We also closed out the year with our weekly somatics centering practice, grounding ourselves every Wednesday in the skills and resilience needed to build a long-term movement for worker power.

With all of that behind us, here’s what’s coming up next.

Coming Up

Winter Break & Staff Retreat (Dec 15, 2025 to Jan 11, 2026)

Our office will be closed from Dec 15 to Jan 4 for our annual winter break, followed by our staff retreat from Jan 5 to 11. During this period, our team will not be checking email. We look forward to reconnecting once we’re back in action. If you have an urgent request during that time, please email maya@beyondthebars.org with “URGENT” in the subject line.

While we pause for winter break and gear up for our retreat, we’re staying connected to national conversations to inform our work. These pieces stood out this month.

What We’re Reading

The Impact of Incarcerated Labor in Hyundai’s U.S. Supply Chain by Susan Helper, Suresh Naidu, Adam Reich, and Aaron Sojourner

This groundbreaking report examines wages and working conditions in Hyundai’s Alabama supply chain. It finds that a 10% increase in the share of incarcerated workers at a plant is associated with a 10–14% decline in wages for non-incarcerated workers. Because incarcerated workers face coercive prison conditions and are far less able to quit over low pay, their presence gives employers leverage to suppress wages and degrade working conditions across the entire workforce.

Making a May Day 2028 General Strike a Reality by Alex Han

The idea of a May 2028 general strike, proposed by UAW president Shawn Fain, may sound impossible. But a strategic look back at the coordinated strikes and militancy of the past two decades shows we might be much closer than we think.

Get on the Job and Organize with Inside Organizer School by Amie Stager and Isabela Escalona

How a new generation of leaders is reviving the labor movement through salting. More on salting here.

Share

If these ideas resonate with you, here are a few ways to take action with us.

Take Action

• Share the Report → bit.ly/TheTempTrap

• Stay Updated → @beyondbars_mia

• Learn More → beyondthebars.org

• Take Action → Sign up to volunteer

• Fuel the Work → Donate now

Every day, millions of workers with criminal records stock our shelves, load our trucks, fix our roads, and build our cities. They’re told they’re lucky to have any job at all, but here’s what we’ve uncovered: They’re not just working, they’re being systematically exploited by low-road industries that profit from their records.

Today, we’re proud to release The Temp Trap: A Blueprint for Organizing Workers with Records in the Temp Industry, a landmark report exposing how the temp industry works and laying out a strategy to organize workers with records to win dignified work.

This report is the result of two years of field work and research, including:

• 1,443 doors knocked

• 608 conversations with impacted community members

• 183 surveys conducted inside Miami-Dade jails

• 83 temp agencies and 58 reentry and workforce organizations across South Florida surveyed

Read The Temp Trap

The Temp Trap: A Blueprint for Organizing Workers with Records in the Temp Industry

Foreword by Maya Ragsdale & Katherine Passley, Co-Executive Directors, Beyond the Bars

The predominant narrative about people reentering society after incarceration is that they are excluded from the job market—that they can’t find work. But as our report will expose, the truth is more insidious. People with records are working, often in the lowest paid, most dangerous jobs in our country, precisely because they have records. They’re locked out of good jobs and left to survive in the most unstable, exploitative ones.

Our work at Beyond the Bars begins with a simple truth: There is no path to ending incarceration without transforming the conditions of work.

The United States has built an economy where punishment and labor exploitation are deeply intertwined. Inside our nation’s prisons, multimillion-dollar compounds are sustained by the coerced labor of incarcerated people, who cook meals, clean cells, cut grass, repair roofs, and perform nearly every task needed to keep facilities running.

They are, however, excluded from all federal employment protections, denied the right to organize, and stripped of the wage, health and safety, and anti-discrimination standards that apply to nearly every other workplace in the country. As a result, they are often paid pennies—or, in many cases, nothing at all—for their labor, and are routinely assigned to dangerous jobs without health and safety training or recourse when they are injured.

The experience of performing labor under coercion leaves a lasting mark. Inside prison walls, incarcerated people learn that work means control without rights. Upon release, they enter a labor market that is hauntingly familiar, with the authority of the prison guard replaced by that of the supervisor, and the control of the cell replicated on the shop floors of low-wage, high-turnover jobs. What is often dismissed in popular and policy discourse as a “prison mentality” is, in truth, a rational adaptation to a labor market that cheapens labor, normalizes disposability, and trains people to accept exploitation as inevitable.

Many of the same jobs people perform under coercion in prison—cooking, cleaning, repairing, building, caring for others, and resolving conflicts—exist outside as stable, higher-wage careers in culinary arts, sanitation, logistics, construction, care work, and conflict mediation. People returning home from incarceration already possess the skills to thrive in these fields, yet the doors remain largely closed to them. Background checks, licensing restrictions, liability policies, insurance barriers, and employer stigma block access, creating a cruel paradox: The state profits from people’s labor inside only to bar them from the very industries their work sustains once they’re free.

Locked out of stable careers, people returning home are funneled into the only jobs still willing to take them. The temp industry has become the default entry point after incarceration. A person might apply for a warehouse job paying $25 an hour, get denied because of a background check, walk next door to a temp agency, and then be sent to that same warehouse the next day, doing the same work for minimum wage while the temp agency captures the difference.

Temp agencies promise what other employers won’t: fast placement with no background checks, a ride, a badge, and quick pay. When bills and court fees pile up, they are one of the few avenues that open quickly enough.

This report exposes how the carceral and temp labor systems together create a workforce that can be easily controlled, underpaid, and silenced. It also lays out a roadmap for change rooted in our forthcoming strategy document, “The Economic Freedom Agenda,” which advances two interconnected objectives: raising standards in the temp industry and expanding access to union jobs, through which workers can obtain stability, fair wages, and collective power.

We offer this report as a blueprint for organizers across both the decarceral and labor movements. It is a tool for decarceral organizers to critically examine how we approach “reentry,” to recognize our shared interests with labor, and to understand that without engaging workers’ economic conditions head on, we cannot win. And for labor organizers, it is a call to see the realities, resilience, and profound skills of workers with records—and to understand that organizing these more than 114 million workers is not optional or peripheral, but essential to the survival and future of the labor movement itself.

Temp work is reshaping entire industries and threatening to set the floor of wages, rights, and conditions for all workers. If we don’t organize workers within temp agencies, we cede the ground on which the future of work will be built.

Read The Temp Trap

Labor pool in North Miami. (Note: faces blurred for privacy.)

FROM MANAGER TO CONSTRUCTION LABORER

As our report uncovers, many people returning from incarceration bring valuable skills and prior work experience from a wide range of occupations, yet those skills are often ignored or underutilized by the industrial temp agencies that funnel them into low-wage, manual labor.

Felix, a Beyond the Bars member, shared, “Before I went to jail, I was a manager at Office Depot. When I came out, I couldn’t get the kind of jobs I had before. Probation required a paycheck, and I had court fees due. With better jobs closed off because of my record, I ended up at a temp and labor pool—doing construction, which I’d never done before.”

Temp agencies aren’t a choice; they’re practically the only option. Even before a person leaves prison or jail, they are often handed a list of temp agencies to contact upon release. Felix recalled receiving a packet of information that included the names of several temp agencies before he was even released. On its face, giving someone a head start on finding employment seems like a good thing, but it wasn’t that simple. “When I got out, my first thought was, I’m going to use what they gave me,” he said. “That’s the first place you go, but when you get there, they’re not really helping anybody.”

Felix’s story isn’t an anomaly; it’s the system working exactly as designed. Our report shows how we raise the floor for all blue-collar temp workers.

Read The Temp Trap

SINCE THE LAST WORK RELEASE

Highlights from our month of organizing, advocacy, education, and support this month.

Worker Organizing. We held our monthly Worker Organizing Committee meeting, where worker-leaders took key roles in facilitating the meeting. Attendees reported back on their commitments, including site assessments at temp agencies, canvassing, and mobilizing to Tallahassee, and discussed next steps for organizing temp workers toward dignified work.

Worker Advocacy. We mobilized to Tallahassee from October 9–16 during legislators’ second committee week, meeting with lawmakers and sharing the realities temp workers face across Florida. We’re building on last session’s success, when our members helped stop harmful rollbacks that would have harmed nearly one million blue-collar temp workers, by continuing to push for stronger protections and a fairer labor market for our communities.

Worker Education. Our member, Xavier, held our monthly book club, attended by nine other members. This month’s reading was an excerpt from Haiti: Trapped in the Outer Periphery by Robert Fatton Jr., discussing how Haiti’s ongoing political and economic crises drive migration to the U.S. and shape the experiences of Haitian workers in Miami. Another six members participated in our political education on the labor market and economics during our Walk-in-Wednesday at our office.

Worker Support. Through our participatory defense work, we welcomed three members home: Jason returned after 10 years of incarceration, and Racheeve and Jermaine came home after beating a probation violation. We helped Matt avoid jail time by challenging his alleged probation violation with the support of ROOT Legal. We also secured travel motions for three members on probation to join our upcoming Tallahassee mobilization for our FLPA advocacy. Finally, we held a restorative justice circle to quash interpersonal beef between two members that spilled over into their work at temp agencies and their organizing commitments with us.

Cross-Movement Solidarity.

• We formalized a partnership with UNITE HERE! Local 355’s Hospitality Education & Training Program to provide space for hospitality training classes at our Miami headquarters. This collaboration deepens our work building pipelines into union apprenticeships and training programs for people with records.

• Our team had a big presence at COSHCON 2025. Freddy won the Worker Power Organizing award presented by National COSH for his contributions to worker health, safety, and justice. Kat spoke on COSHCON’s main stage on a panel, Voices Across Platforms: Storytelling and Organizing, alongside organizers from Organized Power in Numbers (OPIN), New Labor, and the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW). Meanwhile, our organizers co-facilitated a workshop called Justice on the Job: Organizing Across Incarceration and Temporary Work, teaching participants the fundamentals of temp worker organizing through hands-on roleplay.

• We hosted and co-facilitated the Temp Worker Advocacy Coalition (TWAC) convening at our Miami office, bringing together organizations from across the country that are organizing and advocating for blue-collar temp workers in sectors like green energy, warehousing, stadiums, hospitality, and construction.

Team Development.

• Maya was selected to join Aspen Institute’s Job Quality Fellows, Class of 2025-2026 and recently kicked off the fellowship in Birmingham, alongside leaders from organizations like USSW and the Lift Fund. This fellowship brings together leaders who are working to expand the availability of quality jobs across the South.

• Kat returned from Return & Reclaim with Mass Liberation in Accra, Ghana, reconnecting with her ancestral culture in West Africa and deepening her somatics practice. She also graduated from the Quilombo School for Exemplary Movement Leadership Director & Lead Organizer’s course through BOLD (Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity).

• Jean attended Legal Defense Fund’s conference in New Orleans, On the Rise: Securing the Future of Organizing, connecting with lawyers and organizers building power as authoritarianism advances.

COMING UP

TALLAHASSEE MEMBER MOBILIZATION

NOVEMBER 17-21, 2025

We’re mobilizing to Tallahassee from November 17–21 to meet with legislators and advocate for stronger protections for workers with criminal records across Florida.

Members, contact your organizer to join.

ORGANIZING 4 POWER (O4P) TRAINING

NOVEMBER 18 & 20, DECEMBER 2 & 4, 2025

O4P, a global training program teaching the core fundamentals of organizing founded by Jane McAlevey, is starting up. We’ll be participating with Beyond the Bars member-leaders, and will host a book club on No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age to solidify and discuss what we’re learning.

Members, contact your organizer to join.

GIVE MIAMI DAY

NOVEMBER 20, 2025

Give Miami Day, an online fundraising event for over 1,000 nonprofits in Greater Miami, is coming up. Beyond the Bars has a goal of raising $12,000. Early giving starts on November 15th and Give Miami Day is on November 20th.

Click HERE to donate.

MOBILIZATION TO DC FOR ABOLITION AMENDMENT BILL LAUNCH

DECEMBER 5, 2025

On December 5th, Congresswoman Celeste Maloy (R-Utah) will introduce a constitutional amendment to end the 13th Amendment’s slavery exception, the clause that still allows involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime. Since 1865, the 13th Amendment has prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude for most people, but not for those convicted of crimes. This exception continues to enable coerced labor in prisons today. As a member of End the Exception’s Steering Committee, Beyond the Bars will be in D.C. helping with the bill introduction. There will be a press conference, legislative visits, and organizing for the fight ahead.

Members, contact your organizer to join.

FIFTH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION: CAGED BIRD ARTS SLAM

DECEMBER 14, 2025, 7:00PM

Join us for the Caged Bird Arts Slam, a night of celebration and resistance in honor of Beyond the Bars’ fifth anniversary. We welcome poets, musicians, and visual artists to share their work on the theme of reclaiming economic freedom.

To share your art, email your name, phone number, and art medium to info@beyondthebars.org.

To attend, RSVP at bit.ly/BTBCagedBirdArts.

MEMBER SHOUTOUT

Cece speaking about her experience as a temp worker during a panel at the TWAC convening.

This month, we’re celebrating member-leader Cece, who brought six new temp workers into our organization this month, four of whom signed membership cards and took on new commitments, such as facilitating our monthly member meeting, mobilizing to Tallahassee, and conducting site assessments at temp agencies. All completed an in-office training and joined a political education session.

Cece also spoke on a worker panel at the TWAC convening earlier this month, and supported Caged Bird Arts’ upcoming Slam, writing letters to friends and others in Florida jails and prisons to invite them to share their artwork for the event.

WHAT WE’RE READING

A Strategy to Stop the Flow of Our Money to Billionaires by Sara Myklebust & Saqib Bhatti

The trillions of dollars in our retirement savings are enriching the ultra wealthy while they ravage our communities. A mass movement led by workers and pensioners can turn off the tap.

Below the Floor: Court-Ordered Community Service Lacks Labor Standards by Han Lu & Noah Zatz

This is part two of a series that uncovers coerced labor in community service programs operated via the criminal legal system, a widely recognized engine of anti-Black structural racism and economic inequality.

We Can Use Predistribution to Fight Income Inequality by Matthew Dimick

Mainstream economics argues that the tax system is the best tool for reducing economic inequality. In fact, “predistributive” measures like minimum wages and collective bargaining can be equally or more effective.

WE’RE HIRING

We’re hiring a Union Coordinator to anchor and expand our partnerships with labor unions across Florida and the South. The Union Coordinator will work at the national, regional, and local levels to recruit and train member teams, partner with unions, develop bargaining strategies that protect workers with records, represent Beyond the Bars in local and national labor coalitions, and more. Read the full job description. To apply, email your resume and cover letter to jobs@beyondthebars.org.

TAKE ACTION

• Share the report → bit.ly/TheTempTrap

• Stay Updated → @beyondbars_mia

• Learn More → beyondthebars.org

• Take Action → Sign up to volunteer

• Fuel the Work → Donate now

This month, we spotlight what it’s like to work a labor pool job while on probation, and share how we’re organizing for change. Don’t miss our co-director Katherine “Kat” Passley’s feature at the end of the newsletter. In These Times recognized her visionary leadership by naming her one of their inaugural Labor Organizers of the Year, selected by labor veterans Sheri Davis, Jennifer Epps, Nelson Lichtenstein, Victor Narro, and Jane Slaughter.

On the Clock and On Probation

WRITTEN by Davontae “Tae” Gibbs, Beyond the Bars member

My name is Davontae Gibbs. I was born and raised in Little Haiti, Liberty City area in Miami, Florida. I had a rough life growing up. I didn’t get to be a kid. Everything hit me at an early age. I was pumping gas, selling candy, selling school supplies to bring money back to my family. Like the other kids around me, I wanted to make something of myself. I was a dream chaser, a goal chaser. Ambition was everything.

I got shot in the shoulder and didn’t graduate from high school because of that. That led me deeper into the streets. I ended up going to jail. I got out on house arrest and wasn’t allowed to leave the house except for work. I wanted a 9 to 5 job and applied to a lot of places, but they looked past me because I was facing a felony charge. Employers doubted me and wouldn’t give me the time or training to prove myself. Eventually, my family almost kicked me out because I couldn’t pay my part.

So I started going to labor pools. I went through Labor for Hire and HireQuest Direct. I would go there at 3 or 4 am, and a lot of the time, I would get passed over. When I did get sent out on a ticket, we weren’t treated like regular workers. We were treated like slaves, like something employers could use up and toss overboard. I never had an employment contract and wouldn’t know how much I was going to make until the job was done. Sometimes they’d pay under the table, in cash.

The agencies sent me all over: to North Miami, Wynwood, Downtown, and Miramar. Mostly construction cleanup and demolition, or warehouse jobs. Loading trucks, moving pallets, sweeping job sites. We were given a broom and a shovel. If we needed anything else to keep ourselves safe, like steel-toed boots, safety goggles, or a vest, we had to buy it ourselves. There was no training, not even on dangerous equipment like jackhammers.

Construction and warehouse jobs paid $60 to $70 a day. If we worked at the port, it might be $80 to $100. But all those places were far, and you’d have to pay $50 just to get there and back. After those deductions, you might go home with $30 to $40 in your pocket. What does that show your kids? Your wife? Your mom? I felt like I was losing. I couldn’t move forward. I was stuck.

On top of that, labor pools didn’t always pay us on time. We were supposed to get paid the same day, but sometimes it took two or three. That made me late on rent, and my landlord started talking about evicting me. I was close to being homeless.

Being on probation meant walking a tightrope. I had to pay $25 a week in fees, and when the labor pool didn’t pay me on time, I couldn’t pay, and my officer said he’d violate me. I had to negotiate just to stay free. Probation will violate you for anything, even coming home late from working overtime. They’d show up at my job unannounced, sitting in their car in the parking lot, watching me work.

All of this is why I joined Beyond the Bars. I had to step out of my comfort zone, because staying quiet was just another kind of cage. Changing things starts with using your voice as a weapon, not for violence, but for truth. For justice. For the people coming behind us.

We have to come together, build a team, and stand on something. Nobody is going to hand us dignity. We have to take it for ourselves.

Tae fights for dignity as a member of our Temp Worker Organizing Committee, one of the ways we’re building new forms of worker power under Kat’s leadership. This month, Kat was named one of In These Times’ inaugural Labor Organizers of the Year. Don’t miss her feature and companion piece below!

Read Kat's In These Times Feature

From Permanent Precarity to Permanent Power

WRITTEN by Katherine Passley, Co-Director

In Florida, the carceral system coerces workers with records into low-wage, precarious jobs by tying their freedom to employment. Background checks bar them from stable work, leaving only the jobs others avoid, quit, or fight to change. At the same time, probation agreements make employment and the payment of court fines and fees a condition of release. Workers with records are destabilized by an economic system that withholds continuity, protections and dignity by design.

Many find work through temp agencies that place them in industrial worksites, construction zones, warehouses and manufacturing facilities. These agencies offer employers cheap, on-demand labor, the power to reassign or discard workers at will, and minimal legal liability. Workers are sent to unfamiliar sites under supervisors they barely know, with no promise of returning the next day. There’s no continuity, no shared identity and no protection. The point is to keep workers too isolated to organize, too replaceable to resist.

At Beyond the Bars, we’re changing that. We’re building peer-led political education programs that inoculate workers against the Right’s attacks and the Left’s broken promises. We’re challenging probation systems that extend punishment into the workplace through mandatory employment requirements, restrictions on work hours and locations, and burdensome fines and fees, all of which can lead to reincarceration if workers are unable to comply.

And we’re taking on the corporate forces that profit from permanent precarity—and the government systems that protect them. Just last month, we stalled SB 1672/HB 6033, a bill backed by corporate giant Pacesetter Personnel Services and pushed by one of Florida’s most powerful lobbyists, Ron Book. The bill would have stripped nearly 1 million temp workers of the few protections they have, like drinking water and a place to sit during the sweltering summer months. But through direct, worker-led organizing, we made legislators feel the heat they thought they could avoid.

Our model blends distributed organizing (where member committees drive decision-making and action) with worker-to-worker organizing that trains temp worker-leaders to spark fights wherever they land. We are generating brush fires that force temp agencies, client companies, and public officials to reckon with the power of organized resistance.

Our leadership development process moves step by step. It begins with participatory research: engaging temp workers, temp agency administrative staff and reentry service providers to map where exploitation concentrates—like agencies clustered near jails, warehouses with high injury rates and job sites with constant turnover. We trace who profits, from subcontractors to brand-name corporations, and identify where fights can ignite: on the job, in probation offices, or through policy campaigns targeting corporate abuse. From there, we train workers to lead direct actions and political education, organize meetings and mobilizations, run campaigns, and ultimately become Strategic Team Leaders who guide new organizers and grow the base.

Our leadership development is intensive because no other institution—not schools, employers or prisons—invests in the leadership potential of workers with records. We see what others refuse to see: the talent, vision and discipline of the criminalized working class. We go beyond individual skill-building to cultivate the capacity for collective struggle.

We know we can’t stop at site fights. Winning a wage theft claim or a fan for an overheated workspace is important, but it doesn’t challenge the broader legal and economic structures that make exploitation possible in the first place.

In the short term, we are developing stronger worker organizing in our region by launching as many workplace fights as possible led by temp workers with records who are ready to challenge exploitation directly.

In the medium term, we are building a permanent base of workers with records who stay organized and politically active even after they leave temp work.

In the long term, we are pushing for greater union density across hyper-exploitative industries.

We’re seeing signs of hope. Even in one of the most repressive labor environments in the country, more unions in Florida are showing interest in organizing low-wage industries. We stand in solidarity with these efforts, always with the leadership of workers with records at the center.

As co-executive director of Beyond the Bars, I can tell you that we are not a service program offering charity or one-off relief. We are developing organizers and fighters with the skills, discipline and collective power to confront and change the conditions of exploitation and criminalization.

Because mass incarceration didn’t just destroy families. It disorganized the working class.

Because Florida’s economy didn’t just “neglect” workers with records. It built its labor supply on their permanent precarity.

At Beyond the Bars, we are organizing workers who were pushed out, locked up and discarded, and we are building their power to lead.

We know the barriers because we live them.

We know the fight because we are in it every day.

And we know that when workers with records organize,

We don’t just survive.

We win.

Read Kat's In These Times Companion

April was all about defeating HB 6033 and SB 1672, bills we successfully stalled in both the House and Senate. Since we already shared updates from that mobilization, we’re skipping a full April recap. Instead, here’s how you can plug into our work in May.

May Calendar

Thursday, May 1 | 4:30 PM | May Day Solidarity Action

Join us as we stand in solidarity with UNITE HERE Local 355 and hospitality workers fighting for dignity, immigrant rights, good contracts, respect on the job, and real protections. We’re showing up for labor, because this fight belongs to all of us.

📲 Hyatt Regency Miami, 400 SE 2nd St, Miami, FL 33131 (open to all)

Saturday, May 3 | 10–1 PM | May Day Neighborhood Rally

Rally with AFGE, TWU, Broward Teachers Union, FLIC & elected officials, demanding housing, healthcare, fair wages, and safety for all, regardless of race, zip code, or status.

📲 1733 E Young Circle, Hollywood, FL 33020 (open to all)

Sunday, May 4 | 2–5 PM | Temp Worker Organizing Committee (TWOC) Meeting

If you’re a temp worker, join us for this month’s TWOC meeting. Food served 1–2 PM and the table closes at 2 PM sharp, so come early. Bring a temp worker friend. Childcare & translation provided.

📲 RSVP: Text your organizer (members only)

Wednesday, May 14 | 7–9 PM | The Prison Industry: How It Works and Who Profits

Register today to join us for a conversation celebrating the release of The Prison Industry: How It Works and Who Profits by Bianca Tylek. The discussion will unpack the financial incentives driving mass incarceration and explore how we can disrupt them. All guests are invited to a reception following the panel to continue the conversation.

📲 Roots Bookstore & Market | 6610 NW 15th Ave, Liberty City, FL (open to all)

This fight is bigger than any one workplace or industry—it’s about the future of our country.

Stand with us. Build with us. Win with us.

Stay Updated → @beyondbars_mia

Learn More → beyondthebars.org

Take Action → Sign up to volunteer

Fuel the Work → Donate now

The Fight for Criminalized Workers is a Fight for Our Democracy

WRITTEN by Maya Ragsdale, Co-Executive Director

Corporate power is consolidating at an alarming rate, stripping us of rights, protections, and dignity, leaving our democracy and economy in shambles. Those in power wield it ruthlessly and working people are left to bear the cost.

But one thing is certain: we cannot let this chaos and war on working families lead us to despair. We deserve a world where we all can lead safe, healthy, and thriving lives.

The strongest check on corporate power is a strong labor movement, which drives mass political and economic participation. To wield real power amid growing precarity, labor must organize workers who don’t yet fit into traditional union models.

This is where Beyond the Bars come in. One in three people in the U.S. has an arrest record, yet public and corporate policies systematically lock them out of stable jobs, forcing them into precarious, low-wage employment. In their first year post-release, formerly incarcerated workers earn an average of just $10,000. On top of that, probation requirements—like court fees, curfews, and mandatory check-ins during work hours—coerce workers into accepting whatever they can get. The result? A disposable, underpaid workforce without union protections, dragging down wages across industries. Mass criminalization isn’t only a criminal justice issue—it’s a labor and democracy issue too.

For example, temp work has become the default for workers with records because temp agencies placing workers in industrial worksites don’t require background checks. But these jobs come with low wages, little training, no benefits, and unpredictable scheduling. And since the 1970s, when the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that temp agencies could legally act as strikebreakers, the industry has played a critical role in reshaping the labor market, fueling corporate power by suppressing worker organizing.

We are fighting for our democracy by investing in the leadership of workers with records, giving them tools to develop and execute winning corporate and public policy campaigns that improve economic mobility by transforming the industries that rely on their labor.

• Nationally, we organize and advocate alongside allies in the labor and criminal justice movements to shift the national narrative and policy landscape for criminalized workers, both during and after incarceration. From challenging federal incentives that reinforce temp labor over permanent employment, to confronting prison labor and the economic systems that benefit from it, our work aims to dismantle the structures that lock workers with records out of opportunity.

• Statewide in Florida, employers cite state and industry regulations, insurance, and liability concerns as top barriers to hiring workers with records into permanent jobs. Unlike in 38 other states, in Florida, they can reject applicants outright before even reviewing their qualifications. We advocate for state legislation that removes employer barriers to hiring workers with records, expanding their access to permanent jobs across industries.

• Locally, we organize temp workers to fight back against temp agencies that provide industrial staffing services, which is a direct extension of mass criminalization. Through our base-building experiment, worker committees demand pathways to permanent employment, livable wages, health & safety protections, and transparency from the temp industry and advocate to eliminate probation work requirements through the criminal legal system.

In short, we bridge movements to rewrite the rules of a rigged economy. The piece that follows gives voice to that struggle.

A Poem For Movement

WRITTEN by Katherine Passley, Co-Executive Director

Detention is not justice, but

violence draped in law, steel

bars and cold walls meant to

hold the surplus. In a world

ruled by capital, our bodies

reduced to commodities,

bought, sold, and caged

so the powerful can feast on

our suffering and call it order.

We are taught to remain civilly obedient

to vote, to wait

to whisper our pain politely,

as if obedience will free us, as

if silence is not complicity.

But no society has survived

the sound of chains breaking.

No cage can hold the storm

that comes when the

oppressed unite and stand in their power.

We are not disposable.

We are the fire they swore

could never spread and the

fighters that rebuild after the

flames are put out.

At Beyond the Bars, our work is deeply personal, and Kat’s poetry, rooted in truth, survival, and resistance, reminds us what’s at stake and what we’re building toward. The fire in her poem isn’t just metaphor, it’s the spark that fuels our organization. This month, we’ve carried that fire into house calls with temp workers, community trainings, research collaborations, and more. Read on to learn about what we moved together in March.

Inside the Work: March 2025

• Worker Organizing. Every Tuesday through Thursday, our organizers hit the streets from 12–8 PM, knocking on doors, talking with workers, and making house calls, rain or shine. We knocked on 421 doors in Miami’s northwest corridor and connected with 128 new workers, including 42 temp workers. These weren’t just quick chats—they were deep conversations about second chances, work conditions, and what it means to organize with a record. At our Temp Worker Organizing Committee (TWOC) meetings, 44 workers showed up, many for the first time. Two stepped up as new leaders, excited to take on more responsibility. And six committee members joined us in the field, helping lead house calls and grow the organization themselves. This kind of momentum matters. Every new leader, every conversation, every door knock—it’s how we shift power in industries that rely on our labor but count on our silence. We’re showing up for each other and we’re building an organization that can’t be ignored.

• Worker Advocacy. At the federal level, we’re working with allies to reform the WOTC tax credit so people with felony convictions can access stable, long-term jobs, not just temporary placements. At the state level, we met with potential partners to explore a legislative campaign that would reduce negligent hiring liability based on an employee’s criminal record alone and stop insurance discrimination against workers with records. And locally, we are pursuing reforms to eliminate probation work requirements, improving workers’ chances of finding and keeping meaningful employment, while preventing probation from being weaponized by low-road employers to keep workers in line.

• Worker Research. This month, we continued to work with students from Harvard Law School and brought on an expert from Blue Pencil Strategies to dig deeper into the realities of temp work for our report, The Temp Trap: Temporary Jobs, Permanent Struggles for Workers with Criminal Records in South Florida. The report will be released in May and will feature data and stories to strengthen our fight for industry-wide reforms.

• Worker Education. At our March 16 TWOC meeting, we trained 44 people on how to identify wage theft, which is when employers steal wages by refusing to pay what’s owed, often via illegal paycheck deductions, unpaid overtime, and misclassification as a 1099 contractor instead of a W-2 employee. We also walked workers through steps to fight back and win through collective action and legal pressure.

• Worker Support. This month, we provided direct support to members navigating complex systems and urgent needs, including court accompaniment, employment and medical referrals, resume help, wage theft recovery, and probation advocacy. For example, our member leaders provided intensive court support for two fellow members’ children, leading to one release and one five-year sentence reduction. We also began planning our April 27th art and poetry event for Second Chance Month, along with a May Day action for second chances, fair wages, and worker protections.

• Movement Building. Two BTB members are participating in National COSH’s We Rise! Workers’ Leadership Academy to bring worker health and safety trainings to criminal justice organizations in South Florida. This month, they’ve been putting together a training on heat protections for our next TWOC meeting—an issue that affects nearly every temp worker in South Florida. We also continued to actively work on the End the Exception campaign, with the goal of bringing labor organizations into the fight to end the 13th Amendment’s exception that allows for prison slavery.

March is behind us, and Second Chance Month is here. Whether you’re canvassing, learning, or creating, there’s a place for you in our work this April. If you believe in building an economy that works for everyone—no matter their past—now’s the time to get involved.

April Calendar

Saturday, April 5 | 12–3 PM | Neighborhood Canvassing Blitz

Want to build worker power? Come canvass with us! We’re having real conversations that bring criminalized workers together in the fight for good jobs. No experience needed—just bring your energy, your heart, and a friend.

📲 RSVP: Email freddy@beyondthebars.org (open to all)

Sunday, April 6 | 3–5 PM | Temp Worker Organizing Committee (TWOC) Meeting

This month’s TWOC meeting includes a training on workplace health & safety, with a focus on heat protections and enforcement. Food served 2–3 PM and the table closes at 3 PM sharp, so come early. Bring a temp worker friend. Childcare & translation provided.

📲 RSVP: Text your organizer (members only)

Sunday, April 12 | 12–1:30 PM | BTB Temp Worker Book Club

Join us to learn about the history of temp work and how it shapes our labor market today. This month, we’re reading the intro (pg. 1-18) of The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America by Erin Hatton.

📲 RSVP: Email maya@beyondthebars.org. Maya will send you the book, add you to the WhatsApp group, and send you the Zoom link. (open to all)

Sunday, April 27 | 3–8 PM | Cultural & Community Organizing Committee (CCOC) Meeting
Join us for an art & poetry event for Second Chance Month and World Day for Safety & Health at Work—and get ready for May Day! We’ll be planning our action for second chances, livable wages, and worker protections. Bring your family & friends. Childcare & translation provided.
📲 RSVP: Text your organizer (members only)

This fight is bigger than any one workplace or industry—it’s about the future of our country.

Stand with us. Build with us. Win with us.

Stay Updated → @beyondbars_mia

Learn More → beyondthebars.org

Take Action → Sign up to volunteer

Fuel the Work → Donate now