LABOR ALIGNMENT
Expanding access to union jobs for workers with records.
Beyond the Bars is building a national strategy to open pathways into high-quality, union jobs for workers with records. This work connects our base to union infrastructure and helps build a labor movement that reflects today’s working class.
Building National Alignment & Scale
Across the country, unions are beginning to confront mass incarceration as a workforce issue. In scattered locals, promising experiments are emerging to recruit and retain formerly incarcerated workers in union jobs, apprenticeships, and leadership.
We bring these union leaders together in coordination tables so we can move from isolated experiments to a shared labor agenda. That agenda focuses on organizing, recruiting, and retaining the 114 million people in the United States with a criminal record as part of the labor movement.
Local Field Testing & Model Development
We design, implement, and evaluate pilot programs with union partners in Florida that can be replicated nationally. These pilots create concrete pathways into union apprenticeship programs, strengthen collective bargaining, and expand reentry-focused union benefits.
Each pilot produces toolkits, contract language, training materials, and data systems so successful local models can scale nationally.
WHY UNIONS MATTER
Labor unions in the United States hold enormous institutional power: roughly $32 billion in net assets, nearly $7 trillion in pension funds, and representation for 16 million workers nationwide.
Even modest shifts in how this power is deployed could create generational change, improving employment outcomes for workers with records while weakening an economic system that recycles people from incarceration into permanent precarity.
how unions benefit
Expands organizing into industries unions often struggle to reach (e.g. temp work)
Raises standards by targeting the wage floor and “forever temp” business models
Creates real pathways from jail & prisons into apprenticeships and union jobs
Strengthens bargaining with fair-chance protections and enforcement strategies
Builds research + narrative that helps unions win public fights
what partnerships can look like
We have active labor partnerships and are happy to share details upon request.
Joint outreach and worker-leader development
Contract and bargaining support
Joint enforcement campaigns
Shared legislative fights
Training for organizers and shop stewards
what unions can do now
Include fair-chance protections in contracts
Limit temp-to-perm abuse and win conversion timelines
Create pathways into apprenticeships for workers with records
BUILD WORKER POWER WITH US
Temp worker or worker with a record? Join Beyond the Bars.
Union or community organization? Partner with us.
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