Germany prisons are more and more a ‘site of industrial labour’. Companies outsource labour and automobile producers subcontract assembly work to prisons. For all their work, prisoners earn below the legal minimum wage while their labour and human rights are not protected. Until 2014, prisoners were not organised. At present, the prisoners’ trade union Gefangenengewerkschaft/Bundesweite Organisation (GG/BO) has around 800 members in more than 40 prisons. A global labour column describes how the union was formed and why a strike was called in Butzbach prison in December 2015 as well as the state’s reaction to the strike.
English: http://column.global-labour-university.org/2016/01/interview …
For more information, please contact the editor Jan Cremers, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) cbn-aias@uva.nl or the communications officer at the ETUI, Mariya Nikolova mnikolova@etui.org. For previous issues of the Collective bargaining newsletter please visit http://www.etui.org/E-Newsletters/Collective-bargaining-newsletter. You may find further information on the ETUI at www.etui.org, and on the AIAS at www.uva-aias.net.