Striking inmates are refusing to leave their cells for work assigned by Texas Corrections Industries (TCI), a publicly traded company... TCI uses prison labor to make a variety of products “from hand soap to bed sheets, from raising livestock to making iron toilets and portable buildings,” all of which are sold to local, state, and federal government agencies...

“They are forced to work on a daily basis, if they refuse to work a single day, they are punished in many different ways,” the letter said... In some states, prisoners in privately run facilities earn 17 cents an hour, but prisons in Texas and several other (mostly Southern) states don’t require inmates to be paid at all, Erica Gammill, director of the Prison Justice League, [said]...

“We will not only demand the end to prison slavery, we will end it ourselves by ceasing to be slaves,” the announcement of the September 9 strike read. “They cannot run these facilities without us.”