Against carceral unionism: OPSEU must divest from the correctional bargaining unit – Spring Mag
September 22, 2025
Prisons are anti-labour and anti-Indigenous institutions that exist to warehouse the surplus populations left behind by the production of capital. Its populations consist of primarily poor, working class people who come from displaced communities shaped by organized abandonment from the state. Correctional officers serve the interests of the state and act as the front line oppressors in prisons defined by deplorable conditions and violence.
In Ontario, all correctional officers in provincial prisons are represented by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) under the correctional bargaining unit. OPSEU has been praised in the past few years as a progressive union that stands in solidarity with liberation movements such as Palestine, releasing statements claiming to recognize that “the road for all oppressed peoples is interconnected.”
When it comes to the violence inherent to prisons however, OPSEU uses the correctional bargaining unit as a means to dead-end the human rights of those incarcerated, the population bearing the most significant brunt of state oppression. Such a reality reveals the contradiction of carceral unionism, in which the collective bargaining power meant to further worker solidarity is instead being used to stifle the fight for downsizing prisons and implementing transformative reforms that lead to prison abolition. What results is the further entrenchment of state carceral power through the co-opting of union organizing to silence incarcerated voices.
