Labor alignment
Expanding access to union jobs work workers with records.
Beyond the Bars is leading a national strategy to open pathways into high-quality, unionized jobs for workers with records. This work connects our base to existing union infrastructure, helping build a labor movement that reflects today’s workforce.
Why Unions Matter
Today, labor unions in the United States control 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 would produce a generational change, both in employment outcomes an in transforming an economic system that currently recycles people from incarceration into permanent precarity.
Building National Alignment & Scale
Across the country, unions are beginning to confront mass incarceration as a workforce issue. In scattered locals, innovative experiments are emerging to bring formerly incarcerated workers into union jobs, apprenticeships, and leadership.
We build coordination tables that bring these union leaders together to move from isolated experiments to a shared labor agenda that organizes, recruits, and retains the 114 million people in the United States with a criminal record within 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 that help move successful local models to national scale.