Ojeda visits the prison to show support to Local 404 members

West Virginia Sen. Richard Ojeda wants unions to stick together, and he also said it’s OK for workers to strike in oder to protect one another.

Ojeda, the Demoratic candidate for the Third Congressional District, joined with members of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Council of Prison Locals (CPL-33) Local 404 at the Federal Correctional Institution at Beaver Wednesday to greet workers as they drove through the gate of the federal prison.

Ojeda and members of the Local 404 said they need more workers inside federal prisons and that staffing cuts since November 2016 have led to unsafe working conditions inside the nation’s prisons, putting employees at risk.

In January, the Trump Administration proposed eliminating more than 6,100 unfilled positions at federal institutions nationwide.

At the medium-security FIC, 404 President Kevin Franco said the number of correctional officers has dropped from 360 to under 300 since 2016. The strain requires officers to work 16-hour shifts in a high-stress and dangerous environment.

“We’re trying to get our message out to the Trump Administration about our positions,” said Franco, a 22-year employee. “They’re at an all-time low.

“You’ve got secretaries, you’ve got accountants in there running the facility, instead of correctional officers.”

Due to the massive drop in manpower required to run the prison, human resource managers, accountants and secretaries are forced to double as correctional officers. Although all employees of a federal prison are required to be trained as correctional officers, Franco said security and safety of employees is compromised when a specialist in accounting, for example, is suddenly placed in a pod with inmates, who are from all over the country and are convicted of crimes from tax evasion to child molestation to murder.

“In order to effectively run a prison, a correctional officer has to be around those inmates on a day-to-day basis to get to know those inmates,” said Franco. “If you pull someone off their job, who’s an accountant or human resources specialist, and expect them to know these inmates and know what goes on in these housing units, it’s impossible.

“Essentially, they’re asking people to baby-sit instead of effectively to run these federal prisons.”

Ojeda said he began defending the interests of corrections officers shortly after taking office in 2016, when he toured a regional jail and saw the high-risk environment.

“I was floored,” he said. “I thought the regional jail was, literally, a jail where if they picked up somebody on the streets of Logan, they went to the regional jail.

“I literally was naive. I thought regional jail was the town drunk, the Otises, you know?”

He said he learned the jail held convicts from around the nation and that the prisoner population was double its capacity.

“I started raising a bunch of Cain in reference to corrections,” he said. “It’s hard to believe that it’s this way.”

Ojeda said safe working conditions are an important objective for unions.

“Unions are starting to realize, if unions stand up for unions, then they win,” he said. “It’s about standing up for each other.

“I don’t want to hear this, ‘You’re not allowed to strike,’ “ Ojeda said. “What are they going to do? What are you doing to do?

“The teachers ‘weren’t allowed’ to strike. They struck, and what happened? They won, right?

“They say air traffic controllers aren’t allowed to strike. You make a congressman or a senator have to ride a bus home one or two times, I guarantee you they’ll be willing to sit down with air traffic controllers.

“We shouldn’t allow people to be mistreated,” he said.

Ojeda said unions are made up of working-class people and that unions built the middle sclass.

“We continue to allow people to come in here and do everything in their power to chip away at the union’s capabilities,” he said. “In West Virginia, it’s been brutal these past four years.

“Don’t be scared to stand up and fight for what you believe is right,” Ojeda told union members. “It’s an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.

“If you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re on the menu. Unions is what gives people a seat at the table. If unions are gone, the safety on the job is gone.”