The furious seamster (that is, me) has by no means strayed from the warpath in the cause of the working class. Here it is, straight from the punishment cell, where I’ve been living these past months: instructions for my fellow inmates, male and female prison seamsters (in the carousel). Even though I live in a world where technology is completely absent, this guide from the Promzona trade union has a high-tech add-on — the Telegram bot t.me/zajava_bot, which will help you correctly draft a request for better working conditions, or collect the necessary information so that we can draft such a request ourselves. Some may think this is nonsense — fighting for a chair with a backrest — but here are the numbers: there are currently 338,000 people in penal colonies, 80,000 of them are employed, and 50 percent of working inmates are in sewing workshops. That means around 40,000 people are right now hunched over sewing machines for 500 rubles a month, sitting on stools, in direct violation of workplace safety rules. I managed to improve working conditions for the workers in my shop, and with the help of ACF lawyers (the Anti-Corruption Foundation), I’ll fight to secure the same for the rest. Constant dripping wears away the stone, and as always, the more people take part in collective action, the more effective it is. You can help too: send these instructions, the link to Promzona’s Telegram post, and our Telegram bot t.me/zajava_bot to inmates you know or to their relatives. Sadly, almost everyone has someone like that these days. We’ll eat this enormous elephant of the FSIN (Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service) labor GULAG piece by piece: chairs, footrests, wages, production quotas. We’ll sort it all out gradually, even if they never let me out of the punishment cell 😉