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Showing posts with label prison labour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prison labour. Show all posts
The Prison State of America
"Prisons employ and exploit the ideal worker. Prisoners do not receive benefits or pensions. They are not paid overtime. They are forbidden to organize and strike. They must show up on time. They are not paid for sick days or granted vacations. They cannot formally complain about working conditions or safety hazards. If they are disobedient, or attempt to protest their pitiful wages, they lose their jobs and can be sent to isolation cells. The roughly 1 million prisoners who work for corporations and government industries in the American prison system are models for what the corporate state expects us all to become. And corporations have no intention of permitting prison reforms that would reduce the size of their bonded workforce. In fact, they are seeking to replicate these conditions throughout the society."
"Prisons employ and exploit the ideal worker. Prisoners do not receive benefits or pensions. They are not paid overtime. They are forbidden to organize and strike. They must show up on time. They are not paid for sick days or granted vacations. They cannot formally complain about working conditions or safety hazards. If they are disobedient, or attempt to protest their pitiful wages, they lose their jobs and can be sent to isolation cells. The roughly 1 million prisoners who work for corporations and government industries in the American prison system are models for what the corporate state expects us all to become. And corporations have no intention of permitting prison reforms that would reduce the size of their bonded workforce. In fact, they are seeking to replicate these conditions throughout the society."
Prisons & Corrections
Life In - And After - Prison
"More than 2.3 million people in the United States are in prison or jail. Here, talks that speak to the experience of life behind bars—and different perspectives on what can make it a rehabilitating experience." TED Talks - 8 brief videos
It's Time to Pay Prisoners the Minimum Wage
"Prison labor has long existed in a 'legal black hole, as David Fathi of the ACLU puts it.... '[Prison labor] seems more common than it did ten or twenty years ago. And a real concern is that employers, whether they’re public or private, are naturally going to be attracted by a uniquely docile and powerless, and literally captive labor force.'"
Life In - And After - Prison
"More than 2.3 million people in the United States are in prison or jail. Here, talks that speak to the experience of life behind bars—and different perspectives on what can make it a rehabilitating experience." TED Talks - 8 brief videos
It's Time to Pay Prisoners the Minimum Wage
"Prison labor has long existed in a 'legal black hole, as David Fathi of the ACLU puts it.... '[Prison labor] seems more common than it did ten or twenty years ago. And a real concern is that employers, whether they’re public or private, are naturally going to be attracted by a uniquely docile and powerless, and literally captive labor force.'"
Getting Paid 93 Cents a Day in America? Corporations Bring Back the 19th Century
Nearly a million prisoners are working in call centers, working in
slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles while getting paid somewhere
between 93 cents and $4.73.
Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.
Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.
Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly
consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now
make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.
These
companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners
to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now
making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body
armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or
manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.
Alabama Agriculture Department Advances Plan To Replace Immigrant Workers With Prisoners
ThinkProgress has been reporting on the catastrophic economic consequences of Alabama’s harshest-in-the-nation immigration law. Undocumented workers are the backbone of Alabama’s agriculture industry, and their exodus has already created a labor shortage in the state. Farmers say crops are rotting in the field and they are in danger of losing their farms by next season.
GOP politicians have crowed that driving immigrants out of the state will reduce unemployment by letting native citizens fill those jobs. But they’ve quickly discovered that Americans are simply unwilling to do the back-breaking labor of harvesting crops.
To stave off the disastrous collapse of state agriculture, Alabama officials are seriously considering replacing immigrant workers with prison laborers who they could perhaps pay even less than immigrants. Earlier this year, the head of Alabama’s agriculture department floated this idea. Now, the department is actively promoting it to the state’s farmers:
Georgia Considers Replacing Firefighters With Free Prison Laborers
Forcing prison inmates to work as unpaid laborers is not a new practice, but GOP-controlled states are increasing taking the idea to extremes as they face budget shortfalls and refuse to raise taxes. Under Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) anti-collective bargaining law, at least one Wisconsin county replaced some union workers with prison labor. Inmates are not paid for their work, but may receive time off of their sentences.
Now Camden County in Georgia is considering tasking prisoners to take on one of the most dangerous jobs there is: fighting fires. Using prisoners as firefighters is a cost-cutting measure that’s expected to save the county a bundle:
A select group of inmates may be exchanging their prison jumpsuits for firefighting gear in Camden County.
The inmates-to-firefighters program is one of several money-saving options the Board of County Commissioners is looking into to stop residents’ fire insurance costs from more than doubling. [...] The inmate firefighter program would be the most cost-effective choice, saving the county more than $500,000 a year by some estimates. But that option is already controversial, drawing criticism from the firefighters who would have to work alongside – and supervise – the prisoners.
Union Workers Replaced With Prison Labor Under Scott Walker’s Collective Bargaining Law
While Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) law dismantling collective bargaining rights has harmed teachers, nurses, and other civil servants, it’s helping a different group in Wisconsinites — inmates. Prisoners are now taking up jobs that used to be held by unionized workers in some parts of the state.
As the Madison Capital Times reports, “Besides losing their right to negotiate over the percentage of their paycheck that will go toward health care and retirement, unions also lost the ability to claim work as a ‘union-only’ job, opening the door for private workers and evidently even inmates to step in and take their place.” Inmates are not paid for their work, but may receive time off of their sentences.
The law went into effect last week, and Racine County is already using inmates to do landscaping, painting, and another basic maintenance around the county that was previously done by county workers. The union had successfully sued to stop the country from using prison labor for these jobs last year, but with Walker’s new law, they have no recourse. Watch a report from Fox6 in Green Bay:
BP Hires Prison Labor to Clean Up Spill While Coastal Residents Struggle
With scores of coastal residents out of work after the spill, BP is hiring inmates to clean up its mess—and getting lucrative tax breaks in the process.
July 23, 2010 |
In the first few days after BP's Deepwater Horizon wellhead exploded, spewing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, cleanup workers could be seen on Louisiana beaches wearing scarlet pants and white t-shirts with the words "Inmate Labor" printed in large red block letters. Coastal residents, many of whom had just seen their livelihoods disappear, expressed outrage at community meetings; why should BP be using cheap or free prison labor when so many people were desperate for work? The outfits disappeared overnight.
Work crews in Grand Isle, Louisiana, still stand out. In a region where nine out of ten residents are white, the cleanup workers are almost exclusively African-American men. The racialized nature of the cleanup is so conspicuous that Ben Jealous, the president of the NAACP, sent a public letter [1] to BP CEO Tony Hayward on July 9, demanding to know why black people were over-represented in "the most physically difficult, lowest paying jobs, with the most significant exposure to toxins."
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