In the comments to the post that has the Cringley article downpage, Al-Muhajabah said she'd seen a page or document or something comparing the number of African slaves the USofA had to the number of prisoners we have now. Being me, I go looking for it.
Didn't find it.
The Next Best Thing to Slaves
by Jim Hightower
At last US industry has figured out how to compete with Third World wages right here at home. Hire prisoners! No need to mess with the want ads, employment agencies, or job fairs to find cheap workers, just bustle on down to your state prison and cut a deal for some convicts. Since 1990, 30 states have contracted out prison labour to private companies.
- JCPenney, Kmart, and Eddie Bauer are getting such products as jeans, sweatshirts, and toys made by prisoners in Tennessee and Washington State.
- IBM, Texas Instruments, and Dell Computer all get circuit boards made by Texas prisoners.
- Honda has had car parts made in Ohio prisons, McDonald's has uniforms made in Oregon prisons, AT&T has hired telemarketers in Colorado prisons, and Spalding gets golf balls packed in Hawaii prisons.
- California's correctional system has become a one-stop-hiring hall for corporations: San Quentin inmates do data entry for Chevron, Macy's and Bank-America; Ventura inmates take telephone reservations for TWA (yes, this does mean callers are unwittingly giving their credit card numbers to criminals, and, yes, there have been "incidents"); Folsum inmates work for both a plastics manufacturer and a brass faucet maker; and Aveala inmates run an ostrich-slaughtering facility for an exporter that ships the meat to Europe.
Who says American industry is losing its ingenuity? These free enterprisers not only get labour for minimum wage and less from the state, but they also provide no health care, no pensions, no vacations, none of those other frills that pampered softies on the outside are always crying about. Plus these jailbirds always show up on time for work, they don't call in "sick" to go to a ballgame, if they talk back to you you have 'em thrown in solitary, and they darn sure won't be joining some pesky union. I tell you, it's the next best thing to having slaves - maybe better, since the company doesn't even have to feed and house them.
Oh, and here's the best part of all: You can slap a Made-in-the-USA label on every product they make for you!
Convict-made goods are expected to reach nearly $9 billion in sales by the end of the decade as the prison population swells; as more companies discover the scam, and as more state politicians learn to cash in on it. Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson, never one to pass up a chance to exploit someone's misery, has been especially adept at huckstering his state's prison force: "Can't find workers?" a state mailing asks corporate executives all across the country. No problem, proclaims the brochure, "A willing workforce waits" - conveniently incarcerated for you in Wisconsin.
Most companies pay the minimum wage, but many get away with paying far less - AT&T, for example, paid only $2 an hour for its imprisoned telemarketers, and Honda got its convict-made car parts from the Ohio prison at $2.05 an hour. The prisoners typically get to keep only 20% of the paycheque, with the state government grabbing the rest, which is why the states are all for it.
Participating firms everywhere sing the praises of this locked-up labour. In an article in Nation magazine, Bob Tessler of DPAS company in San Francisco gushes: "We have a captive labour force, a group of men who are dedicated, who want to work. That makes the whole business profitable." That, plus the fact that California taxpayers also give Tessler a 10% tax credit on the first $2000 of each inmate's wages. Wow, cheap prison labour and a subsidy - if that won't restore your faith in the working of the free market, nothing will! It is such a steal of a deal that Tessler has shut down his operation in Mexico, moving his data processing work inside San Quentin. "Here we don't have a problem with the language, we have better control of our work and, because it's local, we have a quicker turnaround time."
Source: Funny Times November 1998 from There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos, by Jim Hightower
