One of the reasons I used to refuse to invest in China, and now do so only selectively, is that they use some prison labor. Prison labor, unless it’s done at a competitive wage, is a form of slavery. So, to be consistent, I should divest from the US. Mike Elk and Bob Sloan, The Nation (via t/o):
The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners. At the Union Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the state’s forty-one work programs. In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products for sale through contracts with private companies, from eyeglasses to office furniture…
Although a wide variety of goods have long been produced by state and federal prisoners for the US government—license plates are the classic example, with more recent contracts including everything from guided missile parts to the solar panels powering government buildings—prison labor for the private sector was legally barred for years, to avoid unfair competition with private companies. But this has changed thanks to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)…
So: incarcerate people at a cost of $50,000 per year to the taxpayers, make them work at jobs that would pay $7.25 an hour for $0.25/hr. Labor costs being about half of all costs, and figuring a markup to generate a margin of 50% without nearly free labor, that means that one prisoner working 2000 hours per year generates profit of $42,000 for PRIDE, while costing the taxpayers $50,000 minus whatever taxes they are able to get PRIDE to pay (maybe $5,000 if they’re lucky). We pay $45,000. PRIDE makes $42,000. And they are able to drive down the cost of labor to the minimum, or even drive legitimate companies out of business.
It would, of course, be cheaper not to lock up the guy in the first place. But if we just had prisoners do the same services at market rates for a state-administered program, the state would receive a profit of ca. $28,000 and would collect some taxes from the prisoner, making the cost of incarceration roughly $20,000. And that’s assuming that overhead is roughly the same for a state-administered enterprise than for private enterprise. Usually the reverse is true.
What PRIDE is doing is state socialism, folks. The state pays a state-approved company to do something that could be done much more cheaply in other ways. The alternative, a state-administered program, is democracy. Democracy pays a real wage, not a slave wage.
Mercury Rising 鳯女 