"Can’t find workers?" asks a recent mailing by the Wisconsin state prison system. "A willing work force awaits!"
Where? In the high-unemployment neighborhoods of Milwaukee’s inner city? No, in the state prison system!
Gov. Tommy Thompson, the man who gave the country the blueprint for corporate slave labor called "W-2 welfare reform", is now aggressively marketing prisoners to those same corporations. And with a state prison system bursting at the seams with over 12,000 inmates, half of them Black in a state that is 95% white, the supply is plentiful.
Organized labor is becoming increasingly concerned over this use of prison contract labor, and with good reason. Convict-made goods sold on the open market will reportedly reach nearly $9 billion in sales by the end of the decade. Prisoners now stock the shelves at Toys-R-Us in Aurora, Ill.; make farm equipment in Minnesota; produce uniforms for McDonalds in Oregon; make jeans and toys for J.C. Penny and Eddie Bauer in Tennessee and even book airplane reservations by phone for TWA.
"Cheap?" asks former Texas Commissioner of Agriculture Jim Hightower, an opponent of the contract system. "We’re talking as little as 20 cents an hour, with no health care, pensions or any of that other nonsense that workers on the outside want. And these guys always show up on time, they can’t talk back and they won’t be joining any of those pesky unions."
Well, they almost always show up.
On March 4, over 100 prisoners at the Oak Park Heights Correctional Facility in Stillwater, Minn. refused to report to work. Instead, they went on strike, demanding they be paid the minimum wage.
These prisoners, along with another fifty who had been locked-down over the weekend when rumors began to circulate about a possible work stoppage, are employees of MinnCor, the state’s agency for contracting out prisoners to private corporations or other government agencies. They are production workers, making a variety of office products, such as three-ring binders. At least some of these items are then sold by private corporations on the open market.
AJRC was alerted to the strike by Lois Lenius, a prisoner rights activist in Minneapolis and member of our Advisory Committee. We immediately sent a fax to warden Eric Skon.
We made two demands: 1) No retaliation, physical or legal, against the strikers, and 2) Immediately grant the demand of raising the prisoners’ pay to the minimum wage.
We then wrote up a report about the strike and our response to it and mailed, faxed and e-mailed it to various union officials, community and student groups and prisoner rights organizations, a number of whom then also contacted the warden.
Among those who went on record as supporting these demands was Jim Carpenter, Chair of the Wisconsin Fair Trade Campaign. Jim has been a leader in this area in opposing NAFTA and GATT, trade treaties also seeking to transfer jobs to groups of super-exploited workers.
So far as we know, this is the first example of prisoners in the U.S. conducting a labor strike over the issue of being paid the minimum wage. By raising this demand, these prisoners struck a blow not only for themselves, but for all workers whose jobs and wages are threatened by the use of prison contract labor. After all, if prisoners were not being paid $1 or less an hour, there would be no incentive for corporations to exploit them at the expense of union workers on the outside.
Nationally, the AFL-CIO has gone on record as being opposed to the use of prison labor. Resolution No. 67, adopted at the federation’s national convention in 1995, noted that prisoners are being used to "perform services normally delivered by public employees" and that "convict labor in the private sector is used to directly compete with organized labor and drive down wages". The resolution resolved that "the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions oppose the use of inmate labor to perform bargaining unit work" and further called for adherence to "prevailing wage requirements of the law" in regard to job training programs inside prisons.
The motivation for this resolution was clearly to protect the jobs and wage levels of unionized workers in both private industry and in the public service sector (government jobs). That’s fine as far as it goes, but it needs to go further.
Prisoners are workers, too. The vast majority come from poor and working class backgrounds. In fact, today’s prisons are in reality concentration camps for the poor. Moreover, just over half of all the 1.1 million state and federal prisoners are now people of color, many of whom were denied decent jobs on the outside because of racism. But once inside the prison system, then they are given jobs at wages far below those paid for comparable work on the outside, and without the benefit of OSHA inspections, grievance procedures, protections against racial discrimination or sexual harassment, or the right to form unions.
In 1970, there were 200,000 people in state and federal prisons. That was at the start of the so-called "war on drugs" -- war on drugs in the inner city, that is, not in the suburbs where most drugs are used. Today there are 1.1 million, with another half million in county jails.
The U.S. now imprisons a higher percentage of its population than any other country on earth. It sends Black men to prison at a rate six times higher than did the apartheid regime of South Africa. In fact, one out of every three young Black men in the U.S. is now in prison, awaiting trial or on parole.
As this prison population continues to grow, the issue of prisons, prisoners and prison labor will affect more and more people on the outside. If we are to prevent the development of a new system of chattel slavery behind prison walls, we have to act now.
AJRC has drawn up a "Resolution Opposing Government-Sponsored Prison Contract Labor". The resolution not only opposes the use of prison contract labor, but demands the right of prisoners to form unions "as the best guarantee both of civilian jobs and the rights of prisoners themselves."
In May, an AJRC representative was asked to give presentations on our work on this issue to the Living Wage Campaign committee of the Campaign for a Sustainable Milwaukee and then to the CSM general membership meeting. The resolution will be circulated at the upcoming Labor Party Advocates founding conference in Cleveland, Ohio. It is also being sent out on the Internet to various prisoner rights groups.
We are encouraging all our friends in the labor movement to sign on to this resolution. We are also looking to circulate the resolution inside the prisons themselves so that prisoners may express their own desire to form unions.
The more this issue is raised -- the more prisoners are seen by the labor movement and its allies as fellow and sister workers -- the less likely will society at large be able to write off prisoners as dehumanized stereotypes who have no rights as human beings.
For a copy of the resolution, please send us a self-addressed stamped envelope.