Global Economy Behind Bars

by Daniel Burton-Rose

Selling prison labor to private companies is akin to placing welfare recipients into "workfare" jobs -- the government preaches the need for those outside the labor force to learn "personal responsibility" while throwing those it controls into low-paying, nonunion jobs. The prisoner and workfare workers both find themselves in direct competition with other poorly paid workers or unionized employees , lowering their wages.

Outside employers are, of course, the ones who gain. Companies that have hired cheap prison labor (through subcontractors) include Starbucks and Boeing. In Ohio, Unibase, a multinational corporation with its headquarters in Salt Lake City, pays the state to have prisoners in Lebanon, Warren and Orient Correctional Institutions do data-entry work. Unibase told me it works with Ohio inmates in three prisons (although, strangely, the Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections spokesman said "public outcry" had put an end to such joint-venture programs). Unibase pays the Department according to how productive the workers are; Unibase President Lynn Blodgett said he wasn't sure how much prisoners were actually paid in the end: "It's really kind of a state issue." In a 1995 article in Prison L egal News, an Ohio prisoner wrote that the base pay rate was forty-seven cents an hour at the Unibase workshop in Lebanon Correctional Institute, with an "incentive pay rate" linked to such an impossible speed that no o ne earned more than the base rate.

Using prison labor, according to official Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections literature, "is an opportunity to develop new attitudes and to learn marketable skills for (prisoners') return to society as productive citizens." But what isn't said is that the market for many of these skills is already overseas or behind bars. Unibase's 150 prisoner-workers probably won't work at Unibase afte r their release, since, as Blodgett acknowledges, "We have three facilities in Mexico and we do an awful lot of work there." Out of roughly 4,000 Unibase employees, 1,500 are in Mexico. Most of the U.S. workers toil in their own homes doing piecework.

Like many corporations using prisoner labor across the nation, Unibase advances the somewhat clouded logic that their use of prison labor does not undercut "real" jobs because the jobs they have prisoners doing are largely being sent overseas anyway. Unibase president Blodgett says, "You can get data-entry work done everywhere now: Sri Lanka, the Philippines, the Caribbean, there are hundreds of o perations."

"We're constantly fighting offshore vendors, who would happily take the work that's done in those prison industries, probably could beat that price," Blodgett says. "We argue that (the work) gets to stay in the state, and that becomes kind of our sales pitch." Blodgett feels that Unibase is aiding the state by helping to offset the cost of imprisonment. The argument accentuates the degradation of the rights of the American worker in a world where corporations are unfettered but people still are.

Gilmore of UE feels Blodgett's "is just an astounding argument. It's really okay 'because the jobs are staying in the United States'?! I suppose that's true, but why is it that you have to be a felon in order to get the job?"