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Race, class and crime no bar: In fetters, they toil
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In the U.S., a number of states have passed laws that allow commercial organisations to use convict labour. Prisoners get much less than the minimum wage. Retrenchments are not a problem, there is no sick leave, vacation or overtime, and unions are non-existent. The result, says noted journalist P. SAINATH, is that American corporations are on to a good thing.
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THE young executive was gushing. "You know, when I phoned my credit card people while in the United States, I was speaking to a girl in Gurgaon. They'd trained her so well, she had an American accent and was able to tell me what the next day's weather in my part of California would be. Why can't we learn from them?''
The Indian press, too, had run many pieces on this much earlier. Since year 2000, the much heard of, but seldom seen, "girl from Gurgaon" has attained special status. She is a metaphor for the wonders of globalisation and corporate efficiency.
Never mind the need to train the girl in an American accent. The executive had made other calls to his bank's enquiries section and or "credit card people". I asked if he had located who and where they were. He had not.
A pity. Some of those he had spoken to were in places that make Gurgaon look a healthy hill resort in contrast. Possibly, they were convicts in prison. Probably working at much less than the minimum wage. And, quite likely, Black or Hispanic.
Welcome to the new slavery. Privatised prisons in the United States run by for-profit corporations. And Federal or State-run prisons that allow — often invite — private enterprises to use that labour. Quality control made easy. Unions non-existent. And workers don't get more disciplined than this. Even if the prisons are not private, the State can hold down prison labour for private gain and its own benefit.
"These days," says Business Week (online) "prison labour is as close as your cell phone. Jail-based customer service centres have fielded 800-line requests for airline reservations. According to news reports, prisoners have also wrapped software for Microsoft, produced electronic menu boards for McDonald's, and stitched clingy lingerie for a manufacturer."
In the past 20 years, more than 30 States have passed laws that allow commercial outfits to use convict labour. Such programmes now exist in 36 of the 50 American states.
Americon prisons ... New age "slavery" or a good business idea?
The corporations that use prison labour at far less than minimum wage include Fortune 500 giants and other famous "brands". Starbucks and Nintendo Game Boy systems are just two of the big names that have done so. Some of these companies do pay minimum wages — many don't. But they pay it to a private corporation that hires or rents out the prison labour. A form of outsourcing that conceals their use of such labour.
But the private corporation chews half off the top of a prisoner's pay check. Or the department of corrections may do that if it is a State-run prison. Which raises the obvious question: why do companies willing to pay the minimum wage not do so to workers outside the prisons, looking for a job?
The answers are fairly simple. Some of the work they're getting done in prisons could cost more than double the minimum wage hourly, outside. And outside, you can't coerce people into doing it for that much less.
The editors of Prison Legal News, a remarkable journal run by prisoners, point to other gains, too. There are no problems of retrenchments and layoffs. Business in a slump? Just send the "workers" back to their cells whenever it suits you. There are no health, insurance or retirement benefits to be paid out, either. Nor is there any vacation time, sick leave or overtime. It allows you to massively undercut any rivals who have qualms about human rights and the treatment of prisoners. And it helps push down wages across the industry.
There is now a large, and growing, pool of prison labour to draw from. The United States has around two million people behind bars. Of these, 63 per cent are Black and Hispanic, although these two communities together form only 25 per cent of the population. With only five per cent of the world's population, the U.S. has nearly 25 per cent of the world's eight million prisoners.
"It's the new slavery," says Randall Robinson. "It's destroying the younger generation of Black people," he told us at Trinity College in Connecticut earlier this year. This leading African-American thinker points to "the built-in bias and discrimination of the system. It ensures this huge pool of labour. In our democracy, we have private prisons. When as private corporations you own prisons, the only way you can get your stocks to go up is to get more prisoners."
"Blacks are just 12 per cent drug users," points out Robinson, "but account for 35 per cent of those arrested for drug use; for 55 per cent of those convicted for use; and 75 per cent of those incarcerated for use."
In the State of Washington, where Starbucks and others milk this situation, Blacks account for less than four per cent of the population. Yet, they make up almost 40 per cent of the State's prison population. In West Virginia, there are 17 Black prisoners for every White one.
A Human Right Watch backgrounder early this year brought it out in other ways. It observed that "in 12 States, Black men are incarcerated at rates between 12 and 16 times greater than those of White men. In 15 States, Black women are incarcerated at rates between 10 and 35 times greater than those of White women."
One out of every 14 African American men is now in jail. And one out of every four is likely to be in prison at some point in his lifetime. The fastest growing section of prisoners, though, is Black women, of whom 70 per cent are non-violent offenders and 75 per cent have children.
Tying prisons to commerce will affect all prisoners. Black, though, will do much worse than others. That goes back a long way in history. For decades into the 20th Century, the State of Alabama, for instance, ensured a steady supply of servile Black labour to "U.S. Steel". Its laws were shaped for this purpose. A system that even the Wall Street Journal describes as one "rooted in racism and economic expedience", Alabama, says the Journal, "was providing convicts to businesses hungry for hands... " That is, mainly unpaid hands.
"For many years," writes the Journal, " `convict leasing' was one of Alabama's largest sources of funding."
And for some States and corporations, it could well be so again. The Federal Prison Industries (FPI) has yearly sales of $600 million and it is rising. Profits in 1999 were over $37 million. And that's a government programme. What of private prisons? Or private use of labour in State prisons? Stan Saunders of the Columbia Theological Seminary writes that "prisons for profit now generate $30-40 billion of revenue annually. The corrections segment of our economy today employs over half a million full time workers." That's "more than any `Fortune 500' company except General Motors."
Saunders rightly includes prisoners, guards and others in the "corrections industry". If we take just prisoners put "to work", some counts are as low as 100,000. If that is true, it would only show that business is booming. If putting five per cent of the prison population "to work," can rake in such revenues, then the money yet to be made is mind-boggling. Hardly surprising then, that the number of prisoners made to labour for profit goes up each year. Prison workers "employed" by the FPI alone went up 14 per cent two years from 1998.
And in some towns across the U.S., the prison is now the mainstay of the local economy. Crime rates have dropped in the U.S.. Violent crime is down by one-fifth in the last three decades. But incarceration rates, Saunders points out, have quadrupled. Creating a state of siege mindset in the public has helped. Both, media and lawmakers have done that. People have often been led to act against their own interests. Like in Oregon in 1994. Over 70 per cent of voters there, including union members, voted for a constitutional amendment forcing all prisoners to work 40 hours a week.
The result? As Alan Whyte and Jamie Baker write in analysis for the World Socialist Web Site: "thousands of public sector jobs have been lost to convict labour. And thousands of private sector jobs have been lost as a result of firms that now utilise prison labour."
But as they point out, corporations have gained: "Prisoners now manufacture everything from blue jeans to auto parts, to electronics and furniture. Honda has paid inmates $2 an hour for doing the same work an auto worker would get paid $20 to $30 an hour to do. Konica has used prisoners to repair copiers for less than 50 cents an hour. Toys R Us used prisoners to restock shelves and Microsoft to pack and ship software. Clothing made in California and Oregon prisons competes so successfully with apparel made in Latin America and Asia that it is exported to other countries.''
Quite a few public dollars also go to prison farms. These may be government-run, but the labour in these prisons can be hired out to corporations. The giant $178 billion U.S. farm bill (see The Hindu, May 5, 2002) gave subsidies to these and university-owned farms.
"We need to merge the prison and university system," jokes Prof. Eileen Mahoney of San Francisco State University. "It seems the only way we'll ever get money for education. At least, in this social and political climate." Some private prison groups have had top state level political leaders on their payroll. Take Wackenhut Corp. for instance. In New Mexico, as investigations by journalist Greg Palast show, it hired the state legislature's Democratic Party leader as a paid lobbyist. It also gave out contracts to one of his companies.
Are these private prisons "efficient"?
For their top bosses and their political friends, yes. For the State and its people, it has cost a bomb. Wackenhut hired untrained guards on the cheap.
Another cost-saving trick: It used fewer guards to control dangerous prisons. A riot in April 1999, points out Palast, "required 100 state police to smother 200 prisoners with tear gas... The putative savings of privatisation went up in smoke literally".
The damage from riots, prisoner and even guard revolt cost millions of public dollars. That, in a single year.
The social costs, though, are beyond measure. The implications for poor minorities and non-convict labour are appalling. Corporate profit resting on a largely racial basis and a servile workforce is legitimate. Goodbye Gurgaon. Welcome back, Alabama.
P. Sainath is one of the two recipients of the A.H. Boerma Award, 2001, granted for his contributions in changing the nature of the development debate on food, hunger and rural development in the Indian media.
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