A.P. prison labor report reveals more about workers than prisons
“Convicts Leased to Harvest Timber,” 1915, Library of Congress
The Associated Press (A.P.) recently released the findings of its two-year investigation into the scope of prison labor in the US food system. Journalists Robin McDowell and Margie Mason uncovered incarcerated workers in all 50 states providing hundreds of millions of dollars of goods and services to food giants such as Walmart, Whole Foods, Kellogg’s, Tyson, and many more.
Ironically, the report found that some multinational corporations exported these goods to countries from which the U.S. had banned certain imports due to alleged connections to prison labor abroad. The programs are rooted in the exception clause of the 13th Amendment, which outlawed involuntary labor except as a punishment for a crime. It was thanks, in part, to this exception that the South was rebuilt after the North’s total war. It also spawned the first generation of convict leasing, wherein corporations such as U.S. Steel, Tennessee Coal, and Iron & Railroad Co. leveraged the cheap, expendable labor force to expand their industrial empires.
The A.P. report is important, especially because it uncovers yet another area of American life that is shaped by the scourge of mass incarceration and, ultimately, chattel slavery. Yet, I found the report just as illuminating about what it means to be a worker in the United States today.
Incarcerated People as “Inside-Workers”
If we had the moral and political imagination to see incarcerated people as fellow human beings and fellow workers, we’d notice that we lie side-by-side with them on a spectrum of exploitation. American prison labor places in the sharpest possible relief the relationship among workers, capitalists, and policing bodies of the state. We are all exploited by virtue of our common relationship to what is produced and how. Our conditions differ in intensity, not in kind, and that is what should unite us.
As outside-workers, in exchange for a salary, we sell our labor to people who, by and large, do not work themselves. Our labor is treated as just another resource from which value can be extracted. Even though it is what generates profit, we have no claim to that profit nor do we have a say over what happens to it. Ownership over both profits and the technology needed to produce them is what separates capitalists from workers in capitalist economies. What distinguishes workers among themselves is the relative comfort with which they get to live this inherently unfair dynamic. The general ignorance about the scope of prison labor in the U.S. is among the many obstacles to inside-outside worker solidarity.
According to a 2022 joint report by the ACLU and the University of Chicago, approximately 800,000 of America’s 2.3 million people incarcerated in state and federal prisons have jobs. Even though most Americans have never stepped foot inside of a factory—only about 8% of the workforce is in manufacturing—the image of incarcerated people stamping license plates still predominates. To be clear, they still make plates, as they have for over 100 years, but incarcerated people fill many other roles across varied industries where there are labor shortages.
At 800,000 incarcerated employees, state and federal prison systems would be tied with Allied Universal for the third largest employer in the U.S., behind only Walmart and Amazon in global employment. They are vital to national infrastructure yet face some of the worst, most undignified and dangerous conditions. As noted by the Prison Agriculture Project, for instance, at least 30,000 inside-workers populate factory farms and meat processing plants—the same types of facilities that sacrificed thousands of migrant workers at the height of the pre-vaccine COVID pandemic. Investigate Midwest found that before the end of 2021, there were at least 86,000 COVID infections and 423 deaths among meatpackers. Incarcerated workers are essential workers.
Yet they work for pennies. For example, for non-industry workers, which includes all jobs under state correctional agencies, the maximum wage workers make is 52 cents an hour. Those are the “lucky” ones; with few exceptions, inside-workers in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas are expected to work for nothing at all. Workers are, at best, paid pennies, face injuries and death, and are also expected to pay for medical copays. The ACLU study found that the neglected public sector was the principal beneficiary—including much of the labor necessary to maintain our overpopulated prisons themselves.
As Warren Yeager, a former Gulf County, Florida, commissioner told the Florida Times-Union, “There’s no way we can take care of our facilities, our roads, our ditches, if we didn’t have inmate labor….We could not tax our citizens enough to replace the value that the inmate labor contributes to our community.” Given that we are in the fifth decade of starving federal and state agencies that maintain the common good—agencies that provide care and basic services such as mail, repave roads, public health, and the like—prison labor provides a perverse double-incentive for maintaining mass incarceration: to disappear “problem” populations and to supplement those largely abandoned sectors.
How We’re Connected As Working People
Incarcerated workers are the canary in the coal mine. Their treatment is the necessary and predictable conclusion of capitalist-worker relations. They are subject to the most intense forms of surveillance, have minimal workplace protections, and no collective bargaining power. Compliance is enforced with the threat of torture, namely, solitary confinement, or added time to one’s sentence. Currently and formerly incarcerated people, undocumented immigrants, and increasingly (again) children, represent a super-exploited segment of the workforce. Their vulnerability to arbitrary power and workplace abuse is built into their socio-political status. They have few rights that the people who wield power over them must respect.
The presence of disposable segments of the workforce perverts our relationship to labor and one another: It makes us all less secure, and it alienates us from one another. It decreases security for us all because the basics of supply and demand hold for those of us who are forced to sell our labor in exchange for a wage. In addition to driving down wages and workplace conditions, the continued growth of prison labor undermines worker power by diminishing our ranks. Incarcerated people are doing many of the non-technical jobs that people in our communities do and have been leading struggles for union rights and increased minimum wage. For instance, A.P. reporters met women who were in Mississippi debtors' prisons who were working in fast food chains like Popeyes.
Capitalist economies have a tendency to drive down costs at the point of production, most readily by cutting labor costs. Capitalists will give as little as socially permissible. (That’s one reason automation and AI are rarely discussed in terms of making people’s lives better but always as a cudgel to force concessions in collective bargaining fights.) All working class people have a vested interest in maintaining as high a floor as possible for the minimum standard of compensation, freedom, and safety for any worker, regardless of social status. That struggle starts with looking past social differences to see who our people really are.
In solidarity,
Dwayne