Forced labor is alive and well in the United States.

I was reading an article about a government full-employment bill and saw something that caught my eye, causing me to eventually find this website about forced labor in the USA. I could use the word “slavery” defined here, but it’s a third-rail word. In other words, its a very delicate topic.

Forced labor is alive and well in the federal, and probably the state prison system. Nobody talks about it. In essence, if you’re in the federal prison and are able-bodied, you must work or else. I don’t know what “or else” means but it won’t be nice. I knew that prisoners made license plates, work in the prison laundry and the like for internal and government consumption and don’t take issue with that.

But as commercial company contract “employees” prison jobs are for the most part very, very low paid. That means commercial companies save a lot of money rather than hiring regular workforce employees, providing competitive salaries and benefits.

Our government claims that it’s not forced labor, but on-the-job training for inmates so they’ll have skills when they get out. The problem is that prisoners getting out at retirement age, or with life sentences who will only leave prison lying in a box don’t get a free pass. They also have to work. So the “job training” excuse is a canard.

Unicor Industries is the government corporation formed to provide cheap, forced labor for commercial companies and to produce material consumed by our government. I take issue with the selling of this forced labor to commercial companies that want to reduce labor costs and increase profits.

Unicor offers commercial companies all types of commercial products and services. They provide very cheap forced labor under contract, in competition with the regular businesses. These are the same businesses that you work for and may be laid off from, because of Asian competitors offering lower costs because of cheap labor.

You hear repeated claims about bringing jobs back to America. You don’t hear the politicians talking about prisoners taking jobs from law abiding Americans do you? They are. This graph will illustrate the growing pool of prison job candidates. You can call it a talent pool for the prison business to draw from.

I don’t have much sympathy for prisoners, as they were convicted of a crime (that’s another story as what explains the rapid incarceration rate since 1980) but this is a little much.  If you read this Unicor sales brochure and you’ll see that federal prisons are redefined as factories. The factory workers are paid from 40 cents to about a dollar an hour, or an average of about $30 a week each.

If you are curious and want to see what businesses that prisoners compete with, see the Unicore report here. In FY 2011, prisoners work in 71 industry classifications!

In fact, for fiscal years 2009 and 2010 they had a net loss. Even with almost no worker payroll, Unicore still couldn’t make money. Our government in action?

As I said, even worse, they compete with commercial U.S. businesses in the same way that we complain about China and Vietnam competing with our manufacturing base. Its got to stop. If elected I’ll work to stop our own government competing with our commercial businesses by using forced labor.