The Price We Pay for Cheap Labor:
Prison Labor Revealed
The average American citizen probably doesn’t notice that many of the things they use in their daily lives have been produced by the hands of prison inmates somewhere in the U.S. The same person also probably doesn’t know that often when they call a phone number for technical support for a product they are having an issue with; they could be talking to a prison inmate. This in and of itself really does no one any harm and usually the customer gets what they need and is never the wiser to the fact that they just got service from an inmate in prison. In reality though, there are other factor involving prison labor that make it a worthy subject to discuss and go a bit more in depth about. …show more content…
Prison labor may be helping the private industry as well as the state and federally funded prisons, but it’s doing no favors for the individual private law abiding citizen that is out of a job. The fact of the matter is, when private for profit companies make their way into the prison labor market, job loss occurs for regular people. Plainly stated, more profit can be made if the company can get away with making the same product or providing the same service, but at a lower premium. While this seems harmless and natural in the ideals of smart capitalism; it’s really not a wise practice for the economic well being of the nation. As with any society structured around capitalism, we need people to produce the goods and just as importantly, we need people to buy those commodities. When people lose jobs to lower wage workers (prisoners) they lose the income that enabled them to purchase goods they otherwise would have been able to buy as they once had. In the end we end up with a ton of stuff no one can buy because they lost the income source enabling to be a consumer. Ann Hoffman had this to say about …show more content…
In fact, FPI is the 39th-largest government supplier, just ahead of communications giant Motorola. Almost every U.S. bureaucracy is required to buy exclusively from FPI. And every dollar sent to FPI is a dollar less to an American worker. (Adkins
Prison Labor Revealed
The average American citizen probably doesn’t notice that many of the things they use in their daily lives have been produced by the hands of prison inmates somewhere in the U.S. The same person also probably doesn’t know that often when they call a phone number for technical support for a product they are having an issue with; they could be talking to a prison inmate. This in and of itself really does no one any harm and usually the customer gets what they need and is never the wiser to the fact that they just got service from an inmate in prison. In reality though, there are other factor involving prison labor that make it a worthy subject to discuss and go a bit more in depth about. …show more content…
Prison labor may be helping the private industry as well as the state and federally funded prisons, but it’s doing no favors for the individual private law abiding citizen that is out of a job. The fact of the matter is, when private for profit companies make their way into the prison labor market, job loss occurs for regular people. Plainly stated, more profit can be made if the company can get away with making the same product or providing the same service, but at a lower premium. While this seems harmless and natural in the ideals of smart capitalism; it’s really not a wise practice for the economic well being of the nation. As with any society structured around capitalism, we need people to produce the goods and just as importantly, we need people to buy those commodities. When people lose jobs to lower wage workers (prisoners) they lose the income that enabled them to purchase goods they otherwise would have been able to buy as they once had. In the end we end up with a ton of stuff no one can buy because they lost the income source enabling to be a consumer. Ann Hoffman had this to say about …show more content…
In fact, FPI is the 39th-largest government supplier, just ahead of communications giant Motorola. Almost every U.S. bureaucracy is required to buy exclusively from FPI. And every dollar sent to FPI is a dollar less to an American worker. (Adkins