Colorado farm owners replace immigrant labor with ‘chain gangs’

Colorado legislators passed some of the most restrictive immigration laws in the country following the massive mobilizations for immigrant rights in late March and on International Workers Day, May 1, 2006. One of the laws, H.R. 1023, denies all who have no documentation, that is, all undocumented workers and their families, any “non-emergency” public benefits.

In the wake of these repressive laws and a series of workplace raids, farm owners in Southern and Eastern Colorado are having difficulty finding workers to plant and harvest crops. Last year many crops spoiled in the fields and the agricultural industry across the country suffered major losses.

The Colorado farm owners’ answer to this crisis in the agricultural industry is to find even more exploitable labor than immigrant workers—prison labor.

Private companies, now numbering 135, began using prison labor in the 1970s. Microsoft, McDonalds, TWA, IBM, Victoria’s Secret, AT&T and Toys R Us are just some of the companies that use prisoners to cheaply produce products or provide services. While the rate of pay may vary from state to state, the constant is that the great majority of the money that the companies pay goes to the state in which the prisoners are incarcerated.

For instance, in California prisoners receive the “minimum wage” on paper, but the state takes 80 percent for state restitution, anti-drug campaigns, victim’s rights organizations and a prisoner “trust fund.” (prisonactivist.org)

The state of Colorado already employs prison labor for everything from agriculture, which includes running a fishery, dairy farm and harvesting grapes, to making furniture and firefighting, according to the website of Colorado Correctional Industries.

State Rep. Dorothy Butcher said, “The reason this [program] started is to make sure the agricultural industry wouldn’t go out of business.” The new pilot program will be run through the Department of Corrections and will contract with more than a dozen farms in the state to use prisoners to pick melons, onions and peppers for 60 cents an hour,

Butcher makes no pretense that the program is “providing useful skills” to prisoners or “breaking the monotony” of prison life, which are all false arguments that some use to justify using prisoners as slave labor.

This latest announcement illustrates the connection between the struggle of the working class in this country and abroad. Many of the jobs prisoners are being made to do were or still are being done either by immigrant workers here or are being shipped overseas to countries where capital can pay workers lower wages.

The U.S. already has over 25 percent of the world’s prison population, of which 45 percent are Black, nearly 20 percent are Latin@ and the vast majority are poor. More than 2 million are incarcerated in prisons and jails and millions more are on parole.

The component of the prison-industrial complex that is prison labor is booming along with the entire business of criminalizing the oppressed, workers and the poor. The prison industry is one of the fastest growing in the country. Over 100,000 of the more than 2 million prisoners in this country are in facilities run by private companies, the largest of which are the Correction Corporation of America and Wackenhut.

The relationship between prison officials, private companies and private prison companies has grown increasingly intimate since the late 1970s and early 1980s. At the same time white middle class families are moving back into city centers, while police are heavily occupying communities of color. Already, because racism is endemic to U.S. capitalist society, the lack of jobs and resources for the poor and especially for people of color is making young Black men and women society’s pariahs.

Now that governments at the state, local and federal levels are also making it a crime to be undocumented, and the number of poor and desperately poor is at a 32-year high, the prison population can only be expected to grow.

As long as this society provides basic necessities only if they can be sold for a profit, the multinational working class and progressives must fight any prison or jail expansion or use of prisoners for labor. The ultimate enemies are not those offered few options for survival, but those who steal all labor power and turn basic needs for survival into commodities to be sold back to the masses at a profit.