Today in Labor History February 1, 1865: President Lincoln signed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery. However, the 13th Amendment does not abolish all forms of slavery. The state is still permitted to force prisoners to work for free, or for wages far below the minimum wage, with virtually no labor rights. They are even allowed to do this and sell the products made by prisoners for a profit, sometimes even getting tax breaks for doing so. Of the 1.2 million people incarcerated in state and federal prisons in the U.S., nearly 800,000 are laboring by force, whether they want to, or not. Roughly 17% of these prisoners work for government-run businesses (e.g., DMV call centers; doing laundry for public hospitals; hazardous spill cleanup; firefighting in state-owned forests); while 3% work for private-sector employers, at extremely low wages, with no labor rights or protections. And, so long as capitalism exists, the rest of us are wage slaves, forced to choose between selling our bodies and our time to whoever will agree to pay us, or losing our ability to feed and house our families, sometimes at paltry wages that have been driven down by competition from the incarcerated slave labor force. Sadly, with the right-wing backlash against everything “woke,” politicians and pundits successfully convinced California voters to vote against Prop 6, in 2025, which would have banned prison slave labor in their state.

https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-prison-labor/

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