PRISON LABOUR INCREASES UNEMPLOYMENT.

This information wasgained from The Independent

          This cry for austerity as a deficit reduction plan is a wonderful excuse for employers to squeeze wages. Unemployment rising and wage freezes/cuts, it's bonanza time for the corporate world as they tell the workers to like it or lump it. While they are forcing down wages and ripping up contracts on conditions, the Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke is opening up new avenues of exploitation to help their profit margins. He has plans to increase to 20,000 the number of prisoners doing cheap labour in prisons. He wants to turn the prisons into profit making machines before handing them over to the private sector to be milked.

        Under this scheme prisoners wages are approximately £2 per hour, of course the prisoners don't get the full £2, as the prisons take variable amounts from that. It is obvious that companies will increasingly out-source their work to the prison service via a new company, One3One. One of the companies taking advantage of the captive slave labour facilities offered by One3One, is Speedy Hire a tool hiring company which in 2010 closed 75 of its repair depots, paying off 800 staff. The company increased its prison contract by approximately 10%, using almost 100 prisoners and handing, during the financial year 2010-2011, £114,012 to Pentoville, Garth and Erlestoke prisons. Approximately 800 more people looking for work in that area while the company rips-off approximately 100 prisoner who have little or no say in the matter. Another company that has grabbed at the cheap labour in prisons is Calpac, a food packaging firm. Its contract with Kirkham prison has increased from £34,321 in 2010 to £154,267. according to the company pay roll the highest paid job was office manager on £40 for a 40 hour week, while a manual packing operative would be paid 55p an hour. Many of the workers work overtime taking their working week to 60 hours. With pay and conditions like this we can expect to see many more firms pay-off hard working people on the outside to employ more cheap trapped labour on the inside. All with the governments blessing, this is how a capitalist government helps the economy.

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