Companies address labor shortages by pursuing current or former prisoners
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Which is entirely my point.
If not, shouldn't slavery be a pretty hot political issue?
Wikipedia says things like the death penalty still exists in half of US states, but I don't know the numbers for states using captive workers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
:) You'd think, right?
It's not exactly a niche issue, there are plenty of people talking about it. But once you get fully into the mainstream, the issue seems to just fall off completely. There's a real apathy in America about how our prison system works, and not just apathy on the Right, mainstream Democrats talk about modern-day slavery in prison way less than I would expect them to.
I'm not sure if it's a messaging thing, or if culturally we're just primed not to care. But yeah, America never fully ended slavery, it's still allowed if you've been convicted of a crime.
But the Democrats' solution is to defund local PDs, which will leave a vacuum that can be filled by Federal agents that are more loyal to Washington than local cops
Naturally, this "defund the police" message takes the air out of serious criminal justice reform.
If "the Left," was serious about reforming our prisons, step one would be legalizing marijuana and everybody knows it.
Schumer keeps saying they're going to do it this session but instead the Democrats are pushing through huge spending bills and arguing over which unarmed rioter proves the Reichstag Fire, er, I mean, 1/6 "Insurrection," justifies their rhetoric and attempts to federalize elections
So yeah, actually, despite my argumentative tone I think I agree with everything you said and this is just additional context
I think you should distinguish "democrats" the vast vast vast majority of which are conservative (in the sense of conserve), from far-left radicals.
Even among the far-left, the idea of actually defunding police is essentially offered only by a fraction of pseudo-revolutionaries.
>Even among the far-left, the idea of actually defunding police is essentially offered only by a fraction of pseudo-revolutionaries.
My twitter feed paints a different picture, I have a swath of people who would interpret the "defund the police" slogan as: "funding mental health, local services, and so on, through cuts to the police budget, military-style equipment, and such", and much less of the "abolish the police" anarchistic far-left sentiment you've perceived.
Their movement seems to have a hard time distancing themselves from their more extreme members, and that is a plentiful source of people talking past each other, which does little to elevate the level of debate.
Love.
To put this into perspective:
The most recent study I've seen suggests that roughly 90% of tweets are posted by 10% of its users. Only about 20% of the American population is on Twitter in the first place, and that demographic is heavily skewed towards younger generations. Assuming those numbers are correct, 90% of Twitter's content is coming from 2% of the American population, with a heavy skew towards Left positions.
To contrast, the most recent survey of "defund the police" I can find online suggests that less than 18% of the population supports defunding the police (~30% of Democrats). And the percentage of that group that interprets "defund the police" in the literal sense of slashing police budgets instead of as a cultural/political signal is probably even lower.
People really don't realize how little Twitter represents reality. Part of this is the media's fault, part of it is the culture, part of it is... I'm not sure. But it's a really huge mistake to look at Twitter and think that it's a representative slice of mainstream opinion; if that was true then Warren would be president right now.
That seems in the right order of magnitude, for social media and web forums in general.
>Only about 20% of the American population is on Twitter in the first place, and that demographic is heavily skewed towards younger generations
So, I'll grant you that. My point really is about the interpretation of "defund the police" among people who subscribe to the idea, more than it is about the popularity of the movement.
>To contrast, the most recent survey of "defund the police" I can find online suggests that less than 18% of the population supports defunding the police (~30% of Democrats). And the percentage of that group that interprets "defund the police" in the literal sense of slashing police budgets is probably even lower.
Right, but wouldn't that stem precisely from the unclear communication problem I'm trying to highlight?
If "defund the police" is only interpreted as "slashing police budgets", then it makes sense that the idea would poll poorly, especially to non-Twitter users. Worded like this, the idea seems to target people who dislike the police more than people who like social services.
So the more important point, to me, is whether the public understanding of what the pollsters are asking matches how the movement wants to define itself.
Otherwise that would be a quite misleading and unhelpful misrepresentation of the idea, wouldn't it?
(Disclaimer: Hypothetically, I weakly support the idea, though I'm not a vocal supporter. I may have some biais.)
That's a good point that's worth making. And it's important to note that even if you go all the way to the police abolition movement, very few of those people aren't also talking about replacing police officers with extensive social services. So I think you're right-on with the idea that the movement is often characterized poorly.
But is it unpopular just because it's a communication problem? Maybe. In the sense that if you figured out the right way to present any policy idea it might become popular, I guess.
> wouldn't that stem precisely from the unclear communication problem I'm trying to highlight?
I don't know. I don't personally think the biggest reason defunding the police is unpopular is that a vocal minority is corrupting the phrase and giving people the wrong impression. I think that minority gets blamed for a lot of stuff, but it doesn't seem to me that the general public is really engaged with the conversation that much to begin with, and they don't really have much information about it at all, if they even care enough to look for it. And that a big portion of the public might reject the concept even if they understood it well, because they're fundamentally more pro-police than people on Twitter realize.
When I brought up "defund the police" as a cultural signal, what I mean is that as a mainstream topic of debate the phrase may be entirely separate and orthogonal to anything that even far-Left activists are actually saying. I'm not entirely convinced the movement's problem is messaging, because I'm not entirely convinced that most mainstream Democrats/Republicans are even on Twitter to hear the movement's message in the first place.
When I hear 18% of Democrats support the idea, I wonder how many of them support it purely in the sense of them saying, "I'm a progressive." Maybe part of them are interpreting it as slashing police budgets, some of them are interpreting it as redistributing resources, but I think that some of them just aren't interpreting it, the phrase is just something they think that progressives like.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but I think it's a little over-simplistic to say that miscommunication is the biggest reason why the idea doesn't have traction. Here's a weird fact: support for BLM as a movement among mainstream Democrats fell once protests calmed down, completely contrary to the narrative/fear that people had that looters would hurt support and that a calmer environment would be better for mainstream acceptance. To me, that suggests that messaging alone paints an incomplete picture of what's happening.
That's a good question, and I'm absolutely open to the idea that it would be unpopular regardless. I do agree that the picture I have of the broader US demographic is probably very tinted by my online bubble, and probably not fully accurate :)
But, at the same time, I think I have plenty of room to argue just that.
>It doesn't seem to me that the general public is really engaged with the conversation that much to begin with, and they don't really have much information about it at all, if they even care enough to look for it
That's very possible, though as seen above with the topic of prison labor, it regrettably seems that public support for an idea has as much to do with how and how much the idea is broadcast. In the case of slavery, I hope I can safely say most people would declare they oppose it if called as-such on the evening news.
Despite the general public not being very involved in a potential 13th amendment reform conversation.
Back to 'defund the police', that is in fact, imo, a really bad slogan if the primary idea is funding alternative means of de-escalation. People, I think, can get behind allocating money to proposed solutions a lot easier than they can evaluate tradeoffs between budget cuts here and reallocation there, let alone when defunding existing solutions is the only part you hear about.
So I wouldn't bet on the concept itself being unacceptable. In other words, I think it's a lot easier to convince a half of a heterogenous group that X is a bad idea, and the other half a good one, than we might comfortably want to admit.
A small percentage of people will _not_ be swayed so easily, and these are the ones I trust to judge the idea on its own merit, which helps inform public opinion and sway the larger group. But these people may not hear about the idea, if you don't first broadcast it to the rest of the group under its (honest) "best-case formulation".
>because they're fundamentally more pro-police than people on Twitter realize.
I agree with that very much, but I also see people outside of Twitter that regularly seem to vote against their best interests, or almost contradict themselves.
Pro-policeness being part of how the idea is presented was the mistake. Ask people if they're pro funding for programs to "de-escalate violence" — or whichever other positive wording, and you might avoid that particular issue.
>I'm not entirely convinced that most mainstream Democrats/Republicans are even on Twitter to hear the movement's message in the first place.
Right. And this is where I make a cliché of myself by taking a stab at "mainstream media", and attempting to fit that under the broader umbrella of "miscommunication" =)
>I hear 18% of Democrats support the idea, I wonder how many of them support it purely in the sense of them saying, "I'm a progressive." >I think that some of them just aren't interpreting it.
Yes, and I think you might be right. But that seems to be a wider observation on the state of partisan politics.
>but I think it's a little over-simplistic to say that miscommunication is the biggest reason why the idea doesn't have traction
It probably can't explain everything, and maybe I have too low an expectation of the general public — I am almost making a caricature of them, as if they'll believe anything if you word it just right — and thank you for stressing that the public is in fact probably a lot more pro-police that I acknowledged. I can't definitely say which is the biggest factor, but I'd like to know, and I feel that the idea not being presented under its best light preventing us from knowing that, is a bit of a shame :)
>support for BLM as a movement among mainstream Democrats fell once protests calmed down
Yes. I'm also puzzled by that one. I feel the situation above may be a lot less complex than the BLM one (by virtue of _not_ having entered the public debate nearly as much), but I'd be happy to learn more about that.
Thanks for making some interesting points!
Love.
(note: I've edited this somewhat a few minutes after posting, apologies if you loaded the page in between. Bad habit I have...)
Even something that (in my mind) should be pretty uncontroversial like getting rid of cash bail is considered a radical idea by a lot of people as soon as you step off of Twitter.
Biden ran on increasing police budgets, and won the primary pretty handily. People have a misplaced view of how Left the Democratic electorate (and most of the people who get elected) actually are.
I think that lots of people don't give much of a shit about prison experiences. The classic maybe you shouldn't have committed crime in the first place, let that be a lesson to you etc.
Prison is supposed (in many peoples view, irrespective of stated aims in law) to be a deterrent. Not Fun. Breaking rocks and digging ditches and not having cable tv etc fits that mould.
So I guess you'd want to change that pretty ingrained cultural precept? Personally I'd rather pitch "prisons should be safe, comfortable, clean" over "no more modern slavery" - feels like an easier sell.
Occasionally it's mentioned on some show like Jon Oliver, but there isn't the political willpower to solve this clear abuse since it would cost more money.
If you're talking about the last decade, maybe. In the current month/year? No, because the government is currently paying people to stay at home at rates competitive to employment[1]. With that taken into account labor's power is arguably stronger than ever.
[1] The median US hourly wage is $15.35 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/185335/median-hourly-ear...). With the $300/week subsidy from the federal government and 50% of hourly wage from unemployment, that works out to $15.18 for staying at home.
Because they can afford not to.
You're taking a view of the free market that's a little over-simplified from how it actually works. Most industries have areas where they hit happy mediums, where they don't actually race completely to the bottom. Wages can be a part of that. It requires something to shake up the market to force businesses to start competing and lowering profit margins, which arguably is exactly what's happening right now.
Some businesses are paying employees more, and they're not seeing the same labor shortages. But I think a sizable chunk of businesses are mad about the idea that wages work this way, and their ideology is that the government should make sure that low-income workers always stay in a position where low-wage jobs seem attractive.
A big thing to recognize with economic theory in the real world is that profit margins don't always trend to zero, at least not in the immediate short term. If businesses did all increase their profits to $20 in your scenario, they'd collectively all have the same hiring problems and lower profit margins. So that kind of thing won't happen until an event (a pandemic, increased government aid, better worker mobility, a shift in culture, new companies entering the market) forces businesses to get competitive with each other over a limited resource.
> Maybe the answer is that due to covid (recession, lockdowns), business is down so they can't justify paying each employee $15, because that's close to the value that they provide?
I think that's unlikely, multiple industries (Amazon included) saw profits rise during Covid, not shrink.
And in any case, the market is a big part of determining what value employees provide. If you can't afford to hire employees for $15 an hour, and that's what the market is demanding, then the problem isn't that the employees are overvalued, the problem is that your business isn't sustainable and you can't afford to pay market rates.
That's a big part of how the free market works: there are a ton of business ideas I could pursue if I had access to free labor, but unfortunately in a free market you have to pay market value for things (workers included).
There are lots of ways to think about an economy and market incentives, but surely a pure Capitalist reading of this situation is that if your business can't make money paying market rates for its workers and supplies, then your business doesn't deserve to exist. I'm not sure why I should be sympathetic from any perspective, Capitalist or otherwise, if a business complains that the only way it can afford to operate is if its workers are made to live in poverty and forced under threat of poverty to take low-paying jobs. That doesn't sound like a free market to me.
Higher income ranges are able to save by purchasing physical assets that can later be sold for inflated dollars. But, inflation is damaging to higher income purchasing power as well. There is just more breathing room in higher income ranges. Middle class becomes lower class unless they can manage to earn more.
Inflation is a loss for all but a few. Everybody becomes more poor through inflation with the exception of people closest to the new money. Those closest to new money get to spend it before prices increase.
Wages grow more than prices rise. It would be a better outcome for lower income ranges.
Tell that to the Amazon workers pissing and shitting in bottles.
>She noted many private companies that hire prison workers will not employ them after they are released and will not hire job applicants with criminal records. She added that these programs perpetuate mass incarceration.
And even that law doesn't actually give them the right to continue to work, it just gives a subset of them the right to petition to continue to be allowed to work -- it's a very limited band-aide that doesn't actually solve the underlying problem. And this stuff is happening at a state level, it's not enough to point at a few isolated companies to claim that they're they problem. I just think it's really hard to argue that our current prison labor system is working well.
We can't realistically talk about training prisoners unless we take criminal records out of hiring processes and get rid of laws that bar prisoners from finding work once they're out of prison.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912193742/california-bill-cle...
My problem is the older I get the more complicated I realize everything is. It's easy to see flaws but fixes are overwhelmingly complicated.
I think it's stupid (and bad for society) to ban someone from some employment based on an unrelated crime. It drives down supply of employees, which should trigger increases in pay. Like you said, this law is a band-aid; it doesn't fix the problem (restricted employment) and it side-steps the natural counter to the problem (increasing salaries). Why not fix whatever says firefighters can't have criminal records? Why aren't normal economic pressures sufficient?
I also don't want to disregard criminal records completely, e.g. I wouldn't ever want to hire Bernie Madoff as an investment advisor (even if he were still alive). For me it's an issue of whether the crime is relevant and that's really hard to say sometimes.
Our economy had been demand-constrained, not supply-constrained, for decades, and peole are beaten into submission not by forced/excessive work, but by telling them they don't or barely deserve to work. (Let your own fears make you work hard, not the whip.)
Prison is no exception. https://johnjayeconomics.org/prison-labor-in-u-s-state-priso...
Sentencing people to hard labor for certain crimes had been done for thousands of years by that point. The prison carve out was a reflection of the fact that the states passing the amendment were interested in getting rid of commercial slavery as it existed in the south, not throwing a wrench into their own prison systems. The idea that some fraction of prisoners would be doing hard labor for the duration of their sentence or some fraction was completely (edit:)uncontroversial status quo at the time. Contrast with lifetime enslavement for commercial purposes which was was controversial enough to fight a war over.
The government version of "slavery for me but not for thee"
Slavery overall was status quo. America passed an amendment to end slavery, but added some exceptions to preserve slave labor for criminals, because as you state:
> the states passing the amendment were interested in getting rid of commercial slavery as it existed in the south, not throwing a wrench into their own prison systems
They wanted to end the subset of slavery that was practiced in the South without ending slavery overall.
No, the point isn't that the housing shortage isn't real, it's that whether it's a labor shortage or a wage shortage is in the eye of the beholder.
You assume there's an infinite profit margin available for decreasing.
Many industries operate at a few percent profit.
There's no money there either, after a division.
I see UBI as a very elegant solution to this problem. It levels the playing field for everybody. The problem with the current job market is that the negotiation power is not symmetrical.
Who could consciously down vote this?
-1 to HN perceived morality.
To which problem? A UBI will obviously mean more income for those stuck in low wage jobs.
But a UBI will definitely not help attract employees to low wage positions. In fact, I think the increased unemployment benefits during Covid proved that if people have some sort of UBI payment, they are not going to work low wage jobs (hence the labor shortage).
a) Make a better workplace that people don't hate coming to.
b) Make the wages compensate enough for the terrible environment they have created.
With a UBI, managers would no longer be under the illusion that "They will eventually come crawling back when they run out of money."
You may think that's a good thing, but you can't just say "Those rich businesses will just cough up more money". That won't always be the case.
Or they can increase prices to match their increased salary expenditures and stay in business.
Often the major predictor of an employee leaving/staying isn't the compensation, but the management.
I don't think this is true. I am also of the opinion that UBI would decrease demand for low wage jobs, but I do not believe that the increased unemployment benefits due to COVID proves this. The increased unemployment benefits have an income cliff where they go away, so it is possible to return to work and end up making less than (or very close to) what you were making from unemployment. I certainly know a few people who would make barely any more money from returning to work compared to the unemployment benefits they receive.
Or you know, proper min wages and benefits: paid vacations, paid sick days, paid parental leaves, &c.
Not treating people like cattle is a good starting point
The US is using slave labor and at the same time sanctioning China for...using slave labor.
First of all, this lumps two groups together. Second, isn't it kind of "good" if employers become more willing to hire people with criminal records? They have a hell of a time finding jobs, which gets in the way of social reintegration.
> a Waste Management Services executive discussed hiring immigrants to fill commercial driver’s license positions
Oh no! Hiring immigrants! ... What are we supposed to do, shut them out of the job market to form parallel societies in the Banlieues?
How is this in The Guardian? It's Bannonesque "Reserve Army of Capital" stuff.
Absolutely.
> Bannonesque
Yes, but our immigration structure should be fixed so higher skill higher wage immigrants get in first. The way we do immigration now is pretty fucked and makes Bannonesque stuff way less obviously false than it ought to be.
Still, absolutely agree this is a weird headline, and too much mixing of things.
> In New York City, construction industry employers recruit recently released prisoners who must seek and maintain employment as a condition of their release from prison.
Why can't an ex-con go bum off their family? Or become a mendicant holy man? Or become a novelist, who in 9/10 cases is just unemployed, but in 1/10 earns money off "My Life in Lockup: The Joe Blow Story" (popular in the prison library)? We should be making formal employment less necessary, not more.
I guess businesses just need to hold out until then.
https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/RI...
C.f. WWII when black people got way more jobs leading to more prosperity and power and ultimately the civil rights movement.
The "labor shortage" is simply progress back towards the fast-growing economy and less lopsided labor market we used to have.
Better growth raises all boats, but capitalists winge about their loss of relative power. This why I say it's a great lie capitalists actually like growth. They actually prefer a doldrum economy with an unproductive basset bubble.