Privatization of Labor

History

Private industrial contracting started with merchant capitalists in 16th-century European workhouses. Beginning in the 17th century, English felons were transported first to the American and later to the Australian colonies, where private employers were granted or bought leases on their labor. Tradesmen, merchants, shipbuilders, and iron manufacturers also purchased convicts, who were cheaper than slaves; other convicts, principally women, served as house servants and cooks. They were also usually required to offer sexual services as well. The French transported its convicts to Guiana and New Caledonia, primarily for the profit of the state, but also for private employers. Beginning in the 18th century, convicts worked at North African and Spanish American presidios in mining, textile, and agricultural work.

The private control of prison labor in America began in the colonial period. In the 18th century, the crime of theft was punished by restitution through compulsory labor under indenture. This form of punishment was soon replaced by forced labor in houses of correction, however. From 1790 until 1829, American penitentiaries operated under a “piece-price” form of the contract system. In this system, prison authorities supervised prisoner workers while merchant capitalists furnished raw materials and arranged to acquire the finished products at an agreedupon price per unit. Massachusetts introduced the contract system as early as 1807. The [Page 774]rise of the merchant capitalist after 1825 rapidly spread the piece-price system to congregate prison factories using modern power machinery. Gradually, merchant capitalists began offering contracts through which they leased the labor of prisoners, directly controlling and supervising the workers at the prison shops. This type of contracting reached its high point in the period from 1835 to 1885, when it predominated in American prisons outside of the South.

Criticism of contracting mounted in the 1870s, however, with prison reformers objecting to the pernicious and corrupting influence of entrepreneurs on the daily prison regime. While there was some debate about their profitability, prison factories also came under intense pressure from the emerging labor union movement and from small manufacturers. Together, they formed “anti-contract” associations to lobby state legislatures. Considerable opposition to free market prison industry led to the gradual abandonment of most contracting and convict leasing by the 1890s. Many penologists and reformers also opposed the contract and piece-price systems. But not long after the diminution of contracting, these same reformers were bemoaning the lack of meaningful work in prisons—illustrating the essential paradox of prison labor: It is both oppressive and liberating. By the start of the 20th century, many state prisons under the state-use system had deteriorated into large-scale idleness and unrelieved boredom, and productive labor was completely done in by Depressionera legislation—the 1935 Hawes-Cooper Act and the Ashurst-Sumner Act of 1940—outlawing the interstate commerce of prison-made goods.

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