{"id":176088,"date":"2020-09-07T18:59:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-07T23:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/09\/07\/if-you-cannot-do-your-job-with-slave-labor-you-are-doing-your-job-wrong\/"},"modified":"2020-09-07T18:59:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-07T23:59:00","slug":"if-you-cannot-do-your-job-with-slave-labor-you-are-doing-your-job-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/09\/07\/if-you-cannot-do-your-job-with-slave-labor-you-are-doing-your-job-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"If You Cannot Do Your Job with Slave Labor, You Are Doing Your Job Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"
Numerous media reports have been making hay of the shortage of inmate labor to fight California wild-fires<\/a>.<\/div>\n

Clearly this is a matter of fact, but there is an underlying issue here that is being ignored, which is that California’s fire-fighting infrastructure is dependent on prison labor at $1.00\/hour.<\/p>\n

I understand how this is convenient, but it is also profoundly evil:<\/p>\n

As a historic set of wildfires sweeps across California, sparked by lightning and stoked by record heat and drought resulting from climate change (Mercury News, 8\/19\/20<\/a>; Scientific American, 4\/3\/20<\/a>), many news outlets have drawn readers\u2019 attention to an additional problem the state faces in fighting the fires: shortages of the prison labor that it normally relies on for firefighting crews.<\/p>\n

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection \u2014 known as Cal Fire \u2014 \u201chas roughly half as many inmate fire crews than it originally had to work during the most dangerous part of wildfire season,\u201d thanks to prison quarantines and Covid-related early-release programs, reported CNBC (8\/21\/20<\/a>), and \u201crotating out firefighters isn\u2019t an easy option because there\u2019s already a significant shortage of workers available.\u201d Insider (8\/20\/20<\/a>) wrote that \u201cthe coronavirus pandemic is creating a shortage of inmate fire crews to battle the wildfires,\u201d noting that California has \u201crelied on incarcerated firefighters as its primary \u2018hand crews\u2019 since the 1940s.\u201d The New York Times (8\/22\/20<\/a>) declared that losing inmate labor \u201chas been the difference between having the manpower to save homes from wildfires \u2014 or not,\u201d and that \u201chiring firefighters to replace them, especially given the difficult work involved, would challenge a state already strapped for cash.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a gripping story, certainly, of a state unable to respond sufficiently to one disaster because of steps taken to ward off another. But the coverage all danced around a key problem with framing this as a labor shortage: There are plenty of workers available in a state with 2.5 million people currently unemployed<\/a> \u2014 no doubt including many of the fire-trained inmate workers who were released early by Gov. Gavin Newsom in order to free them from the threat of getting sick in California\u2019s Covid-ravaged prisons<\/a>. The main difference: Unlike prison laborers, regular citizens have to be paid more than pittance wages.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are far too many people and institutions profiting from the carceral state, and one of them is the state of California.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Numerous media reports have been making hay of the shortage of inmate labor to fight California wild-fires. Clearly this is a matter of fact, but there is an underlying issue here that is being ignored, which is that California’s fire-fighting infrastructure is dependent on prison labor at $1.00\/hour. I understand how this is convenient, but …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[443,368,505,450],"class_list":["post-176088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-corrections","tag-corruption","tag-disaster","tag-employment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176088"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176088\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}