Labour

Labour in prisons: CSC —> CORCAN

Correctional Services Canada: CORCAN is this training and on the job work program done in prisons

• Doing job training of incarcerated people, and getting them ready to work when they re-enter society

• Soft skills: how to write a resume, cover letter, etc.

• The program has rehabilitative success

• In Canadian prison where is is happening in 2021 worker were paid up to 6.90 a day

  • Well below minimum wage

  • There are still additional deductions for room and board(living in the prison system)

• Thing you could get include: metal products, furniture, constructions services, laundry services, printing and engraving, textiles, etc.

UNICOR (US prison industries)

trade name for US Prison industries

• employment training, preparation for regeneration

• pay rates: 0.23 to 1.15$/hour

• customer services for hire (you can contract prisoners fro this kind of work)

• Manufacturing, warehousing : “bring jobs home; investing in America

  • Having people employed in the prison system is thought of as "brining jobs home"

• other non UNICOR work may be mandatory unpaid

• i.e., Prison labour in California is being used to fight fire

US 13# amendment

prohibits forced labour except as punishment for a crime

Loophole that allows forced labour to happen in prisons

School foster care —> prison pipline

In the US there is a relationship between student who are African American and being suspended expeled, as well as who end up in foster care, leaving the more vulnerable to end up in prison(only one of the reasons for this result)

Due to a possible history of trauma and struggle

Crack was looked at as a poor racialized persons(black) drug and cocaine was though of as a white person higher socioeconomic drug, and the criminal justice system would treat crack way more harshly that cocaine when it was found

Black Geographies: Gilmore and McKittrick

Gilmore talks about racism and add onto the reality of how capitalism is part of that too(Marxist

McMittrick: more creative writing about black geographies

Black world making processes, a lot of geography work has its legacy in colonialism and a lot of geographic knowledge is from white people and white points of view, and denies agency to black people

Black people have not been able to make maps and have their own cartographic experiences

Counter mapping: bring in black points of views and places of significance against colonial maps

 

Taking part in food retailing and providing foornto black populations

Gloden Gulag: about California prison system, how they are similar to slave plantations(they have common white dominance, people are taken from their home and brought to this place, lack of privacy and constant surveillance, places of enforced slow death. How is the US prison system directly connected to black people experience and how doe that further connect to their relationshipmwith the ecponomy

Carceral Gepgraphies

• Prisons are, in some ways, akin to slave plantations

  • reinforced, normalized white dominance

  • displacement

  • surveillance

  • enforced slow death

The prion industrial complex

Prisons have been so lucrative and integrated in the economy that we don't have really a choice to let them fail. This is why incarcerations rates are going up, but crime rates are going down. There is an uneven demographic being targeted(coloured)

Prison are also pert of the neoliberalism system we have created in the era(i.e., tough on crime, focus on victims rights, three strikes are you are out laws, tougher on juvenile crime.

 

Prisons as a business, looking for ways to cut costs and maximize their revenue and profits

 

Starting to build to point that prisons are really good for the economy

 

Dr. Gilmore says" prisons in some regions in the US have gone through economic down turned and thing like low employment rates and these are the same places where a bunch of new prisons are being build, so prisons are turning into spatial fixes to deal with issue of the economy(slow growth, low employment, .etc.). It offers employment to people in these starts and kickstarts the economy and consumption levels again.

• over incarceration in spite of reduced crime rates; gender, class , and racial underpinnings; privatization of prisons

Isolation and Connections

On the one hand incarceration disconnect the person from there social and spatial things they know, but on the other hand is that through enforce prison labour a person gets newly connected to the economy and for profit commodity chains

What are some companies that use prion labour

• wendy’s, Starbucks, Sprint, Nintendo, Victoria’s secret,. Walmart, etc.

The prison economy is subsidize corporate America by providing no cost or low cost labour

Public Sector

the federal sate and local government are the primary beneficiaries of unpaid or underpaid prison labour

in many states these workers are essential to core governmental functions

allow for cost cutting(govenrment)

Gender and Labour force Participation

(most of the affluent white global north, having to bracket out other stories when looking at this)

On of the patterns that is seen is the marginalization of women from paid labour

• Women have always labours for a wages

• But in different eras(Victorian, or Fordist) that position the male as the dominant bread winner and the wife as at home doing unpaid labour from the home

• Can workout well is there are no issues(wages are adequate , no workplace injury, etc.)

• Some of the exceptions are: unwed women being wage earners as teachers, nurses, secretaries, but the expectation is when the get married or remained they give that up and stay at home

• The AVON lady, post war Tupperware: home based businesses that allow women to get out of the house and earn

• Temporarily socially expectable, women have been economically without the same freedoms and opportunities as men

The Vanier institute

In yellow men's labour participation rates 15 and older, by gender

 

In 1976 vs 2023

• Consistently through the 70s there is quite a different usually in the adult years of the labour participation, but now in the younger years we see the labour quite equal and remain so as it increases through the years

Theories on Why the Percent of women’s labour increased in the 70s

(1)Women have simply entered the paid work force by choice

(2)It was still a choice but not a happy one, once you get into the 1970 it was become more difficult to sustain the single income male breadwinner

(3)Welfare reforms in the neoliberal era:

Theories on Why the Percent of women’s labour increased in the 70s: entered the paid work force by choice

1. There is second wave feminism that popularized many andies again women acceinng dependence on men

2. Some were upset about this and felt empowered to become more economically independent

3. Married women sick of only one income and wat to get out their and work for yourself

Theories on Why the Percent of women’s labour increased in the 70s: forced/implied entry into paid workfore

1. It was still a choice but not a happy one, once you get into the 1970 it was become more difficult to sustain the single income male breadwinner

   1. There was also another economic recession(stagflation); prices on everything going up and concurrent problems of unemployment and income stagnation

   2. The price of fuel, (oil crisis in the 1970) was driven up, and society was automobile dependent

   3. In Canada US, and UK

   4. They HAD to go into the work place to support all of the things and family

   5. Moving into duel income earner model

Theories on Why the Percent of women’s labour increased in the 70s: Welfare Reforms

1. in any countries with a social system and safety net coast the countiy billions of dollars(is very expensive), so many counties that wen throu neoliberal government wanted to cut those cost and take as many people off well fare as possible, and in the Neoliberal era wants to cut taxes so that means cutting services too. i.e., mike harris did this

   1. Thinking about Angi Jobe in the documentary Wisconsin was one of the state with massive cuts and was fporces to gett a job and then that mean you are not elegible for welfare anymore

   2. So women were cut off welfare and pushed into low wage jobs

   1. Poverty did go up!

Decline of trade union membership

Along with gender there is unevenness in union density and membership

Margret Thatcher(1973): had hostile take on unions, so union membership rates decline very quickly and aggressively during that time. So UK was hit hard with the decline of manufacturing

Regan was

 the 1930 and 40s lost of unions, and plunged 1970s

Public sector unionization is still strong(nurses, teachers, police officers0; it is mainly in the private sector where unions are plummeting

Same in Canada with the peak in the 40s but now it is still active in how much our labour force is unionized

Nordic Countries and Iceland are extremely unionized 

Wage Stagnation and growing inequality

It is often possible to get middle and lower class people on board with economic elite agendas because they give the mobility and freedom to growth to the "American dream" but it is often dowes not work statistically

Income growth percentage points from 0-6

 and then people and how they sit in the population in percentile

Grey Line: what the pattern were in the year 1980:

•  if you were in the 5% poorest, your income was still going up by 3% a year

• Wealthings of society's wealthiest is also going up, but by less than 2% a yes

  • There is a big gap, but it projects that it will progressively become slightly more equal

Red Line: in 2014

• 5% percentile incomes are not growing they have stagnated

• In the 30th percentile it is also not really moving up lower then the 1980

• Now under neoliberal government , with more deregulation, in the 98th percentile, you income will grow at no less than 4 - 6 % every year

• So the poor are staying poor and the rich are being empower to get way richer

• So the odds are litterally againest the lower half andn can feel like and attack on then middle class

New International Divison of Labour

Emerges since the 60s and into then 70s

 once upon a time in a Pre neoliberal era those folk were able  you their colonial and imperial might to  use the global south(resource extractions) and relocate the resources in the global north and remanufacture them into the good that went out into the global economy

 

Manufacturing used to be heavily situated in the global north(western) countries; i.e., automotive assembly; the rustbelt

 

But in the decline of the colonial imperial era a new geography has taken place that is surrounded around the transnational cooperation's; but now they have arranged labour and the assembly work, the low barrier work, in the global south(which used to be peripheral: China, India, Bangladesh)

 

Stimulates economy for the less developed place and give them cheaper tech

 

Connected to creative destruction:

Gig economy: platform economy, crowd work, work on demand

• innovative forms of self employment, income generation, and supplementation

• disruptive platforms and technologies that may destabilize traditional industry, work processes

• Ford government has been interested in then gig economy and its implications to the boarder economy

  • Call these platforms disruptive: in the sense that the are destabilising latter industries like taxis, and hotels

  • How women my use this gig work for income supplementation

  • So many average people are involved with it

    • They are coping with the restless new of capital and the real and perceived lack of job opportunity

    • i.e., on demand tutoring services

      

North American Trends: Flexibilization of work

Forcing working people to become flexibleosze

In the past we thought that when we got out of school there would be a permanent full time well paying job that will be first time

But now there is more contract work, client work, part time work(bad for workers goo employers(b/c they do not have to give any benefits i.e., dental)

So they will have certain months of benefit and then take them off

Global Gig Economy

A big deal because of information connection technology, which is changing what the gig economy may mean for less affluent people in the world

Africa: gig economy is a big deal

• Rockefeller foundation: which gives millions of dollars to invest in a bunch of project and see potential for the gig economy in places like Africa

ICT revolution transcending space; global contract labour force

• Tech allow it to be available all around the work in every time zone

An employment opportunity for refugees and displaced persons

• Internal conflict in certain places and forcing them to leave certain countries and they end up in often near by countries

• find themselves with a lot of refugees and displaced people so you have to think of how to provide these people with what they need to pursue gig economy opportunities

• Very neoliberal in nature: freedom to choose, lots of choice

• Is the techno gun being distributed equitably and is it reaching remote people

  Prolems

• Gives women to mange care burdens

• May cause stress

• Do people have the right to associate and organize? Unionization?

   

  The not normal work relationships not who is on the loosing side how is this make up more dispensable or vulnerable to further lack of jobs or opportunity of benefit

Problems with gig economy

Who controls labour often a highly competitive market

\leads to people undercutting the market in to lower of rates of pay for the same work; just to cut the contract?

 

And companies still have people because the still control pa, prices, etc

Fissured Work Places

• David Weil

• Why work become so bad for so many . What can be done

  • The basic employment relationship has broken apart

  • Relationship used to be with one employment like a rock, but now the rock has fissure, and multiple employers have a piece in the employment relationship because increasing market pressures

  • Demand that companies work on core competence(what it is good at and when investor will be willing to reward)

  • The desire to shed employment: i.e., apple( has to reduce cost and make dure their product work s for there is many other companies that work through it

  • Since no one want to earn workplace risks things are shifting\

  • Fairness: there is a lot of recent economic research saying people want to be treated fairly

  • So in the past when there is one wall shoeing all people in the assembly line working together questions about fairness of wages

  • Price for. A service not a wage for a labour activity

Capital market Pressures

Stock markets and other means of investment in our economies people where are shareholders put a lot of pressure on businesses to preform

• So businesses feel the pressure to preform and growth, fast

• So a lot of them to feel the need for focus on their core competence

  • i.e., computer companies: on the design and innovation; shoe company: not making the shoe but the design and innovation

  • So they focus on core companies and shed employment that does not directly connect to the competences out

    • i.e., instead of people a janitor salary: get a janitor company to give you a janitor when you need, so they are not under you

    • So if you are being denied workplace safety(you get hired to work for a certain part of time, but you have an issue who do you complain to the people you work under, or the location you are working non of them will car)

Declining Perceptions of Fairness

If wee had a work place with shoe designed, cleaners, assembly worker, people will talk and share information so it some part if getting big pay rases and someone else is in it feels unfair, so you will take that and do something with it(take it to the bosses), but if all the work is separated and not full time these problem is offset because you lose that social connection and security