Raise Wages? No Need — McDonald’s Is Hiring Inmates Instead
Citing labor shortages, Alabama prisons are accused of “leasing” inmates to McDonald’s and other fast-food chains —and taking a cut of their wages.
The Alabama Department of Corrections transports dozens of incarcerated people per day to jobs at government agencies and private businesses around Alabama, including KFC, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s franchises. (Mario Tama / Getty Images)
“Walk into a McDonald’s in Alabama, and the worker flipping your McDouble could be an incarcerated person,” warns a recent video from the digital news outlet More Perfect Union.
The idea that an inmate in the custody of the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) might be working the kitchen at a fast-food restaurant is shocking, even to seasoned observers of the fast-food industry and the American prison system. Yet as two lawsuits filed in federal court in the last year attest, the practice is so pervasive that it’s become a reliable source of income for the state.
According to the first suit, filed by the legal nonprofit Justice Catalyst on behalf of inmates last September, ADOC transports dozens of incarcerated people per day to jobs at government agencies and private businesses around Alabama, including KFC, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s franchises. ADOC also delivers inmates to meatpacking plants run by companies like Koch Foods and Gemstone Foods. At each of their jobsites, inmates do the same work as any employee, sometimes for twelve hours or more per day. From 2018 until the suit was filed last September, one McDonald’s franchisee alone put an estimated 122 ADOC inmates to work in its restaurants.
In a state without a wage floor of its own, allowing employers to default to the federal wage floor of $7.25 per hour, ADOC collects 40 percent of the inmates’ gross paycheck. ADOC also deducts fees from the inmates’ paychecks to pay for transporting inmates between the prisons where they live and the “free world” jobs where they work, as well as washing their uniforms.
As both suits allege, inmates who refuse to work on a given day can face consequences, including revocation of privileges (like time on the phone with family members), stints in solitary confinement, lengthening of sentences, or transfer to one of Alabama’s medium- or high-security prisons — some of the most violent prisons in the country.
ADOC calls the whole scheme “convict leasing.” But given inmates’ inability to quit when they want to without repercussions behind bars, the system is closer to involuntary servitude — i.e., slavery.
“In Alabama, slavery and involuntary servitude did not end with the Civil War,” states the most recent suit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR):
A century and a half ago, these practices simply moved from the plantation to the penitentiary. For generations, state officials have maintained a system of forced labor intended to extract profits off the backs of Black and poor Alabamians and maintain them in a state of subjugation.
In their suits, CCR and Justice Catalyst cite a 2022 amendment in the Alabama constitution that prohibits slavery or involuntary servitude in all circumstances. This standard goes beyond the Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, which permits slavery “as punishment for a crime.” An Alabama judge recently dismissed CCR’s suit on jurisdictional grounds, though Jessica Vosburgh, a Birmingham-based lawyer for the organization, told Jacobin it is currently weighing options for an appeal. The Justice Catalyst case is ongoing. In the meantime, Vosburgh says, ADOC continues to transport workers to private businesses around the state, including fast-food restaurants, just as before.
Exploitation to Go
The Alabama scheme is a horrendous example of the realities of American prison labor. But prisons aside, it’s also instructive about the pervasive problems in fast-food labor.
In the United States alone, an estimated 4.8 million people currently work in fast food. Decades of alignment between fast-food corporations and franchisees and government development priorities have made fast-food outlets just as common in inner-city neighborhoods, downtown financial centers, and military bases as they are at the truck stops and suburban shopping districts that have long constituted their mainline territories. Ubiquity has made fast-food outlets both a common site of employment and a critical part of the American food distribution system. Yet as an industry that offers low pay for highly stressful, dangerous, and undignified work, fast food has long had difficulty recruiting workers.
There are ways to make the job safer and more attractive to prospective workers. One is to raise the minimum wage for fast-food workers, as California did last year. In response to that change and every other threat to its model of disposable labor, the industry and its proxies have invoked a future when robots fill the place of workers. Yet for all the threats of automation, human hands remain essential to the industry’s functioning.
As a result, the industry has put itself on the leading edge in the field of low-wage worker exploitation. In Toronto, the salad and smoothie chain Freshii came under fire two years ago for outsourcing order-taking to workers in Nicaragua, beamed to customers through a video conferencing system. Freshii stopped the practice after Ontario’s minister of labor called it “outrageous.” However, in New York, a new company called Happy Cashier offers the same service to restaurants, with help from “virtual cashiers” in South America and Southeast Asia.
There’s also the matter of child labor. Since 2021, at least eleven states, including Alabama, have enacted legislation to weaken child labor laws, often in the name of addressing employee shortages in low-wage industries. In some ways, those laws are only legalizing something many employers already do. As an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found, in recent years, the number of minors discovered working illegally increased more than threefold, from a little more than 1,000 in 2015 to more than 3,800 in 2022. As Nina Mast, one of the report’s authors, told Fortune, fast-food franchises constitute the largest group of violators by far.
Alabama has one of the most severe labor shortages in the United States, with thirty-eight unemployed workers actively looking for jobs per every one hundred jobs available, according to the US Chamber of Commerce. The state also has one of the lowest labor participation rates in the country at 57 percent, compared to 63 percent nationwide.
The problem is not that working-age adults are failing to keep up with the abundance of jobs, but rather that they are avoiding the ones that do exist, calculating that the pay isn’t worth the atrocious conditions. Rather than raise pay or improve conditions, fast-food employers are transgressing the normal boundaries of the labor market to employ ultra-exploitable workers, from citizens of poor countries to teenagers to inmates.
Alabama is not the only state where low-wage employers are contracting with prisons to staff their operations. And they won’t stop of their own accord. Laws must be passed to close the loopholes and end the practice. If a company needs workers, there are no shortcuts: it must remedy the situation by providing jobs worth taking.