We obey orders, plans thought up by others or by machines, we don’t choose why, how and with whom we do this or that. Other clues: Sometimes you lose your health and you waste your time, only to struggle to survive in a world governed by commercial relationships.
What am I? Work, of course!
Whether it is legalized or not, whether you are self-employed or in a family business, work is exploitation!
How many people end up in the clutches of the law and in prison, punished for not having been willing or able to submit to the rules of exploitation defined by the law? And once locked up, you still need money to live a little more decently and eat something other than the administered food.
The state and the companies that manage prisons benefit from this by making prisoners work for 2 euros an hour to carry out certain tasks necessary for the functioning of the prison. The state also knows that it is building up a captive workforce that is seen as pariahs by a large majority of its citizen-subjects. And this is of interest to any entrepreneur who wants to pay lower wages (private companies are supposed to pay 45% of the minimum wage per hour and piecework is widely used), to have a workforce that is subject to the rhythm of his order book and to find a way of getting particularly abysmal tasks done.
This avoids relocations and bankruptcies, say the economists. It’s rehabilitation, say the good souls of the left; prison must offer a second chance, the chance to accept one’s condition among the exploited.
Reforms won’t do anything, it’s exploitation and confinement that we want to destroy. So that other horizons can be opened up!
As a contribution to this vast project, we visited three of the hundreds of companies that exploit prisoners:
A shop of the brand Séphora at 27 avenue du Château in Vincennes (Val de Marne). On the night of 27-28 December, the locks were jammed, the automatic opening system of the entrance door was partly sabotaged and its windows broken. On its façade were written “Sephora exploits prisoners”, “Down with work and prison” and “Fire to the prisons”. Sephora is a company of the LVMH group, which, like the vast majority, prefers not to make it known that its cosmetics are partly produced by prison labour.
Others, however, boast about it. This is the case of the “recycled” clothing brand “Les Récupérables” located at 11 rue des Gardes in Paris 18e. The brand’s website and the ATIGIP website [1] show that the company subcontracts part of its production to workshops run by the prison administration. Its founder Anais Dautais Warmel likes to present herself as a “modern and eco-responsible fashion designer”. On the night of 26 to 27 December, her window was covered with “Prison collabo”, “exploiter” and “Freedom for all”.
Others also use it as a selling point by proudly displaying the PEP’S label [2] on their windows, like the shop selling “handmade paper mache pinatas” located at 25 rue des Vinaigriers in Paris 10e. Elena Farah, its creator and manager, speaks of her many years of paying by the piece in the dark workshops of prisons as her “most interesting and enriching human experience”. Well, on the morning of 20 December she discovered her windows tagged and blown out with the inscription “La Pinata exploits prisoners”.
Notes
[1] Agence du Travail d’Intérêt Général et de l’Insertion Professionnelle, which organises the different ways of getting incarceratd people to work: from workshops managed by the prison administration that produce under contract, to concessions (workshops opened by private companies in prisons), to the offers of TIG (Travaux d’Intérêt Général) that the Ministry would like to develop massively.
[2] Produits En Prison.s, a label recently created “to make prison work known and valued”.
