Bloody prisoners taking over all our jobs!

...Plan A(+) [i.e. austerity] should thus be understood as focusing on a concentrated reduction in the cost of variable capital [of hiring workers] within UK production, whatever the human and social consequences. Once more, we are led to believe, there is no alternative.

Plan A and Wage Repression: How will this be done?

Such a reduction can and is being actively facilitated in a number of ways...

...Finally, an ever larger prison population will become increasingly instrumentalised as a reserve of labour whose low costs of exploitation, as with those on workfare programmes, further depresses the wages of the entire working population. This is already the case in the US where prison labour has been described as ‘outsourcings best kept secret’.

Having previously stated in 2010 that all UK prisoners should be working 40 hours a week Kenneth Clarke similarly announced plans to double the prison workforce from it’s current 8,700 to 19,000 by 2020, increasing revenue generated in the sector to £132 million in the process. One already existant working prison is HMP Featherstone in Wolverhampton where every prisoner is in full time employment and paid £17 a week to produce beds and cabinets for the prison estate. The prison hopes to win more contracts from the private sector going forward and represents something of a model that Clarke would like to see rolled out across the United Kingdom.

Rather than speaking in the usual rhetoric of using such programmes as useful in cutting re-offending rates Clarke even chose in 2010 to deploy the vocabulary of resource allocation referring to the current prison population as a “wasted resource” within the national economy. To compound this released prisoners are increasingly put on workfare programmes the moment they are released from prison with unpaid labour becoming, as with the US, an integral part of the prison-industrial complex. Even if one believes that the incarcerated have a debt to repay to society surely such a debt does not include diminishing the wages of everyone else?

Conclusion

A key element of the coalition government’s Plan A(+) is to depreciate the costs of labour as much as possible. By doing this, as well as creating a favourable investment climate for primarily foreign capital by reducing corporation tax and facilitating a climate of tax avoidance, the government hopes to eventually revivify growth and job creation. Growth for ‘who’ and ‘what’ kinds of jobs seem to be entirely inconsequent to our political masters...