Georgia To Use Cheap Prison Labor To Harvest Crops For Second Year In A Row

[Galraedia]

When Georgia Republicans passed an anti-immigration law last year, Hispanic farm workers fled the state in droves, leaving farmers with no one left to pick the crops. Republicans said that they were creating new jobs for Americans by clearing out undocumented workers, but as it turns out, the law also scared many legal workers away as well and Americans aren’t crazy about working in the fields all day picking crops for little money. As a result, crops rotted, costing farm owners millions of dollars. Georgia Republicans then had an idea. Replace the field workers with dirt cheap prison labor.

According to 11 Alive News in Georgia, the state “is using transitional prison inmates to work in south Georgia’s Vidalia onion industry this spring. The program is an update of a failed program introduced in 2011, in which the state sent probationers into vegetable fields to help ease a labor shortage that followed the passage of a tough new immigration law. Growers complained that probationers were unreliable and slow compared to migrant workers who have historically worked in vegetable fields.”

Read more: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/04/20/georgia-to-use-cheap-prison-labor-to-harvest-crops-for-second-year-in-a-row/