Ben Rupert sur Twitter : "March leaving from campus leaving in about 15 minutes. Please join. #berkeley"... Not Frantz Fanon sur Twitter : "Protesters hungry & thirsty so they liberated this @WholeFoods. "FEED THE PEOPLE!" #Berkeley #BlackLivesMatter #FTP. Prison to Table: The Other Side of the Whole Foods Experience.
It’s not clear what shocked people most about the report in Fortune that Whole Foods Market sells goat cheese and tilapia prepared with prison labor—the horrendous exploitation of prisoners for a base rate less than one-tenth of Whole Foods’ starting wage, or the fact that even after paying prisoner-workers sixty cents an hour, that tiny wheel of goat cheese still costs upward of seven dollars.
Whichever reason it was, for many the story disturbed the experience that Whole Foods carefully cultivates for its customers. Walk into any Whole Foods Market and the messaging is clear. Colorful panels above neatly displayed quarts of organic chicken broth boast that Whole Foods pays the highest minimum wage in the grocery business ($10 an hour, which is still a poverty wage for most workers). Pamphlets outside the meat cases detail the company’s animal welfare rating system and explain why it doesn’t sell shark meat and other seafood that can’t be fished sustainably.
As a matter of fact, yes. How Dairy Milked by Prisoners Ends Up on Whole Foods Shelves - Rebecca J. Rosen. In Colorado, inmates are working as farmhands, providing the milk that becomes high-end goat cheese, on sale at stores across the country.
David Shankbone/Flickr For many shoppers, the fancy cheese section at Whole Foods evokes images of sweet little farms on hillsides, perhaps run by a family who has been in the same spot for generations. It does not, in all likelihood, make shoppers think about prison. But a new piece in Fortune reports that Colorado Correctional Industries (CCi) is providing the labor for a host of products that goes beyond stereotypical prisoner products (license plates and office furniture) and includes the goat milk used by Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy, carried by Whole Foods.
According to Jennifer Alsever, six inmates at the Skyline Correctional Center in Canon City milk 1,000 goats twice a day. CCi, for its part, views inmate employment as rehabilitative. But even if you accept that jobs can somehow facilitate re-entry, can prison work programs facilitate jobs? Prison labor’s new frontier: Artisanal foods.
Some years back, a small Colorado goat-cheese maker called Haystack Mountain faced its version of a classic growth challenge: National demand was growing for its chèvres and other cheeses, and the company was struggling to find enough local goat farmers to produce milk.
The solution came from a surprising source: Colorado Corrections Industries (CCI). Today six inmates milk 1,000 goats twice a day on a prison-run farm. After non-inmate employees cultivate the cheese at a company facility, it’s sold in Whole Foods WFM -0.89% outlets, among other stores. Prison labor has gone artisanal. Sure, plenty of inmates still churn out government office furniture and the like, and incarcerated workers have occasionally been used by large companies since the late 1970s. But in recent years a new wave has begun, driven primarily by small businesses that need workers for boutique-size production. Says John Scaggs, Haystack’s marketing and sales director, referring to CCI: “They have land. Raven Rakia sur Twitter : "Whole Foods uses prison labor. #berkeleyprotests"...
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