Chain Gang - Prison Labor, Boeing, 23andMe, and Taking Ls
Prison Labor
Two things the United States is especially good at are putting its citizens in prison, and putting cheap meat and produce on grocery shelves. It is fitting, therefore, that a significant portion of our agribusiness benefits either directly or indirectly from prison labor:
Intricate, invisible webs ... link some of the world’s largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide, according to a sweeping two-year AP investigation into prison labor that tied hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market.
When the country banned slavery and involuntary servitude after the Civil War, it included a critical carveout - except as punishment for a crime. For sixty years after slavery's official end it stuck around under a new moniker - convict leasing - which allowed authorities mostly in Southern states to arrest mostly Black men for petty or made-up offenses and lend them to coal mines and railroads.
The practice officially ended in 1941, despite having been outlawed by states thirteen years prior, but even that wasn't enough to fully cleanse the stain - the law prohibiting transport of goods made by incarcerated workers included an exception...for agricultural goods.
Today, more than a hundred and fifty years after the end of slavery, these are the conditions prisoners can be subjected to:
During his time in the fields, he was overseen by armed guards on horseback and recalled seeing men, working with little or no water, passing out in triple-digit heat. Some days, he said, workers would throw their tools in the air to protest, despite knowing the potential consequences.
“They’d come, maybe four in the truck, shields over their face, billy clubs, and they’d beat you right there in the field. They beat you, handcuff you and beat you again,” said Ingram...
[...]
“I was in a field with a hoe in my hand with maybe like a hundred other women. We were standing in a line very closely together, and we had to raise our hoes up at the exact same time and count ‘One, two, three, chop!’” said Faye Jacobs, who worked on prison farms in Arkansas.
[...]
The AP went out on a work detail with a Florida chain gang wearing black-and-white striped uniforms and ankle shackles, created after Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey took office in 2012.
[...]
In March 2020, though all other outside company jobs were halted, the Arizona corrections department announced about 140 women were being abruptly moved from their prison to a metal hangar-like warehouse on property owned by Hickman’s Family Farms, which pitches itself as the Southwest’s largest egg producer.
It is no secret that American prisoners suffer inhumane treatment at the hands of a system designed to humiliate them as much as possible. We cage people in this country to remove them from public eyesight, so that we don't have to sit with the consequences of that reactionary approach to disorder.
Our punitive approach to incarceration means that work is a central tenet of the avearge prison experience. An estimated eight hundred thousand of the country's more than two million prisoners are put to work in menial and often degrading jobs, for little to no money.
Much of the work involves maintaining prisons, cleaning, cooking, doing laundry. Other prisoners sent into fields or slaughterhouses have little say in the matter, forced into 'hard labor' doing backbreaking work and generating outsized profits for state agencies and private agribusiness.
Many of the companies buying cows or wheat or almonds from prisons have rules against such behavior, but it's easy to ignore the country's most denigrated minority - one stripped of legal rights by the system eagerly exploiting their labor.
Thousands of different justice systems at the local, state, and federal level mean there is little accountability for overzealous police chiefs, sheriffs, or wardens who establish authoritarian fiefdoms fueled by cruelty and utter disregard for human dignity:
David Farabough, who oversees the state’s 20,000 acres of prison farms, said Arkansas’ operations can help build character.
[...]
[Louisiana corrections spokesman Ken Pastorick] said the phrase “sentenced with hard labor” is a legal term referring to a prisoner with a felony conviction.
Despite an essentially all-profit operation, paying workers nothing and selling the goods into the market, many of these state programs manage to lose money:
Nearly half the agricultural goods produced in Texas between 2014 and 2018 lost money, for example, and a similar report in Louisiana uncovered losses of around $3.8 million between fiscal years 2016 and 2018. A separate federal investigation into graft at the for-profit arm of Louisiana’s correctional department led to the jailing of two employees.
The records are spotty at best and officials have no incentive to be transparent about their operations, so it's left to our imaginations whether these losses are a result of bureaucratic incompetence, corruption, or both.
The most profitable system of prison labor, by far, is work-release. Prisoners are loaned out to businesses and paid minimum wage, which the prisons aggressively garnish:
In Alabama, for instance, the state brought in more than $32 million in the past five fiscal years after garnishing 40 percent of prisoners’ wages.
This is a fantastic deal for companies - in a tight job market they've got a literal captive labor force who shows up on time, doesn't (can't) complain, and isn't subject to safety or worker protections. They aren't limited to behind-the-scenes jobs packing produce either:
Some incarcerated workers with just a few months or years left on their sentences have been employed everywhere from popular restaurant chains like Burger King to major retail stores and meat-processing plants.
And some aren't even prisoners in the traditional sense, because some places use loopholes to run debtors' prisons:
The AP met women in Mississippi locked up at restitution centers, the equivalent of debtors’ prisons, to pay off court-mandated expenses. They worked at Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen and other fast-food chains and also have been hired out to individuals for work like lawn mowing or home repairs.
The phrase 'women locked up in restitution centers to pay off court expenses and forced to work at fast food restaurants' chills to the bone. It is so shocking, so cynical and twisted, and somehow not the least bit surprising.
In Alabama defendants awaiting trial can participate in work-release to pay their bond:
Some people arrested in Alabama are put to work even before they’ve been convicted. An unusual work-release program accepts pre-trial defendants, allowing them to avoid jail while earning bond money. But with multiple fees deducted from their salaries, that can take time.
Our carceral system is ruthlessly effective at extracting maximum value from convict labor while imposing the most humiliating and dehumanizing forms of punishment available within (and often outside) the law. Put simply, we have cheap things in this country because we're so good at exploiting desperate labor forces (migrants, prisoners) while pantomiming the moral high ground - we currently block shipments of Chinese cotton because...they use prison labor.
Offering people convicted of a crime jobs is perhaps laudable if your goal is actual rehabilitation. Forcing them to work and stealing all their pay because you've stripped them of basic human rights is inhumane and inexcusable. Our country's biggest food and textile brands happily profiting off the system would be a huge scandal, if anyone was willing to face the unpleasant truth of where their cheap stuff comes from.
Boeing
Air travel is, statistically speaking, extremely safe. The aptly named website Simple Flying informs us that you are two hundred thousand times more likely to die in a car crash than on a plane, and air travel is getting safer each year, even as we fly more.
These facts do not help anyone with flight anxiety, because the things that make being on a plane scary are not grounded in reason and statistics. Nor does it help that one particular type of plane that many of us fly on a regular basis seems to be fucking up again:
The fuselage panel that blew off an Alaska Airlines jet earlier this month was removed for repair then reinstalled improperly by Boeing mechanics on the Renton final assembly line, a person familiar with the details of the work told The Seattle Times.
You probably read somewhere about the emergency door blowing off a plane mid-flight, and the resulting finger-pointing between Boeing and one of its suppliers who the company, for a time, claimed assembled the door wrong, until people at Boeing's plant said no, it was definitely our fault.
Insufficient safety measures and quality control were also cited as the cause of two deadly crashes back in 2019. This is a big problem not only for Boeing but air travel as an industry, because Boeing is one half of the passenger plane duopoly.
For some, this presents a financial concern, because it is bad for the public to distrust Boeing even as their planes literally fall apart. The Financial Times worries that the main thing holding Boeing and any potential rivals back is the regulatory process:
“Partly, this is a simple ‘time is money’ thing, and increased regulatory checks extend the entire development process,” says [Sash] Tusa, noting that safety standards are more demanding. But even small improvements in performance cost more today as existing civil aircraft technology approaches its limits, he adds.
Safety standards probably should be more demanding, considering Boeing has a habit of building planes that are less safe than its major rival, Airbus. And while today's planes (even Boeing's) are much safer than their predecessors, it's worth asking why a company as big and powerful as Boeing, with a stranglehold on the aviation market, is doing so much worse than Airbus at building quality airplanes.
Boeing is infamous for its acquisition of beleaguered rival McDonnell Douglas in the 90s and its subsequent financialization of operations by a series of business-brained executives. Basically, Boeing bought a company that made bad planes, wasted time trying to rehabilitate those bad planes rather than building new planes, and in response to ceding market share to Airbus, embraced the ethos that accounting was more important than making good planes:
[Boeing CEO Harry] Stonecipher’s other big cultural transformation was focused on maligning and marginalizing engineers as a class, and airplanes as a business. “You can make a lot of money going out of business” was something he liked to say. [Jack] Welch had been famous for transferring upper managers from, say, GE’s locomotives division one year over to plastics the next, and to jet engines after that. Stonecipher wanted Boeing’s upper management to view planes with that same cold detachment, to not, as then-chief financial officer Debbie Hopkins explained in a 2000 Bloomberg interview, “get overly focused on the box”—i.e., the airplane.
2000s Boeing management believed that building good planes was a solved problem, and focused its efforts on pleasing markets and shareholders by extracting maximum value from existing assets while cutting back on innovation. This is a harmlessly offensive attitude to have if you work at a consulting company or app maker or whatever, but minimizing production and safety concerns while building giant metal tubes that transport delicate human cargo thousands of miles around the globe should elicit a stronger commitment to detail.
Nor was Boeing's disregard for safety a big secret; it has been caught repeatedly covering up malfeasance rather than admitting fault or fixing errors. The glitchy MCAS software that killed 346 people was kept secret from even Boeing's own test pilots:
...mentioned only once in the glossary of the plane’s 1,600-page manual, left entirely out of the 56-minute iPad refresher course that some 737-certified pilots took for MAX certification, and—in a last-minute edit—removed from the November 7 emergency airworthiness directive the Federal Aviation Administration had issued two weeks after the Lion Air crash, ostensibly to “remind” pilots of the protocol for responding to a “runaway stabilizer.”
MCAS relied on one potentially faulty stability sensor which, if it thought the plane was going into a stall - a situation made more likely by Boeing's slapdash refit of the 737 to save money - it would automatically push the aircraft's nose down, and then do it again five seconds later, and again and again, with predictably tragic results.
The long series of corner-cutting decisions to repackage an old plane with a few new parts led to bad software and flight systems that crashed two planes and grounded the fleet for a year and a half.
Boeing's response to the dual tragedies was to enlist its powerful lobbying connections to smear the dead pilots rather than admit fault:
Starting almost immediately after the Ethiopian crash, Daniel Elwell and Sam Graves, respectively the then-acting FAA chief and the ranking Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, led a coordinated campaign to blame the dead pilots for crashing the planes. The crux of their argument was that there was nothing to see here—that correct execution of the runaway stabilizer checklist would have saved all 346 lives, and that the real scandal behind the two crashes was a regime of lax foreign pilot training standards.
And it worked - the company's stock did not fall off a cliff, and as the incident faded from the collective consciousness, it went back to making shoddy planes and cutting deals to maintain its sliding market share.
So, here we are, with a company supposedly critical to air travel, propped up by huge government subsidies and business inertia, who hasn't learned a single lesson from the last time its planes suffered catastrophic failures in flight. The government can't (won't) force Boeing to change its practices or increase safety spending and training because jobs, patriotism, et cetera. We talk a lot around these parts about how the primary American contribution to any industry is making it worse and somehow more expensive. Seen through that lens, Boeing is about as American as it gets.
23andMe
If you are a celebrated tech founder, waking up at 4am to post Instagram Stories of yourself reading the WSJ on the Peloton, you probably do not want to read a headline with the words 'Fall From $6 Billion to Nearly $0' in said publication. Even worse would be if your company's name preceded those words. So I imagine Wednesday morning was tough for Anne Wojcicki, founder of genetic testing company 23andMe.
Not long ago, she was a darling of the tech press:
Forbes anointed Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe’s chief executive and a Silicon Valley celebrity, as the “newest self-made billionaire.”
Is there a surer indicator of impending scandal, bankruptcy, or federal indictment than Forbes minting you a paper billionaire?
23andMe went public in 2021, and was briefly worth a paper $6 billion dollars. Now its stock has dropped 98% and is in danger of being delisted from the NASDAQ. What happened?
The WSJ details a core, uh, problem with the company's business model:
At the center of 23andMe’s DNA-testing business are two fundamental challenges. Customers only need to take the test once, and few test-takers get life-altering health results.
Right, yep. That tracks. Competitor Ancestry.com claims it's making a bunch of money because it offers services in addition to simple genetic testing - the value proposition lies in helping you discover or expand your family tree. This seems like a more sustainable, reasonable pitch than...whatever 23andMe is selling.
What are they selling, exactly? Like many people, I've heard of the company and their home DNA tests, but that's where my knowledge ends. It turns out that yes, for years it's been selling a DNA test it claimed could help people gain insights into their health, which the FDA wasn't initially wild about:
The company’s first national advertising campaign a few months later caught the eye of the Food and Drug Administration, which halted sales of the health test, citing a risk of false reports. 23andMe had taken a cavalier approach to regulation, typical of Silicon Valley, and hadn’t gotten FDA authorization to market its test.
Two years and many millions in investor cash later, the test hit the market (legally), and was a viral sensation. But, again, selling a $99 DNA test a person only needs to take once has a ceiling of, well, whatever the maximum number of people who want to take a DNA test is, and that's not the kind of business you spend a billion dollars building.
To maintain the growth narrative for investors, Wojcicki built out a 150-person 'drug development' team to partner with pharma companies and leverage insights from it's vast DNA sample database. But drug development is slow and costly, and none of the company's work has yet shown results.
How did the company raise so much money for DNA tests without a viable long term strategy? Well, Wojcicki grew up in Silicon Valley, went to Yale, and (importantly) married Google founder Sergey Brin. From that point her story veers fully into cliché - she forced out her scientist co-founder in a board coup, befriended and received investments from a gaggle of celebrities and financiers, relocated to huge offices with yoga and meditation classes, and - wait for it - went public via SPAC in 2021.
And now, like so many other unicorns, reality has come crashing in, and everyone is finally asking the questions they should have asked before investing in the first place. Wojcicki had the right DNA to raise gobs of cash, but couldn't evolve her business model fast enough to keep up with natural selection (sorry). These celebrity founder stories may not rhyme, but they sample one another in a way that would do Kool Herc proud.
Taking Ls
Let's wrap up this week with some good news, shall we? Donald Trump has posted his way into an $83 million dollar jury verdict in a defamation trial. To boot, he cannot easily use his tried-and-true technique of simply appealing every ruling against him to endlessly delay proceedings - the nature of the ruling may force him to pay up or risk Carroll seizing his assets. Has a man ever taken this big an L for refusing to shut the fuck up?
Maybe! There may not be a direct link between Elon Musk's antagonism towards a Delaware judge during his Twitter purchase debacle and her ruling this week that his $55 billion Tesla compensation package was too big, but we can certainly speculate. The country's other most insufferable man took a world historic L, with around a third of his current net worth in limbo as Tesla scrambles to either appeal the verdict or put together a new, more acceptable bonus package for its Technoking.
We don't often see our most powerful held accountable, but it's becoming a a trend, and we can enjoy that while it lasts.
Short Cons
AP - "When IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel met privately with senators recently, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee asked for his assessment of a startling report: A whistleblower estimated that 95% of claims now being made by businesses for a COVID-era tax break were fraudulent."
Futurism - "Following disappointing quarterly earnings results by Microsoft and Google owner Alphabet, Reuters reports that AI-related companies lost a whopping $190 billion in stock market value."
The Guardian - "Claims that Icon of the Seas, the vast new ship described as ‘human lasagne’, runs on clean fuel have been labelled greenwashing as LNG’s methane emissions are a more potent climate gas than CO2."
NYT - "A giant Brazilian meatpacking company is facing persistent opposition to its plans for a listing on the New York Stock Exchange because of concerns about corruption settlements, accusations of Amazon deforestation and its growing market share in the United States."
The City - "Three contributors to Mayor Eric Adams’ 2025 re-election campaign recounted in interviews in the past month how they — and in two cases their spouses — were reimbursed for a total of more than $10,000 in donations by hotel and construction executives in violation of state law."
404 Media - "The ad is actually part of a network of fake Instagram profiles that, by promising valuable investment advice and huge returns, funnels users to groups on WhatsApp, which is also owned by Meta. These groups then ask users to share their Cash App accounts or investment accounts, and make certain buys or transfers."
Variety - "Warner Bros. Discovery probably won’t see a transformative M&A deal this year — and given negative trends in its TV and streaming businesses, Wells Fargo analysts issued a downgrade on the media conglomerate’s stock."
Know someone thinking of going to prison for the job opportunities? Send them HERE.