Even Private Prisons Must Obey The Law
A Federal Court ruled that the NWDC must pay at least a minimum wage to inmates who work on site. This is a victory, not only for the worker inmates, but for all of Tacoma’s low-wage workers who fight for economic justice.
Seattle Times staff writer Mike Carter reported on the story on May 13. This story tells us that Federal Judge Robert Bryan has just ruled Tacoma’s Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) must pay state minimum wage to worker inmates. In other words, NWDC can no longer get away with paying only $1/day to these locked-up workers.
What NWDC Has Been Doing
The NWDC has been paying inmates $1/day for such necessary tasks as janitorial work or kitchen work.
The NWDC lawyers have engaged in a lot of legal gobbledygook to justify paying these slave-labor wages to inmate workers. But the judge’s ruling strips away the corporate lawyers’ legalistic excuses, thus exposing NWDC’s corporate naked greed, pure and simple. No longer can NWDC commit wage theft against these desperate prisoners who fled here to escape intolerable conditions in their homeland.
What Is The NWDC?
The NWDC is a private prison-like institution under contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. It makes huge profits from both locking up undocumented workers and exploiting their captive status by underpaying them.
NWDC is owned by something called the GEO Group. The GEO Group runs a number of private prisons and similar facilities around the world, including North America, South Africa, Australia, and the United Kingdom, according to Wikipedia. They have faced charges of widespread prisoner mistreatment. There are accounts of riots, lawsuits, investigations, and even deaths.
A Victory for All Tacoma Workers
Federal Judge Robert Bryan’s ruling represents a big win for Tacoma’s working class and immigrant rights activists. Until now, NWDC has avoided the requirement of needing to pay many workers a minimum wage, let alone a living wage. If this judge’s ruling stands, this will be a huge victory for all low-wage workers and allies in Tacoma.
La Resistencia wrote the following observation about this article on their Facebook page, and we are adding it here as a correction to some details. For more about La Resistencia, click here.
La Resistencia Not quite. The ruling is part of a lawsuit against Geo for not paying the minimum wage at nwdc to people detained. The ruling says Geo must submit their financial statements to the Attorney General. Geo didn’t want to do it. Now they must. There will be a trial in September when we hope the judge rule against Geo. Then we can declare victory. Thank you for following up on this.