After facing public scrutiny for the use of prison labor, a supplier to the South Korean automaker Hyundai said it had dismissed dozens of incarcerated men it had employed through the Alabama Department of Corrections and ended its inmate labor contract with the state.
The supplier, Ju-Young, ended the contract weeks after The New York Times published an article about the company’s involvement in the state’s expansive prison labor system. Prison labor is facing increased legal challenges in state and federal courts after Alabama changed its constitution in 2022 to more broadly ban “involuntary servitude,” removing a previous exception for those convicted of crimes.
“The contract with A.D.O.C. has been terminated,” a Ju-Young official, Eunjung Lee, said in an email. “We are not sure yet if we will be resuming work with A.D.O.C.”
Incarcerated men being held at a correctional facility said they had been informed by local managers at Ju-Young plants in early November that the attention brought to the firm by The Times report was unwelcome, according to affidavits from several workers collected by a nonprofit labor group that is considering filing a legal challenge to the firings. They were told that executives would begin letting people go that month until all imprisoned workers could be replaced.
A spokeswoman for the Alabama Department of Corrections did not respond to requests for comment.
Officials at Jobs to Move America, the labor group that has been working with many of the prisoners, said 32 men were fired. Of those, at least 20 have been reassigned to other work-release jobs, the group said.
The supplier code of conduct at Hyundai dictates that suppliers should not manufacture “directly or indirectly, with the use of forced labor.” A Hyundai spokesman declined to say whether the company had determined that Ju-Young, which makes fenders for the automaker, was in violation of that code or whether the labor of Alabama prisoners constituted “forced labor.”
“Hyundai is not involved in individual hiring decisions by independent suppliers,” the spokesman said. He added, “Hyundai requires all of its suppliers to follow the law and its supplier code of conduct, and we have a track record of taking action when we learn of alleged violations.”
The prison labor program in Alabama — in which thousands of prisoners are sent to work for private businesses and risk disciplinary action if they refuse — has faced criticism from labor activists and some lawyers who say the system is a modern form of the “convict-leasing” forced labor programs of the Jim Crow era.
After factoring in the 40 percent cut that the Alabama prison system takes from workers’ paychecks, taxes and deductions for laundry and transportation fees, inmates often collect just a few dollars an hour. (Prison work done for state entities is often done without payment, or at a rate of $2 an hour.)
The prisoners themselves often expressed mixed feelings about their jobs. In interviews this year with The Times, some men who worked at Ju-Young said they felt that they had no choice but to agree to take and stay on jobs that might be dangerous or hard. But most were also relieved to be working and earning a paycheck outside prison walls, often alongside free citizens.
Labor organizers — who would prefer the prison labor system be reformed rather than scrapped — largely do not view the firings at the Hyundai supplier as a victory.
After learning of them, “the first feeling we felt was devastation,” said Haeden Wright, an organizer at Jobs to Move America. “They depend on those jobs, to be safe from less safe parts of the system,” she added, referring to the state’s medium- and high-security prisons. Separately, the U.S. Justice Department is suing the Alabama Department of Corrections, accusing it of unsafe, violent conditions in those facilities.
According to a copy of the employer agreement contract between the Alabama Department of Corrections and Ju-Young signed in November 2021 that was obtained by the The Times, the firm said it would “comply with applicable requirements established by the Fair Labor Standards Act.”
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