Thursday, May 28, 2015

Say “Cheese!” — Whole Foods cheese made by prison labor

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Whole Foods shoppers who imagine that their expensive artisanal cheese is made on a quaint rural farm by happy workers may be surprised to discover that the cheese is really made by prison inmates. According to Fortune, Colorado cheese maker Haystack Mountain gets their milk from a goat farm run by Colorado Corrections Industries (CCI), where 1,000 goats are milked by six inmates twice a day. This is becoming a commonplace practice, as “nationwide 63,032 inmates produce more than $2 billion worth of products a year,” according to Forbes.
And it’s not just license plates that are being made in prison. Today, inmates “produce apple juice, raise tilapia, milk cows and goats, grow flowers, and manage vineyards.” CCI pays only 60 cents per hour for the inmates’ labor, although some manage to earn a whopping $3-400 a month.
Wow! [UPDATE: The mass appeal article (from which I originally quoted) misquoted Fortune. The original article says the inmates make only 60 cents PER DAY, not per hour!
Americans (on the outside) can’t possibly compete with that. In the near future, prison will be the only way Americans can keep a roof over their heads and have some job “security.”]
I won’t be buying anything from “Whole Foods” again. Not the wholesome establishment it claims to be.

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