Category Archives: Wage Slavery

Photo courtesy of Push Green.

BUFFALO, NY Juneteenth, the mid-June holiday that commemorates the day in 1865 on which enslaved people of African descent in Galveston, Texas learned they had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier, has been growing in popularity. Buffalo, New York now hosts the third largest Juneteenth Festival in the nation, and the largest on the eastern seaboard. Filling Martin Luther King Park June 17 with a procession of music, drumming, and dance, the 2017 celebrations were jubilant. The smell of smoked foods swirled through the park as stands displayed traditional African-American clothing and handicrafts alongside various community organizations.

The holidays history is a bittersweet one. Led by the laboring base of the Southern economy, the revolution that won the Civil War established a Reconstruction of the South. Historian Eric Foner has called the Reconstruction period Americas unfinished revolution, because it was cut short with a counter-revolution: Jim Crow.

The system of convict leasing, which Pulitzer-Prize winning author and journalist Douglas Blackmon calls slavery by another name, also persisted into the twentieth century; todays version of subminimum-wage labor in prisons is its direct descendant.

In Buffalo, the celebration and parade included many labor groups including: New York State Nurses Association; Communications Workers of America Local 1168, the Buffalo Teachers Federation; the United Auto Workers Local 774, 897, and Region 9; and AFSCME D.C. 35 .

Also participating in the festival were the Young Black Democrats of Western New York, and open Buffalo, an organization which helps coordinate organizations and coalitions struggling for a more democratic Buffalo, including People United for Fair Housing (PUSH), Coalition for Economic Justice (CEJ), Prisoners Are People Too, Erie County Restorative Justice Coalition, VOICE-Buffalo, and others. Leaders of Community Voices Heard (CVH) were also represented in the CPUSA contingent.

Stacy Fernandez of the Buffalo News also noted an increased police presence at the festival this year.

The Young Black Democrats of WNY alerted festival participants of the need to vote for Bernie Tolbert for Erie County Sheriff. Tolbert is running to replace Timothy B. Howard. Under Howards watch, many people have reportedly died in jail while waiting for trial, the use of devices known as Stingrays have been used to tap peoples cell phones, and Howard himself spoke at a Trump rally with people holding the Confederate flag behind him.

The Community Voices Heard members, together with members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), highlighted another piece of slaverys legacy: forced labor in the Work Exchange Program (WEP).

Put into place by the Clinton administration in 1996, WEP required people on public assistance to work without pay. Public workers received rewards for connecting people to poverty wage jobs at places like McDonalds, and after the six month period of working for free, public benefits recipients were frequently fired. Disproportionately affecting racially and nationally oppressed people, the work-for-free program resulted in a spike in homelessness in New York City, and was finally ended by a CVH-led campaign and a progressive Mayor, City Council, and Human Resources Commissioner at the end of 2016. However, a similar program called WeCare persists, and what appears to be a lack of communication between HRA and the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) has resulted in outcomes similar to those that followed WEP.

Continued here:

Jubilant crowds, union members gather at Buffalo's Juneteenth celebration - People's World

A family of human trafficking victims was discovered cowering under tarpaulin in a Derbyshire field, drinking rainwater from a rusty can to survive.

It is just one example of the disturbing crime revealed by police, who say they have dealt with nearly 300 reports of suspected human trafficking in the last few months in Derbyshire.

In Derby, other victims were found being paid a wage of 33p an hour while being plied with cheap vodka.

Now police have issued a list of tell-tale signs of trafficking victims and asked the public to help spot them. They say "modern slaves" have been found working in prostitution, nail bars, car washes and the building trade but officers say it could be any area of work.

They say trafficking victims can be refugees in the country illegally, and therefore reluctant or unable to approach authorities for help when exploit. They could also be people who come here for legitimate work but then lose that job and fall on hard times, becoming susceptible to criminal.

Or they could even be people born here who become vulnerable when they suffer a life crisis. Traffickers keep a hold on their victims by threatening to tell authorities if a person is here illegally, or even taking away their passports or documentation.

They also use physical or mental violence to intimidate workers into doing what they want, often paying them a pittance and forcing them to live in squalid and cramped conditions.

Detective Sergeant Gareth Smethem, from Derbyshire police, said the force needed the help of the public. He said: "This is a crime which the public can really be on board with us on. When you go to a car wash, have a look at the demeanour and attitude of the people there.

"I want to be clear not all car washes are going to be like this. But some will. If you see people looking down, tired and scared, that could be a sign. Please let us know.

"They may look withdrawn or scruffy. If there's something there that does not seem right, then please tell us.

"If you have work done at your house and an English-speaking man arrives but the work is being carried out by reserved foreign nationals who speak little English, that is a warning sign - especially if the English speaking man comes and collects the money at the end. If you see anything suspicious, please let us know."

Detective Sergeant Smethem is part of a new Derbyshire unit - Operation Wilberforce - established by the force to find the true scale of the problem. Wilberforce officers say they have their eyes open" but have no no idea" of the true scale of the problem they face.

The team was formed in March and Detective Chief Inspector Paul Tatlow, who oversees the operation, said it had been contacted 296 times since then by people concerned that human trafficking and modern-day slavery was taking place.

Detective Constable Andy Hulland said the most shocking example the team had come across was a family who had been trafficked twice.

He said: We got a call from a member of the public to say they were concerned about people in a field in Derbyshire who were living under a tarpaulin. We got there and established they had no money. They were collecting rain water in a rusty can to drink. They spoke no English and that's the situation they dealt with.

We established that they had been trafficked twice in the UK and had just been dumped. We have worked with other agencies to get them some food and somewhere secure to live in the county. It's all about identifying the victims and then getting them the help and support they need.

We've come across victims in Derby who were being forced to work long hours for just 33p per hour. They were being given cheap vodka as well as a reward.

These are the abhorrent crimes we're coming across. They are preying on the weak all of the time. The work we do is really rewarding."

Derbyshire hit the headlines back in 2013 with Operation Atwood, which saw the jailing of two Slovakian brothers for seven years and eight months for trafficking people from their own country into Derby. Twelve victims were identified and it was revealed in court they were made to work in car washes and factories and only received a small amount of their real earnings.

Mr Tatlow said: Operation Atwood was the first time we'd come across more than one person being exploited for money. Since then, we have started to become more and more aware of it. Operation Wilberforce is the first line of help for anybody we find. We want to work out what the size of the problem is we face and then the impact of that.

Our ultimate goal is to stop people from being exploited. We want to get people out of the vicious cycle they find themselves in. Some of them do not know they are being exploited. There are people that are in these relationships and they do know they are victims but what they are involved in is better than back in their own country. They are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Which is better? This can affect all parts of society."

He said that, after Operation Atwood, the force's organised crime teams tackled modern day slavery but now the new unit has been set up to deal with it and identify potential victims rather than waiting for it to happen and then deal with it. Mr Tatlow added: This is a real change in our ethos. We're now going out to try and find it."

One of the challenge they face is that not all victims see themselves as such.

Mr Tatlow said: "It's very complex. Although the fact we've had 296 people get in contact it is still vastly under-reported.

"One thing that's important to get across is this is not always nail bars and car washes. It could be farmers getting someone in to help and not paying them what they should and not treating them right. It could be in Normanton, Derby city centre or the suburbs.

"We used to associate slavery with something happening hundreds of years ago on ships. It's very different now."

If anyone has concerns about human trafficking, they should call police on 101.

Read more here:

Family found living off rainwater from rusty can in a Derbyshire field - Derby Telegraph

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

When activist Sam Sinyangwe was awaiting a meeting with the governors office at the Louisiana state capitol building in Baton Rouge, he noticed something odd.A black man in a dark-blue jumpsuit was printing papers while a correctional guardwith a badge and gunstood watching over him. The pair stood out against the white, middle-aged legislators populating the building.

Sinyangwe said he did not know exactly what he was looking at, until he saw another black man in the same dark-blue outfit serving food at the capitol buildings cafeteria. This time, Sinyangwe noticed that the man had a patch on his chest labeling him a prisoner of the Louisiana State Department of Corrections, complete with an identification number.

Sinyangwe realized that the server, the man printing papers and the other people working in the lunch line were all prisoners.

Inmates working at the capitol building in Baton Rouge is a common sight. Prisoners work in the Louisiana governors mansion and inmates clean up after Louisiana State University football games as well. But the labor practice of having inmates work in state government buildings extends beyond Louisiana; at least six other states in the U.S. allow for this practice: Arkansas, Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Georgia.

The inmates allowed to work in the capitol or at the governors mansion are fairly low in number and are carefully screened. According to NOLA.com, about 20 to 25 people work daily in the capitol, and 15 to 18 other inmates work as groundskeepers outside the building. The inmates may not be serving a sentence for a sex crime or a violent offense like murder and must have a history of good behavior while incarcerated and display good work ethic. Furthermore, only inmates at the Dixon Correctional Institute (a men-only facility) can work at the capitol, as it is only 30 miles away.

A similar process occurs in Georgia, where inmates must receive a referral from the Board of Pardons of Parole or the Classification Committee within a state prison. Working at the governors mansion in Georgia is contingent upon an inmates criminal history, their behavior while incarcerated and their release date, among other factors.

The inmates perform janitorial tasks such as cleaning the floors or the offices of state legislators. In the Louisiana capitol, inmates also perform small tasks for legislators like grabbing lunch for them.

While inmates working in state government buildings are dutifully screened, they are not much better paid than prisoners with other jobs. In Louisiana, inmates in the capitol are paid between 2 and 20 cents per hour. They could opt for earning good-time credit toward early release, but only if they qualify. And with a normal workday of at least 12 hoursfrom 5 in the morning to at least 5 in the afternoon, barring legislative sessions when inmates work more than 12 hoursthe prisoners make between 24 cents and $2.40 a day. Inmates working in the governors mansion in Missouri recently got a small pay raise to $1.25 an hour to make about $10 per day. With the previous arrangement, prisoners earned $9 a day. In Arkansas, the prisoners are not paid at all.

History of the practice

The practice of using prison inmates as laborers stretches back to the end of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. As more black people were freed from slavery, the plantation economy of the South began to falter with the loss of their primary form of labor. The result was the establishment of vagrancy laws, which specifically targeted black communities, in an effort to incarcerate more black people and force them to work once again.

Even the name given to prisoners who work as servants in governors mansions and capitol buildings in some statestrusteeis the same title that was given to prisoners who worked as overseers on infamous prison plantations such as Angola and Parchman. Prison plantations began replacing the convict lease system in the 1920s as a way for prisoners, an overwhelming majority of whom were black men, to work. Back then, it was considered a privilege to be an overseer on a plantation, and the same narrative goes for inmates working in governors mansions today.

All of this, it looks very familiar: having black laborers toiling in the fields under the eye of overseers and having a white governor served by people drawn from that same forced labor pool, said Carl Takei, a staff attorney at the National Prison Project of the ACLU.

Since then, prisoners have been used as underpaid and unpaid laborers, from private companies to state government buildings. The legal loophole that allows this practice to continue is the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. While the 13th Amendment is best known for abolishing slavery, a clause in the amendment stipulates for the continued legality of slavery within the criminal justice system.

The clause reads: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

If somebody is being subjected to forced labor as part of their sentence in a criminal proceeding, then that is outside the scope of the 13th Amendment, Takei said.

Modern-day slavery?

Hillary Clinton made waves for a passage in her 1996 book It Takes A Villagewhen a Twitter userposted photosof a passage in the memoir where Clinton talks about the prisoners who worked in the governors mansion. The passage quickly spread through social media, with many people criticizing Clinton and calling the practice a form of modern-day slavery.

Both Sinyangwe and Takei agree that the current system is exploitative in that inmates who work are barely paid.

When you lock people up and force them to work without providing them a fair wage, thats called slavery, Takei said.

Despite scrutiny from criminal justice advocates, many corrections departments in states that still use this practice have justified it on the grounds that having inmates work reduces recidivism rates and is more beneficial to them overall.

Joseph Nix, director of executive security at the governors mansion in Mississippi, told the Los Angeles Times in 1988 that the inmates tend to make the best workers.

George Lombardi, the Missouri Department of Corrections director, defended the departments work release program, in which one of the jobs includes working at the governors mansion. About 700 of the 30,000 inmates in the states prison system are part of the work release program.

Lombardi told Missourinet the program instills great work ethic, pride, self-esteem and compassion in offenders.

It really cuts to the core philosophy of our department, which is in addition to the time you have to serve, you have another obligation to help your community if possible, Lombardi said. So we present you with opportunities to do that in the form of work release and/or our restorative justice efforts that we have throughout the system.

Paula Earls, executive director of the governors mansion in Missouri, told the Los Angeles Timesin 1998that there have been no problems with inmates and touted the benefits of having inmates work at the mansion.

Were their last leg before they get out to society, she said. I treat them like staff. I appreciate the work they do. They are ready to go back out and make something of themselves and we hope we help with that.

Sinyangwe said these justifications for using inmate labor share similarities with the justifications people used for slaverythat it helped civilize black slaves and increased their work ethic.

When you read the history books about the Antebellum South, those are the same arguments being used, he said. So Im not persuaded by them. I dont think theyre original or new.

Arguments that inmate labor can prepare prisoners for integrating into the outside world once they are released also lose weight because of how difficult it is for former prisoners even to get a job to begin with. The hiring practice of asking applicants to indicate their criminal history on job applications has a harmful effect on ex-convicts, as they are less likely to get called back. These results skew along racial lines, as a study by Harvard sociologist Devah Pager found that only 5 percent of black men with a criminal conviction hear back from potential employers. The research also showed that black men with no criminal convictions are less likely to get hired than white men with criminal convictions14 percent for black men with no record compared to 17 percent of white men with a criminal record.

Wendy Sawyer, a policy analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative, said a larger issue than recidivism are the economic and racial barriers inmates face once they are released.

Everyones upset about recidivism rates, and its all about trying to keep people out once theyre out, she said. But then we make it as impossible as we can for that to work for people.We set up all these barriers that make it difficult for people to get their lives back together.

Arguments about recidivism and psychological benefits aside, another factor driving this practice is its cost-cutting benefits for the state. Because inmates are severely underpaid or not paid at all for their work, the state saves money on every prisoner working in the capitol or the governors mansion by not having to shell out the minimum wage to compensate them. This was the case in Louisiana when inmates began working in the capitol in 1990, as the state was experiencing a financial crisis. Inmates working at the governors mansion were also employed as a cost-saving measure.

Takei said these arguments made to justify the practice do not excuse the fact that it is a deeply exploitative system.

The fact that performing particular tasks may be part of a rehabilitation strategy doesnt excuse the fact that the people in these positions are denied a fair wage and the labor protections they would be entitled to if they were performing the same work on the outside, he said.

Sawyer noted that the greater underlying problem is that the prison system in the U.S. is hardly rehabilitative. Its really just punitive, she said. Its just people sitting there, kind of locked out of society.

Remembering the big picture

While the practice of using inmate labor in capitol buildings and governors mansions largely stays under the radar, it speaks to a larger issue in the prison labor system. As a whole, inmates who work while incarcerated, whether for a private company, for the state or even within the prison, make little to no money. This is despite the fact that in federal prisons, 100 percent of able-bodied inmates are required to work, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. In addition, the average rate of minimum wage for inmates paid by the state is 93 cents, while the average maximum wage is $4.73.

Takei said prisoners working in the governors mansion or the capitol building are caught between a rock and a hard place.

If your choice is between getting paid zero dollars an hour or being paid 25 cents an hour, oftentimes youll choose 25 cents an hour because you need that money, he said.

Sinyangwe said that at the very least, prisoners who are working should get paid a minimum wage for their labor. He noted that reducing recidivism rates could be better accomplished if prisoners earned an adequate wage and could either save the money or spend the money while incarcerated on services like calling family members or buying commissary items. He added that in states like Louisianaone of the poorest states in the countryfamilies of inmates are often financially struggling and shoulder many of the costs their family member incurs while in prison.

I think it would be incredibly impactful to reduce the recidivism rates by making sure that when people get out of jail, they actually have money to actually start a life, he said. That they are not forced to go back into the informal economy or committing crimes just to make a living.

Takei echoed this sentiment. I doubt that if you talk to any of the people who are working as servants in the governors mansion that they would object to the idea of actually being paid a fair wage for their work, he said.

Takei acknowledged that reforming the prison labor system would be difficult, given the precedent set by the 13th Amendment that legalizes this form of modern-day slavery. A number of courts around the country have also affirmed that prisoners arenot protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act or the National Labor Relations Act.

There is also the complacency of state legislators and governors who interact with these inmates every day, but have not taken any action to better their circumstances.

These were the legislators who had the power to change those dynamics, and yet who are benefiting by preserving them, Sinyangwe said.

Sawyer added that the issue has become a missed opportunity for progressives in particular to draw more attention to a practice that is essentially hiding in plain sight.

Theyre in the state buildings. Theyre in our places of government, she said. And were accepting that thats how this countrys going to be.Our state governments are going to benefit from that kind of labor. It feels like kind of a passive acceptance.

Since witnessing the inmates working in the Baton Rouge capitol building, Sam Sinyangwe said he has been looking at methods of reform, whether that involves administrative regulation, a legislative change or even a constitutional amendment to revise the loophole in the 13th Amendment. But he has not lost sight of the broader goal: ending mass incarceration.

What I would like to see, one, is that we are moving to end mass incarceration, he said, to repeal the policies and the draconian sentencing laws that got us to this place.

Celisa Calacal is a junior writing fellow for AlterNet. She is a senior journalism major and legal studies minor at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. Previously she worked at ThinkProgress and served as an editor for Ithaca Colleges student newspaper.Follow her at @celisa_mia.

This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.

See original here:

'Modern-Day Slavery': Many Southern States Have Prison Inmates Working In Governor's Mansions And Capitol ... - The National Memo (blog)

Photo Credit: Sean Pavone/Shutterstock

When activist Sam Sinyangwe was awaiting a meeting with the governors office at the Louisiana state capitol building in Baton Rouge, he noticed something odd.A black man in a dark-blue jumpsuit was printing papers while a correctional guardwith a badge and gunstood watching over him. The pair stood out against the white, middle-aged legislators populating the building.

Sinyangwe said he did not know exactly what he was looking at, until he saw another black man in the same dark-blue outfit serving food at the capitol buildings cafeteria. This time, Sinyangwe noticed that the man had a patch on his chest labeling him a prisoner of the Louisiana State Department of Corrections, complete with an identification number.

Sinyangwe realized that the server, the man printing papers and the other people working in the lunch line were all prisoners.

Inmates working at the capitol building in Baton Rouge is a common sight. Prisoners work in the Louisiana governors mansion and inmates clean up after Louisiana State University football games as well. But the labor practice of having inmates work in state government buildings extends beyond Louisiana; at least six other states in the U.S. allow for this practice: Arkansas, Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Georgia.

The inmates allowed to work in the capitol or at the governors mansion are fairly low in number and are carefully screened. According to NOLA.com, about 20 to 25 people work daily in the capitol, and 15 to 18 other inmates work as groundskeepers outside the building. The inmates may not be serving a sentence for a sex crime or a violent offense like murder and must have a history of good behavior while incarcerated and display good work ethic. Furthermore, only inmates at the Dixon Correctional Institute (a men-only facility) can work at the capitol, as it is only 30 miles away.

A similar process occurs in Georgia, where inmates must receive a referral from the Board of Pardons of Parole or the Classification Committee within a state prison. Working at the governors mansion in Georgia is contingent upon an inmates criminal history, their behavior while incarcerated and their release date, among other factors.

The inmates perform janitorial tasks such as cleaning the floors or the offices of state legislators. In the Louisiana capitol, inmates also perform small tasks for legislators like grabbing lunch for them.

While inmates working in state government buildings are dutifully screened, they are not much better paid than prisoners with other jobs. In Louisiana, inmates in the capitol are paid between 2 and 20 cents per hour. They could opt for earning good-time credit toward early release, but only if they qualify. And with a normal workday of at least 12 hoursfrom 5 in the morning to at least 5 in the afternoon, barring legislative sessions when inmates work more than 12 hoursthe prisoners make between 24 cents and $2.40 a day. Inmates working in the governors mansion in Missouri recently got a small pay raise to $1.25 an hour to make about $10 per day. With the previous arrangement, prisoners earned $9 a day. In Arkansas, the prisoners are not paid at all.

History of the practice

The practice of using prison inmates as laborers stretches back to the end of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. As more black people were freed from slavery, the plantation economy of the South began to falter with the loss of their primary form of labor. The result was the establishment of vagrancy laws, which specifically targeted black communities, in an effort to incarcerate more black people and force them to work once again.

Even the name given to prisoners who work as servants in governors mansions and capitol buildings in some statestrusteeis the same title that was given to prisoners who worked as overseers on infamous prison plantations such as Angola and Parchman. Prison plantations began replacing the convict lease system in the 1920s as a way for prisoners, an overwhelming majority of whom were black men, to work. Back then, it was considered a privilege to be an overseer on a plantation, and the same narrative goes for inmates working in governors mansions today.

All of this, it looks very familiar: having black laborers toiling in the fields under the eye of overseers and having a white governor served by people drawn from that same forced labor pool, said Carl Takei, a staff attorney at the National Prison Project of the ACLU.

Since then, prisoners have been used as underpaid and unpaid laborers, from private companies to state government buildings. The legal loophole that allows this practice to continue is the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. While the 13th Amendment is best known for abolishing slavery, a clause in the amendment stipulates for the continued legality of slavery within the criminal justice system.

The clause reads: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

If somebody is being subjected to forced labor as part of their sentence in a criminal proceeding, then that is outside the scope of the 13th Amendment, Takei said.

Modern-day slavery?

Hillary Clinton made waves for a passage in her 1996 book It Takes A Villagewhen a Twitter userposted photosof a passage in the memoir where Clinton talks about the prisoners who worked in the governors mansion. The passage quickly spread through social media, with many people criticizing Clinton and calling the practice a form of modern-day slavery.

Both Sinyangwe and Takei agree that the current system is exploitative in that inmates who work are barely paid.

When you lock people up and force them to work without providing them a fair wage, thats called slavery, Takei said.

Despite scrutiny from criminal justice advocates, many corrections departments in states that still use this practice have justified it on the grounds that having inmates work reduces recidivism rates and is more beneficial to them overall.

Joseph Nix, director of executive security at the governors mansion in Mississippi, told the Los Angeles Times in 1988 that the inmates tend to make the best workers.

George Lombardi, the Missouri Department of Corrections director, defended the departments work release program, in which one of the jobs includes working at the governors mansion. About 700 of the 30,000 inmates in the states prison system are part of the work release program.

Lombardi told Missourinet the program instills great work ethic, pride, self-esteem and compassion in offenders.

It really cuts to the core philosophy of our department, which is in addition to the time you have to serve, you have another obligation to help your community if possible, Lombardi said. So we present you with opportunities to do that in the form of work release and/or our restorative justice efforts that we have throughout the system.

Paula Earls, executive director of the governors mansion in Missouri, told the Los Angeles Timesin 1998that there have been no problems with inmates and touted the benefits of having inmates work at the mansion.

"We're their last leg before they get out to society," she said. "I treat them like staff. I appreciate the work they do. They are ready to go back out and make something of themselves and we hope we help with that."

Sinyangwe said these justifications for using inmate labor share similarities with the justifications people used for slaverythat it helped civilize black slaves and increased their work ethic.

When you read the history books about the Antebellum South, those are the same arguments being used, he said. So Im not persuaded by them. I dont think theyre original or new.

Arguments that inmate labor can prepare prisoners for integrating into the outside world once they are released also lose weight because of how difficult it is for former prisoners even to get a job to begin with. The hiring practice of asking applicants to indicate their criminal history on job applications has a harmful effect on ex-convicts, as they are less likely to get called back. These results skew along racial lines, as a study by Harvard sociologist Devah Pager found that only 5 percent of black men with a criminal conviction hear back from potential employers. The research also showed that black men with no criminal convictions are less likely to get hired than white men with criminal convictions14 percent for black men with no record compared to 17 percent of white men with a criminal record.

Wendy Sawyer, a policy analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative, said a larger issue than recidivism are the economic and racial barriers inmates face once they are released.

Everyone's upset about recidivism rates, and it's all about trying to keep people out once they're out, she said. But then we make it as impossible as we can for that to work for people....We set up all these barriers that make it difficult for people to get their lives back together.

Arguments about recidivism and psychological benefits aside, another factor driving this practice is its cost-cutting benefits for the state. Because inmates are severely underpaid or not paid at all for their work, the state saves money on every prisoner working in the capitol or the governors mansion by not having to shell out the minimum wage to compensate them. This was the case in Louisiana when inmates began working in the capitol in 1990, as the state was experiencing a financial crisis. Inmates working at the governor's mansion were also employed as a cost-saving measure.

Takei said these arguments made to justify the practice do not excuse the fact that it is a deeply exploitative system.

The fact that performing particular tasks may be part of a rehabilitation strategy doesnt excuse the fact that the people in these positions are denied a fair wage and the labor protections they would be entitled to if they were performing the same work on the outside, he said.

Sawyer noted that the greater underlying problem is that the prison system in the U.S. is hardly rehabilitative. It's really just punitive, she said. It's just people sitting there, kind of locked out of society.

Remembering the big picture

While the practice of using inmate labor in capitol buildings and governors mansions largely stays under the radar, it speaks to a larger issue in the prison labor system. As a whole, inmates who work while incarcerated, whether for a private company, for the state or even within the prison, make little to no money. This is despite the fact that in federal prisons, 100 percent of able-bodied inmates are required to work, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. In addition, the average rate of minimum wage for inmates paid by the state is 93 cents, while the average maximum wage is $4.73.

Takei said prisoners working in the governors mansion or the capitol building are caught between a rock and a hard place.

If your choice is between getting paid zero dollars an hour or being paid 25 cents an hour, oftentimes youll choose 25 cents an hour because you need that money, he said.

Sinyangwe said that at the very least, prisoners who are working should get paid a minimum wage for their labor. He noted that reducing recidivism rates could be better accomplished if prisoners earned an adequate wage and could either save the money or spend the money while incarcerated on services like calling family members or buying commissary items. He added that in states like Louisianaone of the poorest states in the countryfamilies of inmates are often financially struggling and shoulder many of the costs their family member incurs while in prison.

I think it would be incredibly impactful to reduce the recidivism rates by making sure that when people get out of jail, they actually have money to actually start a life, he said. That they are not forced to go back into the informal economy or committing crimes just to make a living.

Takei echoed this sentiment. I doubt that if you talk to any of the people who are working as servants in the governors mansion that they would object to the idea of actually being paid a fair wage for their work, he said.

Takei acknowledged that reforming the prison labor system would be difficult, given the precedent set by the 13th Amendment that legalizes this form of modern-day slavery. A number of courts around the country have also affirmed that prisoners arenot protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act or the National Labor Relations Act.

There is also the complacency of state legislators and governors who interact with these inmates every day, but have not taken any action to better their circumstances.

These were the legislators who had the power to change those dynamics, and yet who are benefiting by preserving them, Sinyangwe said.

Sawyer added that the issue has become a missed opportunity for progressives in particular to draw more attention to a practice that is essentially hiding in plain sight.

They're in the state buildings. They're in our places of government, she said. And we're accepting that that's how this country's going to be.Our state governments are going to benefit from that kind of labor. It feels like kind of a passive acceptance.

Since witnessing the inmates working in the Baton Rouge capitol building, Sam Sinyangwe said he has been looking at methods of reform, whether that involves administrative regulation, a legislative change or even a constitutional amendment to revise the loophole in the 13th Amendment. But he has not lost sight of the broader goal: ending mass incarceration.

What I would like to see, one, is that we are moving to end mass incarceration, he said, to repeal the policies and the draconian sentencing laws that got us to this place.

Celisa Calacal is a junior writing fellow for AlterNet. She is a senior journalism major and legal studies minor at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. Previously she worked at ThinkProgress and served as an editor for Ithaca College's student newspaper.Follow her at @celisa_mia.

Read the rest here:

'Modern-Day Slavery': Many Southern States Have Prison Inmates Working in Governor's Mansions and Capitol Buildings - AlterNet

By Margaret Kimberley

The United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) recently convened its fourth national conference in Richmond, Virginia. The organizations that comprise this coalition are unwavering in their determination to fight for peace and justice. Opposing the wars at home and abroad is their standard for action.

Virginia is an ironic location for a group whose goal was to unite anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberalism and anti-racist forces. If the United States is the belly of the beast, Virginia must be the inner lining. It is the place where the settler colonial project began. Romanticized tales of Pocahantas hide an ugly story of genocide committed against the indigenous population. Virginia was the place where the first enslaved Africans arrived in 1619. In time it became known as the slave breeding state and Richmond was the capital of the confederacy. Yet in 2017 three hundred people gathered there to fight against this legacy that brings so much suffering to humanity.

Black Agenda Report is a UNAC member organization and this columnist is an Administrative Committee member. The connection between the two groups is a natural one. While other so-called peace groups are tied to the Democrats and ebb and flow with that partys fortunes, UNAC is independent of the duopoly. It does not change its organizing principles based on who controls Congress or who sits in the White House Oval Office. Those distinctions are artificial and the system is no less rapacious if there is a change in Republican or Democratic party control.

The nature of the American capitalist system requires that every country become either a vassal or an enemy. It gives us the rule of billionaires. The U.S created a mass incarceration system for the sole purpose of crushing the black liberation movement while also creating a profit center in the process.

All of the oppressions are intertwined. Millions of Americans toil under wage slavery or prison slavery and make fortunes for other people. But the contradictions of capitalism are growing more acute, and imperialist war is the outcome of a system trying to maintain itself. The fight for a living minimum wage and the fight against interventions abroad must therefore be addressed together because they are in fact part of a whole.

The UNAC conference also presented an opportunity to renew the African American-centered peace movement. The newly formed Black Alliance for Peace was very much present with leadership such as Black Agenda Report editor Ajamu Baraka playing key roles. Charo Mina-Rojas spoke about the struggle waged by black Colombians in the Buenaventura region of that country. Lawrence Hamm of the Peoples Organization for Progress linked the history of mass rebellion with the fight against police violence.

Barack Obamas presidency created a rupture in the black American radical tradition. The end of his administration creates an opportunity to rekindle that proud legacy, and to reject the politics of intervention and mass death that emanates from every American presidential administration.

UNAC organizations know that the imperialist project is bipartisan. Barack Obama began the war for regime change in Syria and Donald Trump, despite making claims to the contrary, continues it. The need to expose the American effort to dominate the world continued even as UNAC members met. While speakers pointed to the dangers that America inflicts upon the world, the United States government shot down a Syrian jet and increased the risk of conflict with Russia.

Attendees came from 29 states and from Hungary, Colombia, Ukraine, the Philippines, Serbia, Syria, Palestine and Canada. Every region of the world has been impacted by the drive for American hegemony. The fight against aggression must therefore be waged internationally. Foreign policy is not some rarified realm that can only be addressed by the self-appointed experts who have brought the world to the brink. The people who fight for a living wage or against police murder in this country must also speak to this governments assaults on human rights and sovereignty around the world.

The unity of all these struggles was made clear on the last morning of the conference. Ana Edwards led a march to Shockoe Bottom, the location of a cemetery for enslaved people and the site of one of the largest slave markets in the country. She and other activists from the Virginia Defenders for Peace, Justice and Equality have struggled to preserve the site as a memorial park and protect it from commercial so-called development.

The trip to Shockoe Bottom brought the conference full circle. Racism, supremacist war and predatory capitalism were perfected in Virginia and the people who want to change it paid homage to the first victims. We say, Power to the people but if we mean it we must say clearly who our enemies are and confront them at every opportunity.

The time is ripe for change. Some of that change will be forced upon us, but some of it must be created. That is why UNAC is so important. It is committed to creating the conditions which may make the beast and its belly a thing of the past.

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UNAC Brings Power To The People OpEd - Eurasia Review

DENVER Every day, immigrants are told to clean their living areas in a privately run Colorado detention center or risk being put in solitary confinement. Some also volunteer to do jobs as varied as landscaping, more cleaning and cutting other inmates hair, but the pay is always the same $1 a day.

A group of former detainees says the system borders on modern-day slavery. They are challenging it in federal court and have won the right to sue the Denver-area detention centers operator on behalf of an estimated 60,000 people held there over a decade.

The former detainees allege the GEO Group is exploiting people in the 1,500-bed center to keep it operating with just one full-time janitor. The company reported $2.2 billion in revenue and had nearly $163 million in adjusted net income last year.

The case could have broad consequences for the private prison industry, which hopes to cash in on demand for more detention space as the Trump administration cracks down on illegal immigration.

Immigration detention centers are roughly the equivalent of jails in the criminal justice system places where people accused of civil violations of immigration law wait until their cases are resolved. While people convicted of crimes and serving time in prison are often required to work, those held in the nations jails generally cannot be forced to work because they have not been convicted, according to the U.S. Justice Departments National Institute of Corrections.

Courts view immigration detention not as punishment but as a way to keep people from fleeing, said Kathleen Kim, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who specializes in immigration law. Forcing detainees to work violates the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery and bars involuntary servitude except for punishment of a crime, she said.

Financially, this model of operating these facilities very much depends on the labor of the people detained there, said an attorney for the Colorado detainees, Andrew Free, of Nashville, Tenn.

GEO says it is only following government policies and wants an appeals court to block the case from proceeding on behalf of everyone held from 2004 and 2014, noting class-action status could lead to additional claims against similar companies.

Thats already started. Another lawsuit filed in May against CoreCivic, the nations largest private prison operator, challenges similar labor practices at its San Diego immigration detention center.

Jonathan Burns, spokesman for the Nashville-based company, said all of its detainee work programs are voluntary and comply with the standards of the federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency.

The agency has come to rely heavily on private companies to house its detainee population, which has tended to fluctuate with surges and drops in immigration.

In December, an Obama administration task force recommended continuing the use of private contractors for immigration detainees even though the administration announced it was phasing them out as operators of federal prisons. At a time when about 65 percent of immigration detainees were in private facilities, the group concluded it would take billions of dollars for the government to take over.

Now, President Donald Trump has asked Congress for a $1.5 billion budget increase for ICE to arrest, detain and deport immigrants in the country illegally. ICE acting director Thomas Homan recently told lawmakers it expects to house about 51,000 immigrant detainees on a given day, up from nearly 40,000.

In April, GEO, ICEs second-largest detention contractor, won a $110 million contract to build the first new immigrant detention center under Trump.

In its appeal, GEO said the former detainees and their attorneys dislike ICEs rules, but instead of asking Congress to change them they are pursuing a class-action lawsuit for monetary relief. Now, the company said, it faces massive financial risk for carrying out federal directives.

GEO noted company officials can remember only once when someone awaiting a hearing was put in solitary confinement for refusing to clean.

The former detainees at the Denver Contract Detention Facility say $1 a day is the minimum they must receive for work and that GEO lied in telling them it could not pay more. But the company says the amount is set in its contract with the government, which reimburses GEO for what it pays detainees.

While government rules require detainees to keep their personal living areas clean without pay, the plaintiffs claim GEO forces detainees to also clean and maintain common areas for free.

Following a November inspection, the U.S. Homeland Security Departments Office of Inspector General found another immigration facility, the publicly run Theo Lacy detention center in California, violated that rule by requiring detainees to clean common-area showers.

One of the former Colorado detainees who filed the lawsuit, Grisel Xahuentitla, of the central Mexico state of Tlaxcala, said as part of her mandatory daily cleaning, she was responsible for her pods floors and tables, along with basketball courts and a small library. But after some other women were deported, she volunteered to clean sinks, toilets and showers three times a day for $1 a day, partly because she felt bad for the lone woman left doing the job.

Xahuentitla also was looking for something to do, having lost interest in the crocheting workshops intended to keep women occupied.

I felt like I was getting a little depressed being there. Thats why I wanted the job, just to kill time, said Xahuentitla, now 33, who spent four months in the center in 2014 and now lives in the mountain town of Durango. She would not discuss how she was released or her current immigration status.

Xahuentitlas family sent her money, so she didnt need the daily wage to make phone calls or buys things like ramen noodles at the canteen. But she said others worked for the money.

The lawsuit estimates about 2,000 people held at the center agreed to work for $1 a day over three years. They are among the estimated 60,000 who were allegedly compelled to clean their living areas for no pay over a decade. (AP)

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Ex-detainees charge borderline slavery in lawsuit - The Philadelphia Tribune

Minimum wage not about employers

(Re: Wage hike irresponsible in the June 14 edition of the Examiner)

It would appear that Mark Magner has not had to support himself or his family on a minimum wage.

Before any of us can remember, some cried foul when slavery was abolished. How could the economy survive? It depended on free labour!

Then they abolished child labour. How could we cope with losing that source of cheap labour.

Unions fought bitterly for a living wage.

And we adapted to all this.

If a business cannot survive paying a living wage to its employees, maybe it is poorly managed. Maybe it survives through oppression. Maybe it should close its doors.

Maybe we should get used to paying the true cost of goods and services. There are other incomes that should be modified and reduced. The minimum wage is not one of them.

Mel MacIsaac

Barrie

Planet interconnected

(Re: Trump pulls U.S. out of climate deal in the June 2 edition of the Examiner)

The United States of America is the biggest carbon polluter in the history of the world.

The Global South, which did little to create the problem, but now are facing catastrophic changes in the climate.

American President Donald Trump made it very clear, he was ending contributions to the Green Climate Fund.

The United States has pledged by far the most, $3 billion total or $9.41 per capita. Many countries have offered more on a per capita basis. The Swedes, for example, will contribute nearly $60 each.

It is abundantly clear to military around the world that climate change is the mother of all risks to national and global security. Climate change acts as a threat multiplier, exacerbating threats in already unstable regions of the world.

Everything is connected here on Earth. Trump does not appear to understand that fact.

Herein lies the gift Trump has given the world. We will now move on without a disconnected thinker obstructing the path forward.

Cathy Orlando

Citizens Climate Lobby Canada

Sudbury

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Minimum wage, Trump: LETTERS - The Barrie Examiner

Outsourcing which is an indirect method employers devised in getting employees to execute various tasks began in Nigeria in the early 1980s with low cadre jobs as gardeners, cleaners and security guards that formed only a tiny part of the workforce. This was followed by organisations contracting out their book keepings to account firms, a phenomenon that has now assumed a monstrous dimension as contract staffs now constitute a major percentage of the workers of most companies in Nigeria. If it could be ignored back then because contract staffs constituted only a negligible part of the manpower, it should give cause for worry now that the reverse is the case. Like a malignant cancer that starts by manifesting seemingly harmless symptoms, the malaise of outsourcing has over the years spread all over the entire system.

First generation Labour leaders as Pa Michael Imodu and Hassan Sunmonu fought against poor remuneration leading to the institulisation of minimum wage in Nigeria. Successive leaders as Wahab Goodluck, Pascal Bafyau and Adams Oshiomhole fought vehemently against casualisation, the evil that plagued industrial society in their day. Up till recent past, a number of firms including financial institutions were picketed at the instance of labour leaders for gross violation of labour regulations as regard engagement of casual staffs and succeeded in reducing the menace to its bearest minimum. A greater evil is here and there is no one to speak against it.

The idea of an organisation sourcing its manpower should not be a deplorable one if the process had not been attended by acute poor remuneration and overall appalling condition of service. Under this scheme, the worker is reduced to a mere industrial adjunct. Benefits as medical care, annual and maternity leaves that were taken for granted in the past are now a luxury to the worker while welfare programmes that formed part of the their incentive are now beyond the reach of the average worker in Nigeria. A good number of these hapless ones work for 12 hours a day and seven days a week against the International Labour Organisation (ILO) stipulated 40 hours work week.

By its nature, mobility along the vertical and horizontal progressions is difficult if not impossible for the contract worker. Gone are the days when Nigerians felt proud working in multinational corporations and a number of local industries and banks whose identity cards they flaunted at any given opportunity to the envy and admiration of their less privileged friends and relations. Government officials make much effort to woo foreign investors to Nigeria for the opportunity which gainful employment offers to the youth. With the trend of outsourcing, this aim has been flatly defeated. Multinational conglomerates that were once the workers haven including foreign investments that enjoy a fabulous tax incentives and duty wavers in collaboration with local predators mercilessly feed fat on the sweat of the Nigerian worker. Contract workers like their casual hands counterparts do not get annual increment, neither do they have benefit in the NLC and TUC neither negotiated minimum wage nor enjoy any of the benefits secured by its 29 affiliated industrial unions at their triennial collective bargaining. An employment letter of a typical contract worker bears the following austere features: basic salary- N73, 440.00; housing allowance- N42, 200.00; transport allowance- N34, 560.00; feeding/utility allowance- N64,800.00; all totaling N216,000.00 per annum.

Save for public corporations/civil service where the trend is yet to gain dominance as contract jobs are limited to menial and technical fields, most jobs from the plumber to the driver and from the blue collar to the white collar are executed by contract hands who are compelled to make do with 25 to 35 per cent of what was hitherto paid for the same positions. While the worker pines away the unscrupulous slave drivers smile to the bank. Outsourcing is monkey de work baboon de shop writ large. The worker in Nigeria today is coerced into high productivity rather than being induced with incentive. A good number of these so called workers trek far distances, some as far as 10 to 15 kilometers to work daily and are constrained to make do with just one square meal for the whole day.

The condition of workers in Nigeria is pathetic and shabby to say the least. In their wretchedness, many employees have become so morally bankrupt as to engage in all sorts of criminal acts in their desperation to survive. Child and gender rights activists need to look into the difficulties faced by workers in Nigeria to nip in the bud the incidents of child abuse and rape rampant in the society. Frequent infighting and the quest for pecuniary gains have combined to render the Nigeria Labour Congress incoherent, inconsistent and emasculated while, workers groan under hardship.

At May Day rallies one finds members of the NLC executive council file out in their colourful regalia chorusing solidarity forever (x2) we will always fight for our rights. They will pontificate on the relevance of the trade union movement to the socioeconomic and political development of the nation and as the bulwark for the defense of the workers rights. But will prevaricate on being confronted with the challenges confronting workers in Nigeria. The NLC slogan: We are committed to ensuring the protection of job, full employment and humane working environment, is all a farce or at best a mere rhetoric. The trade union movement has for long lost its voice in Nigeria. Since the NLC has lost its relevance, it should be shoved aside for a more purposeful, vibrant and dynamic labour union to step in and save Nigeria workers.

Agenro lives in Lagos.

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Outsourcing: The source of modern day slavery - Guardian (blog)

Editorial board, The Republic | azcentral.com Published 8:09 a.m. MT June 19, 2017 | Updated 7 hours ago

A USA TODAY Network investigation found a predatory scheme that ensnared thousands of immigrant truck drivers at the port. Scott Hall

Reyes Castellanos lost his house after too much debt mounted. He continues to work as truck driver, working long hours in the port of Long Beach. (Photo: Omar Ornelas, The Desert Sun)

Evil comes in many guises, but one of its most noxious is when people of means exploit people of no means and bleed them of the few possessions they own.

This was the story of indentured servitude in colonial America and of slavery in the pre-Civil War South. Its the story of Mexican immigrants who picked lettuce by short hoe and wrecked their backs for a pittance.

John Steinbeck captured the outrage in The Grapes of Wrath. And the memorable 1940s film of that novel can still evoke anger at the cruel California land barons who abused Oklahomas itinerant poor.

How trucking companies forced drivers into debt, worked them past exhaustion and left them destitute

This type of mistreatment should have been left to the dark corners of our past, but here we are again, abusing the least among us. An expos by Brett Murphy, a reporter for the USA TODAY Network, tells the story of large trucking enterprises in Southern California exploiting immigrant laborers and leaving them with virtually nothing.

People who speak little English and live meager lives are used to build corporate profits shipping goods that will eventually be sold in some of Americas best-known retail stores.

The so-called port truckers, Murphy reports, move almost half of the nations container imports out of Los Angeles ports.

Hundreds and possibly thousands of drivers are trapped in a system of forced labor that is almost impossible to comprehend by modern sensibilities.

The companies in Southern California have spent the past decade forcing drivers to finance their own trucks by taking on debt they could not afford, Murphy writes. Companies then used that debt as leverage to extract forced labor and trap drivers in jobs that left them destitute.

One man caught in this trap was Samuel Talavera Jr., who in 2013 leased a truck from his employer to deliver dishwashers and tires to warehouses.

The job was so demanding, he had little time at home, working up to 20 hours a day for six days a week and sleeping in the company parking lot. Eventually his truck broke down, and the 67 cents he was making a week was not nearly enough to make repairs. His company would fire him and seize his truck, Murphy wrote, along with $78,000 he had paid on it.

While these truckers haul the goods of big retailers, those retailers can avoid accountability because they dont directly hire port trucking companies. This is a classic case where the little guy gets screwed, said Jeffrey Klink, a former fraud prosecutor and corporate ethics professor at the University of Pittsburghs Graduate School of Business.

The civil-rights leader Julian Bond describes the California port truckers as the new black tenant farmers.

The abuse appears to be widespread.

Since 2010, at least 1,150 port truck drivers have filed claims in civil court or with Californias labor commission, Murphy reports.

Judges have sided with drivers in more than 97 percent of the cases heard, ruling time after time that port truckers in California cant legally be classified as independent contractors, he writes. Instead, they are employees who, by law, must be paid minimum wage and cant be charged for the equipment they use at work.

But the court rulings have not addressed drivers allegations that their employers are barring them from leaving work or requiring them to work hours that exceed federal law.

With so much legal action over a span of years, the abuses seem chronic and cannot be ignored by federal and California authorities.

Fortunately the kind of worker exploitation seen in Californias port trucking industry is far more rare than it was in John Steinbecks America.

I dont know of anything even remotely like this, said Stanford Law School professor William Gould, speaking of the port trucking lease contracts.

As Americans, we are tasked to ensure that such things become even more rare. The abuse of port truckers must end now.

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Our View: Port truckers today's indentured servants - AZCentral.com

The Times' Newsroom staff weigh in on their top five things they'd like to see happen locally or around the world.

Keep busy, city council

Whether you voted for any of the people who currently occupy Crookston's eight city council seats or you wish we had eight different ones, you have to be encouraged by the latest development that has the council's Ways & Means Committee meeting once a week and not the usual once every two weeks, until further notice, simply because they have so many of the proverbial irons on the fire. After all, wouldn't you be a bit discouraged if the council decided to scale back its committee meetings to once a month because they didn't have enough important issues to talk about? They do have a lot on their plate right now, that's for sure. Here's hoping they accomplish some meaningful things at these more frequent discussions.

Check out some youth baseball this weekend

Crookston Parks and Recreation will be hosting a boys 10U and 12U baseball tournament starting at 2 p.m. on Friday, June 23 and again at 9 a.m. on Saturday, June 24 at Highland Complex on Diamonds 2-6. Bring the whole family out for a weekend of fun and make sure to let the kids loose at the playground and Splash Park, too.

People need to move toward an equalist society

Equalism is the belief that all human beings, regardless of gender, race, age, and ethnic origin, are totally equal. We, as a collective human species, need to move away from the patriarchal and discriminatory society that we live in and make a sincere effort to treat everyone equally. It is not acceptable that gender based wage gaps and suspicion and unequal treatment based on skin color still exist in our world today. We have come a long ways since slavery existed in the United States and women were not allowed to vote, but we need to go further. Each and every person deserves an equal chance at life, regardless of what they look like, what their gender is, or where they are from. Let us hope for a future that is free from the racist and sexist mindsets that prevent people from reaching their full potential and keep us from transcending into a truly equal society.

Maddie Everett, summer intern

Twins brass, be patient and stick to long-term plan

Twins backup catcher Chris Gimenez had his tongue somewhat planted in his cheek when he said before this past weekend's series with the Cleveland Indians that the Twins needed to "punch them in the mouth." Gimenez played for the Indians last year, after all. But Twins fans aware of how paper-thin the pitching staff is had to cringe when Gimenez uttered those words and, sure enough, the Indians swept the four-game series. This Twins team simply lacks the pitching to maintain their current encouraging pace. They have two decent starters, one mediocre one, and two bad ones. Their bullpen is mostly a train-wreck. So what do they do? Try to make moves to make the playoffs this season? The team's brass would be wise to resist temptation and instead keep their eyes on the bigger picture, which is transforming this franchise toward long-term, sustained success.

Stop by the Crookston Farmers Market kickoff this Thursday

The Crookston Farmers Market will kick off their season on Thursday, June 22 at the Downtown Square located on 3rd Street and North Ash. There will be locally-grown produce, baked goods, and more. Theyre always looking for more vendors as well so visit their Facebook page for a membership application. The Crookston Farmers Market is open to everyone weekly on Thursdays from 3-6 p.m. so keep it local and shop fresh.

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Times Opinion - Top Five Things - Crookston Daily Times