Comment by laufey 4 days ago
Just curious, why would you expect him to be paid less? I know historically pay is bad for prisoners, but if he's working the same hours and is just as productive as any other employee, shouldn't he be paid the same? I could potentially see paying someone less if they were coming in with much less experience than what's usually hired for in the role, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
It's unclear whether the carve out for prisoners applies to just "involuntary servitude" or "slavery and involuntary servitude."
In practice, only "involuntary servitude" has been used. "Community service" - unpaid - is a very common low level sentence.
The eighth and fourteenth amendments almost certainly forbid enslavement - permanently becoming human property - as a criminal sentence.
Even before the 13th amendment, enslavement as a punishment not common, if it happened at all.
There is almost no case law on the 13th amendment. There are no legal slaves in the US today, and there have not been since the 19th century.
If we pay people 40 cents an hour just to say they aren't slaves, they they are slaves for all intents and purposes. They are put in poor working conditions working for for-profit companies, making much less than minimum wage. How is it legal for the State to not provide sunscreen or shade for inmates doing outdoor manual labor?
https://theappeal.org/louisiana-prisoners-demand-an-end-to-m...
I don't disagree that 40 cents an hour is ludicrous and is only one notch above slavery, but I do think it worth pointing out that the work for 40 cents per hour is voluntary (i.e. they can quit or choose not to accept the work), whereas "slavery" is very much not.
A prisoner costs taxpayers around $50k a year on average in US. If their "take-home" wage is $0.40/h, it may still be generous.
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You can make the exact same argument about employers paying different rates depending on the country the employee is based in, and for all the same reasons.
Is there a good reason why a developer in Thailand or India should be paid less than their colleague who works on the same team, but is based in the US? Many companies believe so - there's a significant difference in the cost of living between those two employees, and employers believe it is fair to adjust the salary to provide a similar quality of life to both.
Equally, a person incarcerated in New York City doesn't have the same living costs as a person who has to live in New York City, so you could reasonably argue that any "Cost of living premium" that a company offers to NYC based employees doesn't need to apply to a person who doesn't experience those higher costs.
> Is there a good reason why a developer in Thailand or India should be paid less than their colleague who works on the same team, but is based in the US?
Yes, and that reason is that people in most of the developed world are free to say yes or no to job offers based on their individual preferences. And, it just so happens, in Thailand and India there are many people who will happily say yes to offers that people in the US would say no to. The cost of living explanation that companies give is illusory; the reality is that they have to pay enough to get people to say yes.
Now, you might ask why people in different countries say yes to offers at different compensation levels. But I think the answer is self evident: people will say yes to offers when they believe that there are lots of other people who will say yes to it. Under those circumstances, saying no won't earn a higher offer but cause the company to give the job to someone else.
Ultimately, then, regional prices are set by what the locals are generally willing to say yes to.
My understanding is that top talent gets top pay, regardless of their living arrangements.
Mediocre talent ... maybe not so much, but these are also the folks that could be replaced by AI.
Except prison has some very key differences from living freely in another state or country. You cannot leave and so don't have a choice about where you work. Even if cost of living is low in prison, you often still have to pay for being there and wages are far less than the cost. A prisoner will be released one day and their cost of living will skyrocket overnight. Do we want motivated hard working people leaving prison with nothing so they end up back in the same environment that got them there in the first place?
>Many companies believe so - there's a significant difference in the cost of living between those two employees, and employers believe it is fair to adjust the salary to provide a similar quality of life to both.
What a complete bs. If anything, in India it costs MORE to achieve a similar standard of living than in the USA. In India you can spend 3 times what a US worker gets paid - and you'll barely have enough money to get the same level of security that that worker gets.
Companies don't care, they pay the minimum amount that they think will interest the worker for long-term employment. And since in India or Thailand the workers don't have such a wide choice in work - they will be paid less, just enough to get them. And they pay the Americans just enough to get them, it is just happening that for Americans this amount are several times bigger. That's all here is.
> and employers believe it is fair to adjust the salary to provide a similar quality of life to both
That's bullshit. E.g. electronics cost the same in all countries.
The point is that they are definitely not cheaper than in the US
Sure, but how much of your wage do you spend buying electronics? The vast majority of my salary goes to fixed expenses like housing, food, healthcare, energy, and transport. Those are all highly location-dependent.
In location A you might spend 80% of your salary on fixed expenses, whereas in location B you only need to spend 20% of that same salary to pay for those expenses - leaving you with far more money for discretionary spending.
For sure, but that doesn't justify doing that per country. If you live in SF you could be spending 80% on fixed expenses, but I'm sure that in the US there are places where you could be spending 20%. This applies to other countries as well.
>but if he's working the same hours and is just as productive as any other employee, shouldn't he be paid the same?
Why would the salaries all bump up to big American city salaries instead of resting somewhere in the lowest range worldwide? If we purely judge work completed.
If you're a remote worker your competition is the world not people in the major city the company is based in.
I speculate: Supply and demand. He doesn't have many options, so doesn't have leverage in negotiating.
Well that’s basically what I’m wondering. Is this a normal employment arrangement - subject to same state payroll tax, labor laws, employee rights, etc - with the additional detail that he resides in prison? Or does the employer need to go through some gateway enforced by the prison with maximum compensation or other restrictions?
But otherwise, in terms of why he’d default to being paid less… yes, what the other commenter said: supply and demand, aka leverage. Turso could choose to be a good citizen and pay him the same as any other employee, but that’s subject to all the questions I posed above, regarding the structural requirements placed on them as the employer.
I am the CEO of Turso. We are free to negotiate any salary we want with him, the prison system doesn't put any caps, up or down. We are paying him well, and certainly not trying to enslave him or anything. There are some restrictions on how the payments are made but not the amount.
We also don't pay him healthcare, because he wouldn't be able to use it.
I assume he doesn't have to pay rent while in prison and gets free meals, so unless they take some of his income, he might actually be doing pretty good.
I guess if you look at pay as solely a result of 'work done' you'd come to this conclusion, and it should work this way, but really its got more to do with the relationship between employer and employee. A person in prison has a very different legal status than someone who doesnt and they do tend to get paid less.
> but if he's working the same hours and is just as productive as any other employee, shouldn't he be paid the same?
He should, but the median salary of engineers in Taiwan is like, 40,000 USD, vs SF which is 160,000 USD. Or London, if one wants to argue something about English language ability or whatever, is 80,000 USD. Literally half that of SF.
Salaries aren't determined by labor value, they're determined by how well employers can collude in a region to get the lowest possible rate while still being able to hire people. Thus they somewhat tend to correlate with cost of living, but not really, e.g. see London vs SF vs NYC. All correlations are used as excuses, when the core, real, reason always comes down to, employers will pay as little as they can get away with.
This annoyed me enough that I started a co-op about it, and we're doing pretty well. I'm still annoyed though. Apparently glommer, the CEO, pays him "full salary" (market rate?), which makes them a good person, but a bad capitalist. They could easily pay basically a slave wage and leverage this dude's ingrained passion for programming to get huge output for almost nothing - that's what the rest of the industry merrily does.
>Salaries aren't determined by labor value,
In a free market, very little is determined by its "value". Clean drinking water costs pennies, but its value is far higher. People in developing countries routinely spend hours a day getting clean water, which works out to a price far higher than even bottled water from for-profit companies.
>they're determined by how well employers can collude in a region to get the lowest possible rate while still being able to hire people. Thus they somewhat tend to correlate with cost of living, but not really, e.g. see London vs SF vs NYC.
Is there any evidence there's more collusion happening in London?
>employers will pay as little as they can get away with.
You're making it sound like this is some sort of profound insight, or that companies are being extra dishonorable by doing this, but literally everyone in an economy is trying to pay "pay as little as they can get away with". When was the last time you tipped a gas station?
> they're determined by how well employers can collude in a region to get the lowest possible rate
Colluding is only one of the factors that influencing the demand for labor. Moreover, in most regions it is a rather insignificant factor. Typically, this is the degree of economic freedom, protection of investments and capitals, the level of regulation and the tax burden in the region, not the degree of colluding.
> good person, but a bad capitalist.
Capitalism is not about evaluative characteristics, but about descriptive ones. It is not "bad capitalists pay a lot, good ones pay the minimum", but about "people tend to pay minimum, so to pay the minimum is expected behavior of capitalists"
The 13th amendment specifically allows slavery of prisoners.
Edit: I don’t mean to imply the author isn’t paid fairly by Turso. A few posts down, the CEO of Turso asserts that they do pay fairly. The OP in this thread might reasonably wonder about this because several states do in fact use prisoners as unpaid slave labor.