Do Black Lives Matter to Producers and Innovators?

“When enough consumers vote with their wallets, retailers and suppliers get the message – and entire systems are forever altered.”

This statement in the Keys to Sustainable Social Enterprise reading - in reference to Good Weave’s development as a solution to child labor – is what I believe should be the central focus of the Black Lives Matter Movement.  Though the movement has been made controversial by the media, its main goal is to end the criminalization of African Americans, and our country’s investment in the prison industrial complex (PIC).  Private prisons have secretly driven America’s economy and culture for decades and have manifested many of the issues we see today in police brutality and the racial disparities of the criminal justice system.  According to Attn, 65% of private prisons have an “occupancy guarantee,” meaning that they must have a certain number of prisoners at all times, or states have to pay for those empty beds. Essentially this creates an incentive for states to incarcerate people at higher rates, and as we have seen, those are typically people of color.

As you can imagine, this phenomenon of increased prisoners also creates an economy of cheap labor; one that many of our household and widely accepted companies have invested in. While the 13^th amendment declared “slavery or involuntary servitude” to be unlawful, it qualifies those actions by saying “except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This means that in America it is constitutional to force prisoners to perform labor for free or very cheap, and many of our trusted companies have followed suit.  

Everyday brands like McDonalds, Wendy’s and Whole Foods use labor from inmates to produce their frozen products. An even larger amount of brands (including Walmart and J.C. Penny’s) purchase products from UNICOR, a company that markets itself as gaining labor from prisoners in exchange for job training – which has been shown to not uphold its end of the bargain.

In response to the ability of Good Weave to actually solve the problem of child labor, I often wonder the ability to American consumers to end the privatization of prisons by not purchasing products from companies who participate in this market.  The problem as we know is that a relatively few amount of Americans are actually aware of the PIC and how it has trickled into our everyday livelihoods.  The even larger problem is the now controversial nature of the topic, especially because it encompasses the principles of the Black Lives Matter Movement.

In the article, innovator Satyarthi noted that people could be educated to shun products produced by exploitation in favor of those produced responsibly.  My question is how do we convince low-income buyers to boycott the products that invest in private prisons if those are the only products that fit within their limited budget?