Labor Day

How Michigan’s prison economy turns work into discipline, maintenance, training, revenue, and debt.

The Other Meaning of Labor Day

Labor Day is supposed to honor work: the dignity of it, the bargaining power behind it, and the idea that labor deserves public recognition. In Michigan’s prisons, however, “labor” means something much narrower and more complicated. The people who cook meals, mop floors, wash laundry, clean housing units, repair furniture, produce license plates, sew garments, and staff prison industries are not treated as ordinary employees. They are incarcerated workers assigned through the Michigan Department of Corrections, and the legal structure around their work separates their labor from the protections, pay, and bargaining rights that the holiday celebrates.

Michigan’s system is not unique. Across the United States, prison labor sits at the intersection of punishment, public budgeting, institutional survival, and rehabilitation. Most incarcerated workers do the unglamorous work that keeps prisons operating such as kitchen work, sanitation, laundry, groundskeeping, and maintenance. A smaller group works in state-run prison industries, while an even smaller group participates in private-sector prison industry programs that must pay prevailing or minimum wages but can require deductions for taxes, room and board, family support, restitution, and other obligations.

Comparing Michigan’s approach with other states and the federal prison system reveals a central tension: prison labor is described by correctional agencies as training and responsibility-building, but it also supplies essential services at rates far below market wages. On Labor Day, that tension deserves more than a passing mention.

Michigan’s Prison Labor Structure

In Michigan, prison work is governed through MDOC policy and state statute. Policy Directive 05.02.110 states that prisoners assigned to work or school receive pay or stipend; it also makes clear that prisoners assigned to work are not employees of the department and are not eligible for workers’ compensation or unemployment benefits for those assignments. That framing is crucial because it defines the work as a correctional assignment rather than as ordinary employment.

Michigan’s prison labor system can be divided into three broad categories. The first is regular institutional work, the day-to-day labor that supports prison operations. MDOC does not treat these assignments as one undifferentiated pool: its Program Classification Manual is required to describe each MSI and non-MSI position, identify the education, experience, and skills required, and assign a pay-related skill level of unskilled, semi-skilled, skilled, or advanced. Unskilled assignments generally involve routine tasks learned quickly under close direction, such as basic sanitation, dishwashing, laundry handling, porter work, grounds cleanup, and material movement. Semi-skilled or skilled assignments require more judgment, training, reliability, or technical ability and may include food preparation, equipment operation, maintenance assistance, repair work, inventory control, and more demanding clerical functions. Advanced assignments are reserved for work requiring substantial experience, specialized knowledge, or responsibility. The second category is Michigan State Industries, the state-run correctional industries program that produces goods and services for government and nonprofit customers. The third is private-sector prison industry work authorized by Michigan’s Correctional Industries Act, including MCL 800.327a, which permits certain private manufacturing or service enterprises to use inmate labor under strict conditions. The statute requires that the enterprise be suitable for inmate labor, limits access to sensitive customer or employee information and restricts eligibility to inmates housed at Level I security who are not serving life sentences.

Institutional jobs also include assignments that are less visible than kitchen or maintenance work. Clerks may support housing units, libraries, schools, stores, or other departments by organizing forms, maintaining logs, filing materials, preparing routine documents, tracking supplies, or performing supervised data-entry and office tasks. Tutors may assist other incarcerated students with adult basic education, high-school-equivalency preparation, literacy, or vocational coursework. In the Vocational Village model, MDOC reports designated vocational trade tutors who reinforce classroom and hands-on instruction. These roles can fall into higher skill classifications because they depend on literacy, subject knowledge, communication, accuracy, discretion, or the ability to guide others. They also show why prison-job classifications matter: two people may both be labeled institutional workers even though one performs repetitive cleaning, and another carries out sustained clerical or instructional responsibility.

One distinctive example is the Michigan Braille Transcribing Fund at G. Robert Cotton Correctional Facility in Jackson. The prison-based program trains incarcerated workers to transcribe textbooks and other printed materials into braille, including technically demanding tactile graphics, for students and other people who are blind or visually impaired. The Fund describes itself as one of the nation’s largest braille production facilities of its kind and says the work gives prisoner staff specialized, potentially employable skills while reducing the cost of braille materials. The program illustrates both sides of Michigan’s prison-labor debate: it produces a socially valuable and highly skilled service, yet its lower prices are partly made possible by incarcerated labor.

The private-sector category looks different from normal institutional work because the statute requires the higher of the prevailing wage or the state minimum wage. But that higher gross wage does not mean the worker takes home a normal paycheck. Michigan law directs deductions for taxes, administrative costs, room and board, family support, victim compensation, restitution, and a retained portion for release. By contrast, ordinary institutional prison-job pay generally functions as a department stipend or assignment pay rather than as a standard employee paycheck, so it is not usually treated like free-world employment with ordinary payroll-tax withholding. Private-sector prison industry wages are different because they are closer to outside wages and the statute expressly contemplates tax deductions before the worker receives the net amount. The result is a two-tiered pay structure: most incarcerated workers earn very low institutional rates, while the relatively rare private-enterprise workers may earn a legally higher wage but see a significant portion diverted before reaching their institutional account.

Pay, Power, and the Meaning of “Not an Employee”

The phrase “not an employee” does a great deal of work. It explains why prison labor can be mandatory or strongly pressured, why ordinary wage-and-hour law does not function inside the prison gate, and why a person can work daily without creating a normal employment relationship. In MDOC policy, work is part of classification, programming, institutional order, and prison management. That means the worker’s bargaining position is fundamentally different from a free-world employee’s position.

The constitutional foundation for this distinction is the Thirteenth Amendment. Ratified in 1865, it abolished slavery and involuntary servitude but expressly excepted labor imposed “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” That punishment clause has long been treated as legal authority for federal and state prisons to compel labor without creating an ordinary employment relationship or guaranteeing ordinary wages. Michigan’s Constitution contains parallel language: Article I, Section 9 prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude “unless for the punishment of crime.” Together, these provisions help explain why incarcerated labor may be required and why courts have often rejected Thirteenth Amendment claims brought by incarcerated workers.

Michigan’s standard institutional rates are extremely low when converted into hourly value. Existing MDOC materials and prison wage surveys place regular institutional work in the range of pennies per hour or a small daily stipend, while state industry jobs pay more but remain far below outside wages. The Prison Policy Initiative’s wage appendix, which compiles state and federal prison pay scales, shows how common this structure is nationally: most states pay incarcerated workers pennies per hour, while several states pay nothing for many regular jobs. Michigan therefore is not an outlier because it pays little; it is part of a national system in which very low prison wages are the norm.

That said, Michigan is also not the lowest-paying state. States such as Texas, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Arkansas have been identified as jurisdictions where many regular prison jobs are unpaid. The ACLU’s national reporting notes that incarcerated workers earn on average between 13 and 52 cents per hour nationwide, and that in seven states workers are not paid at all for most work assignments. Michigan’s baseline pay therefore places it above the unpaid tier but below states that have higher hourly rates or broader wage schedules.

Michigan Compared with Other States

Michigan’s prison labor model resembles the majority of states in structure. Regular institutional jobs make prisons functional; state industries produce government-facing goods; private-sector programs are limited and heavily regulated. The biggest differences among states are not whether prison labor exists, but how it is compensated, whether work is linked to sentence credits, whether refusal triggers punishment, and whether the state attempts to turn prison work into recognized job training.

Some states sit below Michigan because they pay nothing for most regular labor. In those places, the state’s argument is usually that work is part of punishment, discipline, or institutional responsibility rather than compensated employment. Other states sit above Michigan because their regular work pay scales are higher, or because correctional industries pay more competitive hourly rates. Prison Policy Initiative data show broad variation across states, with some systems paying no wages and others paying up to a few dollars per hour for certain jobs. This variation makes a simple fifty-state ranking difficult, but it makes the policy choice obvious: low wages are not inevitable; they are selected, maintained, and defended by statute, regulation, and budget politics.

Michigan differs sharply from states that use work or program participation to reduce time served. Michigan’s truth-in-sentencing framework generally requires people to serve the minimum sentence imposed by the court before parole eligibility, limiting the role that work can play in shortening confinement. Other jurisdictions offer earned-time or good-time credits for program participation, work, or good conduct. That difference changes the meaning of a prison job. In a state with meaningful earned-time credits, work may be both exploitative and materially valuable because it can move a release date. In Michigan, work is much less likely to produce that benefit, which leaves wages, privileges, and institutional standing as the primary incentives.

The Federal System: UNICOR, Work Programs, and Time Credits

The federal prison system uses a similar basic logic but a different administrative language. The Bureau of Prisons describes work as a correctional program designed to build habits, reduce idleness, and prepare incarcerated people for reentry. Federal Prison Industries, known by the trade name UNICOR, is the best-known version of that model. BOP materials describe UNICOR as a self-sustaining correctional program and list typical hourly pay between 23 cents and $1.15, with participation limited to a small share of work-eligible people. The program is officially framed as job training and reentry preparation rather than as ordinary employment.

Federal regulations reinforce that framework. The federal rule governing Federal Prison Industries states that FPI exists to provide meaningful work and training opportunities and that there is no statutory requirement that incarcerated workers be paid for industrial assignments, even though compensation may be provided at the discretion of Federal Prison Industries. In other words, the federal system also separates prison work from a normal labor-market relationship.

The federal system also differs because of the First Step Act. The Act created earned time credits for eligible people who participate successfully in recidivism-reduction programming or productive activities. BOP’s public guidance explains that the law can expand opportunities for placement in home confinement or residential reentry centers and that productive activities may contribute to earned time credits. Compared with Michigan, that makes federal work and programming potentially more valuable because work-related participation can affect custody placement and release timing for eligible individuals, although eligibility rules and exclusions remain significant.

The Hidden Subsidy: Maintaining the Prison Itself

The most important prison labor is often the least visible. License plates and furniture attract attention because they look like production. But the largest share of prison labor is institutional maintenance: preparing meals, washing clothes, cleaning common areas, moving supplies, maintaining grounds, and performing basic repair work. Without that labor, prisons would need more civilian staff, more contractors, or a smaller operating model. That is why prison labor functions as a hidden subsidy. It lowers the apparent cost of incarceration by keeping a large amount of necessary work off ordinary public payrolls.

The savings can be illustrated even without pretending that every prison assignment could be converted one-for-one into a civilian job. Suppose one full-time institutional function requires 2,080 hours of work per year. At Michigan’s 2026 minimum wage of roughly $13.73 an hour, wages alone would be about $28,600. Adding payroll taxes, retirement or health benefits, leave, recruitment, training, supervision, and security requirements could readily push the public cost above $40,000 per position; a contractor would also add overhead and profit. By contrast, a prison worker paid even $1 a day for 250 workdays costs only $250 in direct wages. The gap—tens of thousands of dollars per work-equivalent each year—is the economic advantage the prison captures. The exact statewide total cannot be calculated from public documents because MDOC does not publish a complete roster of prisoner hours by job and because some assignments are part-time, shared, or performed alongside civilian staff. But the direction and scale of the subsidy are clear.

Replacing even a fraction of prisoner labor would therefore raise the cost of incarceration. For example, if 1,000 full-time-equivalent functions had to be staffed at a cost of $40,000 each, annual operating costs would increase by about $40 million before additional management or contract costs. At 5,000 full-time equivalents, the increase would approach $200 million. Those figures are scenarios, not an estimate of MDOC’s actual staffing need, but they show why the issue is consequential against a corrections budget of about $2.2 billion. Michigan’s House Fiscal Agency reports that roughly $1.7 billion is devoted to prisoner custody, care, and programming, including food service and facility administration and maintenance. Hiring outside workers would not eliminate the need for custody staff; civilians and contractors inside secure facilities would still require screening, access control, escorting in some areas, and coordination with officers. The likely result would be a higher per-prisoner cost, potentially several hundred to several thousand dollars annually depending on how many functions were converted.

The ACLU and the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic reported that roughly two-thirds of incarcerated people in state and federal prisons are workers and that more than three-quarters of surveyed incarcerated workers reported facing punishment if they refused to work. The same reporting emphasizes that incarcerated workers are excluded from minimum wage and overtime protections, cannot unionize, and often lack ordinary workplace safety guarantees. Those findings matter for Michigan because they show that the state’s system is part of a national labor regime, not a local administrative oddity.

Supporters of prison labor often point to order, routine, skill-building, and restitution. Those are real policy goals. Many people leaving prison need work habits, credentials, references, and confidence. Michigan’s Vocational Village and Michigan State Industries present themselves in precisely those terms: training, work skills, and bridges to reentry. But the value of rehabilitation depends on whether the work builds transferable skills and whether workers are treated with dignity. Scrubbing floors for less than the cost of a cup of coffee may reduce idleness, but it does not automatically create economic mobility.

Commissary, Communication, and the Prison Economy

Low wages become more severe when measured against the prison economy. Michigan’s current institutional pay framework dates to the early 1980s and, although classifications and individual rates have been adjusted administratively, the basic cents-per-day structure has not been substantively modernized to keep pace with ordinary wages or inflation. A rate that looked small in the 1980s now buys dramatically less after more than four decades of rising prices. Incarcerated workers do not spend money in ordinary stores. They buy from commissary vendors, pay for electronic messages or calls, purchase hygiene items, and often rely on family deposits that may carry fees. Even when the state provides meals, clothing, and basic items, the lived reality of prison includes many costs that wages cannot cover. The problem is therefore not simply that prison pay is low; it is that pay has remained nearly frozen while the prices attached to prison life have continued to rise.

Ramen noodles provide a simple measure of that lost purchasing power. Instant ramen is inexpensive, calorie-dense, easy to store, and widely traded, which has made it a form of informal currency in prisons across the country. Research on prison economies links ramen’s rise to reduced food portions and the need to supplement institutional meals. A person who is paid only pennies for a work assignment may have to devote a meaningful share of a day’s earnings to a single packet. National commissary research has found ramen priced from roughly 42 cents to more than a dollar per serving in prison systems, even though bulk retail prices outside can be around 30 cents or less. The comparison is illustrative: when wages stay fixed for decades, but a basic packet of noodles rises in price, every hour worked purchases fewer meals, fewer hygiene items, and fewer minutes of communication.

The persistence of those rates also reflects legislative inaction. Michigan law authorizes prison work and deductions, but ordinary institutional pay is largely an administrative schedule rather than a wage floor that automatically rises with inflation. Recent corrections budgets show lawmakers willing to restructure compensation for corrections officers including tens of millions of dollars for wage increases and faster pay-step progression while the major budget documents do not contain a parallel, systemwide modernization of prisoner pay. That contrast is evidence of priority-setting, not proof of any individual legislator’s motive. Still, after decades without a substantive reset, the absence of a durable proposal, inflation adjustment, or recurring appropriation for incarcerated workers reasonably indicates limited political incentive: raising prisoner wages creates an immediate and visible budget cost, whereas the benefits—greater purchasing power, family support, restitution, and reentry savings—are dispersed and politically easier to postpone.

This is where Labor Day becomes more than a title. The holiday celebrates the social bargain that work should support human dignity. Prison labor breaks that bargain in several ways. It can be required or coerced. It is paid far below ordinary wages. It often lacks legal employment status. It can fund institutional operations while shifting everyday costs to families outside the prison. And when wages stagnate for decades, the gap between labor and dignity becomes harder to defend.

What Michigan Does Better—and Where It Falls Short

Michigan deserves credit for maintaining structured vocational programming and for operating industries that are at least partly connected to work skills. Michigan State Industries’ public mission emphasizes work skills training and reentry readiness. Michigan’s private-enterprise statute also contains safeguards: it limits eligibility, requires wage standards, restricts access to private information, and requires supervision ratios. These features distinguish Michigan from states that rely more heavily on unpaid labor without comparable wage requirements for private-sector placements.

But Michigan falls short in the pay and power relationship. The fact that regular institutional workers are not employees, receive extremely low compensation, and generally cannot use work to shorten their minimum sentence makes the rehabilitative argument incomplete. If prison labor is truly preparation for successful reentry, then it should resemble work in more than name. That means safer conditions, meaningful training, clearer pathways to credentials, more transparent deductions, and pay that bears some rational relationship to the cost of basic prison life.

Compared with the federal system, Michigan also provides fewer labor-linked release incentives. Federal time credits under the First Step Act are imperfect, complicated, and limited by eligibility rules, but they still reflect a policy judgment that productive activity can matter for release planning. Michigan’s stricter truth-in-sentencing approach leaves prison work with less tangible impact on the length or conditions of confinement. Compared with higher-paying states, Michigan’s standard pay also looks stagnant. Compared with unpaid states, Michigan looks better—but that is a low bar.

A Labor Day Test

A serious Labor Day reflection should not stop at free-world workplaces. It should also ask what kind of work society demands from people it has imprisoned, what that work is worth, and what obligations accompany it. Michigan’s prison labor system relies on incarcerated workers to keep institutions running, trains some people for post-release employment, and permits a small private-sector pathway with statutory wage protections. At the same time, the system pays most workers far below ordinary wages, denies them ordinary employment status, and leaves many basic costs to families and outside supporters.

The central question is not whether incarcerated people should work. Work can provide routine, purpose, skill, accountability, and a bridge back to civic life. The question is whether the state can call that work rehabilitative while preserving a pay structure that would be indefensible in any other setting. If Labor Day means anything, it means that labor is not merely a tool for institutions. It belongs to human beings. Michigan, like every state and the federal government, should be judged by whether its prison labor system recognizes that fact.

References

1. Michigan Department of Corrections. Policy Directive 05.02.110, “Prisoner Work Assignment Pay and School Stipend.”
2. Michigan Department of Corrections. “Vocational Village.”
3. Michigan Legislature. MCL 800.327a, “Assignment of inmates to work in private manufacturing or service enterprise.”
4. Michigan Department of Corrections. “G. Robert Cotton Correctional Facility (JCF).”
5. Michigan Braille Transcribing Fund. “About MBTF.”
6. National Archives. “13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery.”
7. Michigan Legislature. Constitution of Michigan of 1963, Article I, Section 9, “Slavery and involuntary servitude.”
8. Prison Policy Initiative. “Prison Wages: Appendix—State and Federal Prison Wage Policies and Sourcing Information.”
9. Hanna Kozlowska. “Ramen Noodles Have Become a Crucial Currency in Prisons.” Quartz, August 22, 2016.
10. Tara Francis Chan, Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, and Ethan Corey. “Locked In, Priced Out: How Prison Commissary Price-Gouging Preys on the Incarcerated.” The Appeal, April 17, 2024.
11. Michigan Senate Fiscal Agency. “FY 2025–26 Department of Corrections Budget, S.B. 169 (S-2): Senate-Passed.”
12. Michigan House Fiscal Agency. “Fiscal Snapshot: Cost of Caring for Prisoners.” January 2026.
13. American Civil Liberties Union and University of Chicago Law School Global Human Rights Clinic. “Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers.” June 15, 2022.
14. Federal Bureau of Prisons. “UNICOR Program Details.”
15. Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. 28 CFR Part 345, “Federal Prison Industries Inmate Work Programs.”
16. United States Sentencing Commission. “First Step Act Earned Time Credits.”
17. Federal Bureau of Prisons. “First Step Act—Frequently Asked Questions.”