There is no one more patriotic or proud to be an American than me, but even someone who bleeds red,white and blue like I do has to concede that we have a habit of indulging in self-righteous hypocrisy from time to time. In fact, we indulge a lot of the time. OK, we do it all the time. So let’s acknowledge the fact that we have absolutely no moral leg to stand on when we blast China for its use of prison labor while one out of five federal prisoners in the U.S. works for UNICOR at the grand wage of about a buck fifteen an hour making all kinds of stuff. When China does it, we call it "torture" and "abuse" – when we do it, it is called "rehabilitation". The linked article tells a pretty good tale of how UNICOR – usually called ‘prison industries’ – operates.
My concern is not with social causes or American hypocrisy, however. There are plenty of do-gooders and America bashers out there who spend every breathing moment carrying those torches without my feeble contribution. My observation, which will come as a surprise to no one I’m sure, is that the article carries an important message about manufacturing management.
I have no idea what sort of person makes a career choice to provide manufacturing leadership to federal prisoners – can you envision what it must take to get a skid full of quality products out of Pete Rose, the senior managers at Enron and Boeing, Manuel Noriega and the others who have populated the federal prison system? I think it is safe to assume that it is not the cream of the manufacturing management crop running that circus. In fact, I don’t believe we have to make any assumptions at all. Solid proof lies in the fact that UNICOR is clamoring for federal preference in contracts, rather than having to bid for military work.
Think about that. These folks have the best of all worlds – third world labor rates in U.S. locations – and they still need protection because they would not get the contracts if they had to compete for them. Some guy named Andy Leonard runs an outfit that makes it by supplying UNICOR, and he is scared to death that competition will be the death of prison manufacturing, and his company by default. He says that UNICOR is the only outfit capable of large scale electronic manufacturing and that the high volume stuff made by UNICOR must be made by hand. Kate Leonard who heads up what must be the world’s most pathetic supply chain – Correction Vendors Association – says keeping the military contract work in the prisons by force of law, rather than allowing legitimate manufacturers do it at a lower cost would "cripple the war effort".
Kate and Andy need to sober up and listen to this: If you folks in the UNICOR supply chain are so miserable at what you do, if your management is so inept and incompetent, if you are so clueless about manufacturing that you need Congress to force your customers to do business with you – even though UNICOR has $1.15 an hour captive labor – you are not helping the war effort. Whatever you make is inherently bad. My son recently returned from Afghanistan and he is deploying to Iraq this week. I do not want his safety or freedom in Iraq to depend on anything you and the stumblebums running UNICOR are making if you cannot even compete on the uneven playing field you now occupy. Our troops have enough to do without carrying you people on their backs.
The broader lesson for all manufacturers is the one I have made time and again. Cheap labor cannot overcome lousy management. If your factory in the U.S. or Europe is mismanaged, running it with third world labor costs will not cure the problem. Just look at UNICOR for all the proof you need.
Mark Graban says
Bill — brilliant stuff. Wish you were blogging more often with gems like this. How sad, all around, for these prison companies. Why in the world are they competing against our private enterprises? Well, trying to compete… I guess they’re trying.
Barry "aka the Hillbilly" says
Bill provides a lot of clarity in his writing.
A side note, I heard tonight that the accounting mess at Fannie Mae wasn’t as bad as they were initially projecting. Apparently the books were only off by about 6.3 Billion over about a 3 year period. Apparently the rules for dealing with Derivatives are a might bit tricky : )
Bob Vavra says
Bill:
As noted in my blog for Plant Engineering magazine above, I won’t dispute the point on quality of products produced in prison. That’s a personal point, and I respect the individual sacrifice you and your family make too much to debate that. For other products produced behind bars, however, there’s a larger issue. Which is more cost-effective — training prisoners at $1.15 an hour to be productive after they get out or to waste the $20,000-plus we’re all paying to keep them in cigarettes and cable TV?
Bill Waddell says
Bob,
I may not have made my central point too well. Perhaps I assumed some manufacturing principles that I should have clarified. Without muddling too deeply into it, the old Motorola six sigma adage is true: the best quality producer will be the shortest cycle time prducer and the shortest cycle time producer will be the best cost producer.
If prison manufacturing at $1.15 an hour cannot compete on cost with private sector manufacturing – despite a 10:1 advantage in labor costs, they must be wasting resources at an atrocious level. They cannot possibly have minimal waste manufacturing processes if they need laws to force the military to buy from them, rather than to compete. Such out of control manufacturing processes cannot possibly yield high quality products. Manufacturing has found this out the hard way over the course of the last few decades.
Concerning the value to society of rehabilitation, I would suggest that eliminating cigarettes and cable TV is a better alternative than passing the cost of convict rehabilitation to the military and the manufacturing sector. Whoever is responsible for getting prisoners back on the straight and narrow path, forcing bad manufacturing practices on America by force of law strikes me as a pretty shabby way of addressing the issue.