Street Theater Recruits for Bad Jobs at Corn Hill Fest

(July 13, 2003) “This is Bonnie to Security. We have some people here passing out something,” said a festival official into a cell phone about to kick out a handful of activists. After a few minutes of negotiations Bonnie proved to be a compassionate person as she directed the activists to a spot a few feet away, but on the other side of the gate, to continue their prank.

The Creative Protest Affinity Group passed out applications for sweatshop jobs at the Corn Hill Festival today. “We have to make ourselves competitive with Third World and prison labor,” a spokesman said, noting that U.S. unemployment is at a 20-year high, not counting those who gave up looking for work.

“We’re trying to point out how corporations are trying to force people to work for unreasonable wages so they can make obscene profits. The executives are more interested in what kind of deals they can make for themselves. It’s really about how they can push the wages down so they can get more for themselves in compensation. Every time they tell the Board they saved on labor costs their compensation packages get bigger. They are bashing organized labor and convincing a gullible public that U.S. labor is too expensive, but they never apologize for their excessive salaries which are over 500 times the wages of the people who actually do the work.”

The activists passed out applications offering a choice between prison labor wages (nine cents an hour) and Chinese sweatshop wages (IOU). There was an option to donate ten percent of wages to the CEO’s bonus. The application also contained a series of waivers to opt out of legal protections, retirement and other benefits. The dramatis personae called out to the crowd with humorous ad libs and got a generally positive response, with some festival-goers even stopping to share their views. However, one uptight male shot back that he already had a job. Also visible at the festival was a parade of political hacks wearing T-shirts bearing the name of the Republican candidate for County Executive.

With millions of U.S. jobs lost to overseas sweatshops and domestic prison labor camps, U.S. workers, fearing they must compete for fewer jobs, are compromising their own rights or forcing out more competent co-workers from the workplace. At the same time, any word of a downsizing causes investors to salivate on cue. But, in the face of the declining economy, a recent Bush-backed faith-based corporate-welfare proposal to substitute comp time for overtime faced public outrage and was withdrawn.

Meanwhile American taxpayers are spending billions to maintain prisons, prisoners and work facilities while brokers like Core Craft are enjoying huge profits from corporate contracts for cheap prison labor. Many of these prisoners were incarcerated for non-violent offenses and\or did not have adequate defense. The Thirteenth Ammendment abolished slavery except for those convicted of a crime. The justification for slavery was that it was “good for the economy.”