Prison Labor in Southern Auto
By 
How much prison labor goes into the making of your car? At the very least, until a few days ago if you were driving a Hyundai, the answer was likely some.
After facing public scrutiny for the use of prison labor, a supplier to the South Korean automaker Hyundai said it had dismissed dozens of incarcerated men it had employed through the Alabama Department of Corrections and ended its inmate labor contract with the state.
The supplier, Ju-Young, ended the contract weeks after The New York Times published an article about the company’s involvement in the state’s expansive prison labor system. Prison labor is facing increased legal challenges in state and federal courts after Alabama changed its constitution in 2022 to more broadly ban “involuntary servitude,” removing a previous exception for those convicted of crimes.
“The contract with A.D.O.C. has been terminated,” a Ju-Young official, Eunjung Lee, said in an email. “We are not sure yet if we will be resuming work with A.D.O.C.”
Incarcerated men being held at a correctional facility said they had been informed by local managers at Ju-Young plants in early November that the attention brought to the firm by the Times report was unwelcome, according to affidavits from several workers collected by a nonprofit labor group that is considering filing a legal challenge to the firings. They were told that executives would begin letting people go that month until all imprisoned workers could be replaced.
A spokeswoman for the Alabama Department of Corrections did not respond to requests for comment.
Officials at Jobs to Move America, the labor group that has been working with many of the prisoners, said 32 men were fired. Of those, at least 20 have been reassigned to other work-release jobs, the group said.
The supplier code of conduct at Hyundai dictates that suppliers should not manufacture “directly or indirectly, with the use of forced labor.” A Hyundai spokesman declined to say whether the company had determined that Ju-Young, which makes fenders for the automaker, was in violation of that code or whether the labor of Alabama prisoners constituted “forced labor.”
I love the argument that prison labor is not forced labor.
It’s rare that something good happens in the United States in 2024, so we might as well celebrate an example when it does happen.