Labor wants incarcerated people to maintain Victoria’s roads for a few dollars a day. This is not rehabilitation. It is a captive workforce being exploited by the state.
The Victorian Labor government has found a new solution to the state’s deteriorating roads: send prisoners out to clean up the mess.
Under a proposal announced by Premier Ben Carroll, people held in minimum-security prisons would be put to work mowing roadsides, controlling weeds, removing graffiti and collecting rubbish. The government says this would allow its skilled maintenance crews to concentrate on repairing potholes. It insists that prisoners would not replace paid workers, but would merely “supplement the workforce” where shortages exist.
That language should fool no one. If there is work that needs to be done, there are workers who should be employed to do it, paid proper wages and protected by the industrial rights that generations of workers have fought to secure. A “workforce shortage” does not justify reaching behind prison walls for a captive pool of workers who can be paid a fraction of the minimum wage.
Victoria’s roads have been neglected by successive governments. That is a political problem, created by decisions about public spending, outsourcing, staffing and infrastructure. Incarcerated people did not create that problem. They should not now be exploited to repair it.
A workforce that cannot say no
The government will undoubtedly call this rehabilitation, work experience or community contribution. These words are regularly used to sanitise prison labour.
However, strip away the language and examine the relationship itself. The state confines a person, controls their movement, determines their living conditions and restricts their access to money, food, communication and family. That same state then allocates work, sets the rate of payment and decides whether participation affects privileges, prison classification, reports or prospects for release.
There is no meaningful bargaining relationship between the prison and the imprisoned worker. There is no ordinary freedom to walk away, change employers, join a union campaign, negotiate conditions or refuse unsafe work without consequences.
Australia’s Anti-Slavery Commissioner describes forced labour as work extracted through coercion, threats or circumstances in which a person cannot leave. The Australian Government’s own modern-slavery guidance says forced labour involves manipulation, control, violence, threats or lies used to make a person feel unable to stop working or leave.
Prisons are institutions built entirely around control and the denial of a person’s ability to leave.
International law contains exceptions that allow certain labour to be required following conviction, particularly where it remains under public supervision and control. However, a legal exception does not transform exploitation into justice. Nor does it settle the political and moral question of whether governments should use imprisoned people as an ultra-cheap workforce, particularly where their labour substitutes for properly funded public employment or generates benefits for private businesses.
The fact that prison labour has been normalised does not make it free labour.
It makes the exploitation harder to see.
A few dollars for a day’s work
The prison wage schedule in South Australia shows the scale of the exploitation.
At Yatala Labour Prison and Mobilong Prison, the attached determination records daily “skill” payments of:
- $1.64 for low-skilled work
- $1.87 for medium-skilled work
- $2.10 for high-skilled work
- $2.68 for advanced work
Separate performance payments range from 77 cents for “fair” performance to $1.54 for work judged “exceptional.”
These are not hourly rates. They are daily payments.
A person classified as performing advanced work exceptionally could receive only $4.22 for an entire day. Someone on the lowest skill classification with a “fair” performance assessment could receive $2.41.
The jobs identified in the schedule include assembly work and “clean industries.” South Australia openly advertises that businesses can contract its prison industries to manufacture and supply goods. It also reassures businesses that prison workers will not become their employees and that the prison will retain their “custody, care and control.” The government manages the captivity; businesses receive access to the labour.
Rates vary between prisons and jurisdictions, but the structure is broadly consistent across Australia: people perform real work for payments nowhere near the legal minimum afforded to workers outside prison. In Victoria, reporting on the road-maintenance proposal places prison pay at between $7.15 and $9.80 a day.
Calling these amounts “wages” gives them a dignity they have not earned. They are token payments within a system of coerced dependency.
People in prison must still pay for phone calls, toiletries and other basic items from these tiny amounts. Maintaining contact with a child can consume days of prison pay. The state creates scarcity, pays people almost nothing and then charges them to maintain the relationships most likely to support them after release.
Workers when labour is needed, prisoners when rights are demanded
Prison systems want incarcerated people to be treated as workers when there are kitchens to run, clothes to wash, buildings to clean, goods to assemble, prison grounds to maintain or roadsides to clear. However, when people demand the rights attached to work, they become prisoners again.
Prison workers are not generally treated as ordinary employees. They do not receive minimum or award wages, superannuation, paid leave or the full protection of industrial law. They cannot bargain on equal terms. They do not have the same practical access to workplace health and safety processes, independent representation, workers’ compensation and enforceable remedies available to workers outside.
That matters enormously for roadside work. Mowing, weed control, rubbish removal and graffiti cleaning can involve traffic, machinery, chemicals, biohazards, heat and dangerous discarded materials. The government proposes to send people into these environments while denying them the ordinary power workers use to protect themselves.
If an incarcerated person is sufficiently a worker to maintain public infrastructure, that person is sufficiently a worker to receive an award wage, superannuation, workers’ compensation, union representation and full workplace health and safety protections.
Governments cannot have it both ways.
“Skills” that disappear at the prison gate
Prison authorities routinely defend labour programs by claiming they build employability. Yet much prison work does not result in portable qualifications, recognised apprenticeships or credentials that employers will accept.
A person may spend years working in a prison kitchen, laundry, workshop, farm or cleaning crew and leave without a qualification that reflects that experience. Even where training is provided, criminal-record discrimination, licensing restrictions, employer prejudice, unstable housing and post-release surveillance can make employment extraordinarily difficult.
The state takes the value of a person’s labour while they are imprisoned, then releases them into an economy that often refuses to recognise either their work or their worth.
If rehabilitation were genuinely the objective, every work program would be voluntary and connected to accredited, transferable qualifications. People would receive proper wages, with money available to support their families, meet immediate needs after release and build financial security. They would have the same safety protections and avenues for redress as other workers. Their criminal record would not be used to lock them out of the industries in which the prison claimed to be training them.
Instead, “rehabilitation” functions as a moral cover for extraction.
The racial economy of prison labour
Prison labour in Australia cannot be separated from colonisation.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are imprisoned at grotesquely disproportionate rates. Aboriginal people have long had their labour controlled and extracted through missions, reserves, protection regimes, stolen wages and institutions. Governments withheld wages, controlled movement, separated families and claimed that exploitation was for Aboriginal people’s own protection or advancement.
Today’s prison industries sit within that history.
The uniforms and administrative language have changed, but the state continues to confine Aboriginal people disproportionately, control their labour and decide what that labour is worth. Calling the arrangement “rehabilitation” does not break this continuity. It repeats the old colonial claim that coercion becomes benevolent when administered by the state.
The Anti-Slavery Commissioner cannot look away
The Australian Anti-Slavery Commissioner has said that the distinction between modern slavery and other forms of severe exploitation lies in whether people are forced to work through coercion, deception or threats and whether they are able to leave.
Those principles must not stop at the prison gate.
We call on the Commissioner to investigate prison labour across every Australian jurisdiction and publicly examine its compatibility with Australia’s commitments to eliminate slavery, servitude and forced labour. That examination must be led by currently and formerly incarcerated people, not prison departments, corporations and government agencies seeking to defend their own practices.
The Commissioner must scrutinise whether prison work is genuinely voluntary; what consequences follow refusal; who profits; what safety protections exist; whether workers can obtain independent representation and remedies; and whether the work produces qualifications that remain useful after release.
Most importantly, the Commissioner must be prepared to name prison labour for what it is. A captive workforce paid a few dollars a day, denied ordinary industrial rights and placed under the control of the institution that confines it is not simply a quirky employment program.
It is prison slave labour.
Every political party should take a position
At their recent national conference, the Socialists passed a motion opposing prison slave wages. Every other political party should be required to state where it stands.
Do Labor, the Liberals, the Nationals and the Greens support incarcerated workers receiving award wages and full workplace protections? Will they prohibit private profit from grossly underpaid prison labour? Will they guarantee voluntary participation, recognised qualifications, union access, superannuation and workers’ compensation? Or will they continue treating imprisoned people as a disposable workforce outside the protections supposedly afforded to everyone else?
Victoria’s roadside proposal gives Labor an immediate opportunity to answer.
If the government needs more road-maintenance workers, it should employ more workers. If it offers incarcerated people genuine training, they must freely choose to participate, be paid properly and leave with recognised qualifications. Anything less is exploitation dressed in the language of rehabilitation.
People do not lose their humanity when they enter prison. They do not become property of the state. Their labour does not become available for governments to deploy whenever public infrastructure has been neglected or an industry wants to reduce its costs.
A road cleared by a captive worker earning a few dollars a day is not evidence of rehabilitation.
It is evidence of a political system that still believes some people can be imprisoned, exploited and placed beyond the protections won by every other worker.
