Huffington Post
09/20/2017 06:56 pm ET Updated 4 days ago
Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson said that GEO Group should pay minimum wage to detainees who work inside its center.
The state of Washington sued a private prison company on Wednesday for allegedly exploiting immigrant detainees by paying them $1 per day for their labor ― or sometimes compensating them only with candy or chips instead.
State Attorney General Bob Ferguson (D) said the GEO Group, Inc. has profited off of violating state minimum wage laws for more than a decade at the Northwest Detention Center, where it detains as many as 1,575 immigrants at a time on behalf of the federal government. Those detainees do “virtually all” of the non-security work at the Tacoma, Washington, facility, and are barely compensated for it, he said. It is the only immigrant detention center in the state.
“Let’s be honest about what’s going on: GEO has a captive population of vulnerable individuals who cannot easily advocate for themselves,” Ferguson said at a press conference announcing the lawsuit. “This corporation is exploiting those workers for their own profits.”
The payment scheme is common at detention centers around the country, and immigrants and their allies have sued on similar grounds before. But this time, they have a state attorney general ― and the weight and resources that provides ― on their side. If Washington state prevails, it could have massive repercussions for GEO by forcing them to pay an $11 per hour minimum wage and give up past profits ― and send a message to the for-profit immigrant detention business as a whole, which is likely to grow under President Donald Trump.
Read more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/washington-geo-group-immigration_us_59c2ddece4b06f93538c444f.
Leave a Reply