The ethics of employing prisoners

A solar energy company has come under fire for employing inmates from Prescoed open prison in its call centre in Wales. The scheme has attracted cricisim for two main reasons: the company pays the prisoners just £3 per day and it has also fired a significant number of workers since appointing the prisoners, inviting speculation that they were laid off to be replaced by cheap labour - an accusation the company has denied.

This issue may not be as clear cut as it first appears. On a recent Business Leaders tour, organised by the excellent Connect Reading, I heard how hard it is for former prisoners to find a job, which in turn leads to a higher risk of re-offending. So, in theory, anything that provides practical work experience and the opportunity to demonstrate that offenders can perform to the same standard as other workers should be a good thing. Is bussing prisoners into workplaces materially different to the kind of in-house programme run by Gordon Ramsay Behind Bars? Perhaps not - but for me, the core issue lies in the way prisoners are remunerated.

Just like offshoring jobs to developing countries, I feel that taking advantage of the opportunity to pay prisoners far less than the legal minimum wage is unacceptable. Especially in times of economic crisis, UK companies have a moral obligation to support their home labour force and invest in the domestic economy. Equally, I have some sympathy with the argument that work experience can help ex-offenders become productive and law-abiding members of society. So how to ensure that cheap prisoner labour doesn't erode the job prospects of regular workers?

One control already in place is a quota system - no more than 20% of a company's staff can be drawn from the prison community. But the fact that an upper limit is needed just seems to reinforce the notion that the main appeal to employers lies in the low cost of prisoner labour. So, what if the minimum wage legislation was applied to prisoners? While it might not be appropriate for those serving sentences to take home the same wage as a non-offender, the difference between what the employer pays and what the prisoner can keep could be contributed to a victim support fund.

This seems to me quite an elegant solution - it avoids the prison population becoming a source of cheap labour and it is likely to appeal to an entirely different segment of the business community. It moves the emphasis right away from low-cost labour and towards prisoner rehabilitation and it introduces a new element of social contribution - something that could sit quite comfortably with the CSR agenda of an ethical business.

Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke has declared an intention to double the number of prisoners working full time, but this is apparently the first time that prisoners have been allowed to work outside prison premises. Now that the precedent has been set, it's important to ensure that prisoner outworking is put on a proper footing.

Embedded sustainability - an idea whose time has come

I have been struck recently by the possibility that business may finally be grasping the concept that corporate environmental and social responsibility needs to be embedded in the organisation and, furthermore, that it might actually bring commercial benefit. This point is made convincingly by a new book - Embedded Sustainability: The Next Big Competitive Advantage, by Chris Laszlo and Nadya Zhexembayeva (Greenleaf Publishing, 2011). There's an executive summary of its contents, and a discount code (although sadly not valid on the ebook), on the Defra Sustainable Development website.

The book argues that the companies who will succeed are those who choose to embed sustainability into their DNA, incorporating environmental, health, and social value into core business activities with no trade-offs in price or quality. But unlike the ubiquitous bolt-on approaches, embedded sustainability requires a fundamental paradigm shift across every dimension of the business. The writers believe that most organisations have yet to discover how to meet both shareholder and stakeholder requirements in the core business – without mediocrity and without compromise – creating value for the company that cannot be disentangled from the value it creates for society and the environment.
 
This point of view is taken still further by another author, Carol Sanford in her title The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success (Jossey-Bass, 2011). Carol argues that the most successful and profitable businesses, over time, will not be those that "practice CSR" but instead those that rethink their purpose, reorganize themselves to draw upon the creativity and passion of all, and integrate responsible behavior into the way they do everything they do. And, as she told Greenbiz.com, that goes beyond embedding sustainability into the business; taken to its logical conclusion, it could mean the end of CSR as we know it.
 
These are familiar concepts to me, after almost 20 years working for a subsidiary of Kyocera Corporation, which could be the poster child for responsible business. Kyocera's founder, Dr Kazuo Inamori, established the Kyocera Philosophy in the early 1960s, shortly after the company was founded, and at its heart is a single, simple promise: to do what is right as a human being. Almost 50 years on, and with over 60,000 employees across the World, Kyocera employees are still trained in the Kyocera Philosophy and refer to its guiding principles in their daily decisions. All well and good - but it provokes another dilemma. We simply don't have the vocabulary to describe this alternative approach to business in a way that is concise and easy to understand. As with sustainability, the lexicon for ethical and responsible business is littered with terms that fail to convey effectively the commercial and social benefits that accrue from this approach.