Cristine Li

Becoming Green, a private telemarketing company, hired 23 prisoners at low wage. Seventeen of them are being paid at £3 a day, which is only 6% of the minimum wage, to work in the company’s call centre. Meanwhile, 17 former employees were fired with the explanation that it was “part of the normal call centre enviornment”. Most of the fired employees said that they were fired because the company wanted to reduce a great amount of salaries payment by hiring prisoners instead of regular employees.

So is it unethical to hire low-paid prisoners?

There is no appropriate answer for it. For the company, it absolutely prefer hiring prisoners for saving costs and earn more profits. However, for the regular employees, they are non-competitive compare to the prisoners that they done the work at almost  free. For the prisoners, it provides them work experience except the extremely low wage. It seems unethical for both the employees and the prisoners about the wage differences. However, there is no rule that anyone is assigned to a particularly job, so the company has the right to decide who they want to hire. And it is actually having a ecnomic innovation which should be encouraged and congratulated.

Read the whole article here.