Becoming Green, a company that sells solar panels, uses telemarketing as one of the ways to sell their products. However, the telemarketing division of this company surprisingly contains more than a dozen workers, who are inmates from the Prescoed open prison located in Monmouthshire. According to the article from BBC News, Becoming Green claims that they are supporting these inmates’ rehabilitation, and the company is proud. This sounds pretty encouraging and supportive doesn’t it? Well, this doesn’t sound like a good idea when you obtain the knowledge that most of them only gets paid 40p (£0.40) a hour and only earns £3 at the end of the day, while the minimum wage in United Kingdoms is £6.19 per hour. Former employees of the firm has told that the company started to fire some employees, even if their performance was acceptable and meeting the company’s performance targets, and then filled their positions with the prison labourers. This company is taking advantage of these prisoners as cheap labour by giving them unfair wages, and also taking jobs away from decent employees unreasonably.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/aug/08/prisoners-call-centre-fired-staff
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-19184054
Photo: http://www.becominggreen.co/