A recent edition of The Guardian featured a story about the controversial use of prison labour. The article reported that prisoners are being employed by a telemarketing company for pay far below minimum wage -in fact, the prisoners are earning the equivalent of only 60 cents an hour. This raises concerns from several different angles; some people worry that the prisoners are being forced into less-than-ideal working conditions, while others see employment as an undeserved reward for convicts who are supposedly in prison to be punished. There is also the issue of cheap prison labour displacing non-prison workers and creating an advantage for companies that are willing to cut labour costs by hiring from the prison work force.

In his article “Profiting from Prison Labour” in Canadian Business, Chris MacDonald argues that while prison labour is, “to be sure, an ethical issue,” he can see no problem from a business ethics standpoint. According to MacDonald, companies and displaced non-prison workers have no justified cause for complaint because “no one has a right to any particular job” and using prison labour does not give a company any unfair advantage over another. MacDonald states that the (legal) use of prison labour is completely ethical.