Factory owners: Federal prisoners stealing our business

Emily Jane Fox
CNN
August 14, 2012

Just hearing the word Unicor is enough to make Kurt Wilson see red.

Unicor is a government-run enterprise that employs over 13,000 inmates — at wages as low as 23 cents an hour — to make goods for the Pentagon and other federal agencies.

[...]

Wilson has been competing with Unicor for 20 years. He’s an executive at American Apparel Inc., an Alabama company that makes military uniforms. (It is not affiliated with the international retailer of the same name.) He has gone head-to-head with Unicor on just about every product his company makes — and said he has laid off 150 people over the years as a result.

“We pay employees $9 on average,” Wilson said. “They get full medical insurance, 401(k) plans and paid vacation. Yet we’re competing against a federal program that doesn’t pay any of that.”

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This article was posted: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 at 1:02 pm

Tags: domestic news, financial

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