Financial Times photo of the former prison ship, now housing Italian workers in Britain
Desperate foreign workers are living in virtual incarceration on an ex-prison ship docked in Britain. They have to be vanned to work to avoid being beaten by locals furious at their jobs being taken by outsiders. I’m guessing living conditions on the ship are wretched, and the workers have no protection or rights.
Is this the abhorrent future of global labor? Or, more accurately, is this the abhorrent contemporary? Global contracting firms profiting off the benefits of indefinite prison barge leases, sailing to wherever there is a demand to undercut the subcontracting labor markets with cheap resource that technically belongs to no country but rather now to a multinational company, where international law is perhaps somehow circumvented by flotillas of sublegal worker camps perpetually cruising beyond the horizons of legal scrutiny?
Gosh, what an apt metaphor for predatory capitalism. Just barge the prisoners workers around the world as needed. Maybe dumping the injured, sick, and any troublesome labor organizers off the side when at sea and no one is looking.