The Tennessee Convict War/ "Kill a man, get another; kill a mule, buy another."

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Submitted by midtowng on Tue, 08/11/2009 - 22:44.

* labor union history

"Kill a man, get another; kill a mule, buy another."
- a familiar phrase in the mines the convicts workedThe Tennessee Convict War


In 1997 the Tennessee branch of the AFL-CIO made an agreement with the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) to support the privatization of Tennessee's state prison system. This opened the door for Tennessee's prison labor being used to compete with private industry.
Currently the highest-paying prisoner in Tennessee earns 50 cents an hour to produce jeans for Kmart and JC Penney, among other things.

Of all the states, Tennessee unions should have been the last ones to support prison labor. The reason lies more than a century in the past, in the days following the end of slavery.

Worse than Slavery

With the end of the Civil War, employers all over the south were confronted by the reality of the end of free labor. They appealed to their state representatives for help and their representatives responded by finding a pool of free labor previously untapped - prisoners.
It was called Convict Leasing. The prisoners would work for companies during the day outside of prison, and then return to their cells at night. Neglect, brutality, and abuse of the prisoners were rampant, as was official corruption. The conditions were so harsh that prisoners rarely survived longer than 10 years, but everyone was making money from it (except for the prisoners, of course) so the system remained.

In fact the system was so successful that there was a need for more labor. In many states simple assault carried sentences of seven and eight years of hard labor. Larceny could get you twenty years in prison. Stealing five dollars worth of goods could net you twelve months. Even the theft of a rail fence could put you in prison stripes.

Of course, this reality wasn't true for everyone (read: white people). If it was then there would be a political backlash. Instead these inhumane laws fell disproportionately on the recently freed black community.
At Tennessee's main prison in Nashville, African-Americans represented 33 percent of the prisoners in October of 1865. In 1866 Tennessee passed it's convict leasing law. By 1869, 64% of the prison was African-American, and it kept climbing in the following years.

The benefits of this new slavery fell on a select few - the rich.
Poor whites workers found themselves at a disadvantage in this system when their interests conflicted with the upper-class.
In January 1871, free white miners in Tracy City struck for higher wages against the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company (TCI). TCI brought in convict labor as strikebreakers. The strike ultimately failed and was broken.


By 1889, TCI was contracting, or sub-contracting out 60 percent of all of Tennessee's prison population for over $100,000 a year.

Strikebreaking of this sort would pop up several more times in the following twenty years. Whenever the miners tried to organize for better wages and working conditions, the companies would use the threat of convict labor. In the words of TCI company vice-president A. S. Colyar, "an effective club to hold over the heads of free laborers."
This stalemate ended in 1891.

The New South Rebellion

"Kill a man, get another; kill a mule, buy another."
- a familiar phrase in the mines the convicts worked

In 1866, right around the end of the War between the States, coal began to be mined in an area of Anderson County known as Coal Creek. By 1870 this sparsely populated area contained 10 businesses, three of them saloons.

Read More of Historical Article, here......at............
http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/tennessee-convict-war