Reply #10: including that philanthropist bill gates. an early adopter, as always. [View All]

[Hannah Bell]

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=864

Was your Microsoft Windows 95 packed and shrink-wrapped by a Washington State prisoner? According to one prisoner who works for Exmark, a company specializing in product packaging, approximately 90 prisoners at the Twin Rivers Correctional Center (TRCC) in Monroe shrink-wrapped 50,000 units of Windows 95.

"Those were good times for us," he recalls fondly. "Everybody had plenty of work then." That same worker says he was laid off after the Microsoft contract, and hasn't worked since. Each day, he says, he checks the bulletin board: Exmark posts a "call-out" list with the names of those workers fortunate enough to have a job the following day. He explains that those prisoners with the least seniority or who have fallen into disfavor for anything from back talking to poor work habits will appear on the call-out list only for the largest contracts.

Exmark is a subsidiary of Pac Services, a Redmond packaging company which also employs non-prisoner, or "free-world," workers. Steve Curly, an Exmark employee, denied the company had packed any Windows 95. But he said that Exmark's TRCC operation had packed tens of thousands of units of Microsoft Office, and had wrapped and shipped as many as 40,000 Microsoft mice in one week.