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Imho it's not as simple as that, the article has a paragraph who puts it in some perspective: "Nobody wants to have a big goat dairy, so we did it," Joey Grise

Imho it's not as simple as that, the article has a paragraph who puts it in some perspective: "Nobody wants to have a big goat dairy, so we did it," Joey Grisenti says. This farm, with its guaranteed supply of low-cost workers, can survive when other farms cannot. "A lot of people just can't afford to have the manpower that we have here," he says.". What does this say? That goat diaries seem to be an unprofitable business unless you've got a "guaranteed supply of low-cost workers". So either goat milk products are being sold too cheap or the process of goat milking needs to be made less labor intensive. Whatever the solution might be, one thing is for certain: These "guaranteed low-cost workers" sure as hell ain't gonna make it easier for any private competition to join the market, at least if said competition wants to pay their labor fair living wages and still stay competitive. Then there's also the fact that plenty of countries around the world manage to produce goat milk just fine, without having to employ prison labor, among them, even developed EU countries like France, Spain, Greece or the Netherlands. Countries with way higher labor costs compared to the US, yet there seems to be no shortage of goat milk there?

morley 9y ago
The other side of this coin is that, for these "low-cost workers," the goat farm gig is probably better than their alternatives. > Workers on this farm get strip-searched. If they're caught with drugs or tobacco, or get in fights, they could lose this job and be sent to a higher-security facility with a lot less freedom. > > And then there's the pay. It varies, depending on the job, but most inmates on the farm earn a few dollars a day. That's better than most prison jobs, which typically pay less than a dollar a day, but still, it's cut-rate labor. Should that opportunity cost to the prisoners in this program have weight in whether this "cut-rate labor" is ethical or not? If the farm can't sell it's goat milk for ethical reasons and the prisoners wind up in lower-paying or worse jobs, was Whole Foods' righteous action actually ethical? Lots of complex questions here. I don't know the answers here, but it's a little annoying that one letter to Whole Foods taking the moral high ground could handwave so much nuance.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  >The other side of this coin is that, for these "low-cost workers," the goat farm gig is probably better than their alternatives. When you're talking about people who are in prison, "alternatives" can be actual torture. I'd rather work in a stinking pit than be locked in a tiny room 23.5 hours a day, and that last thing is always an "alternative" in prison.

morley 9y ago

The other side of this coin is that, for these "low-cost workers," the goat farm gig is probably better than their alternatives. > Workers on this farm get strip-searched. If they're caught with drugs or tobacco, or get in fights, they could lose this job and be sent to a higher-security facility with a lot less freedom. > > And then there's the pay. It varies, depending on the job, but most inmates on the farm earn a few dollars a day. That's better than most prison jobs, which typically pay less than a dollar a day, but still, it's cut-rate labor. Should that opportunity cost to the prisoners in this program have weight in whether this "cut-rate labor" is ethical or not? If the farm can't sell it's goat milk for ethical reasons and the prisoners wind up in lower-paying or worse jobs, was Whole Foods' righteous action actually ethical? Lots of complex questions here. I don't know the answers here, but it's a little annoying that one letter to Whole Foods taking the moral high ground could handwave so much nuance.

QAPereo 9y ago
>The other side of this coin is that, for these "low-cost workers," the goat farm gig is probably better than their alternatives. When you're talking about people who are in prison, "alternatives" can be actual torture. I'd rather work in a stinking pit than be locked in a tiny room 23.5 hours a day, and that last thing is always an "alternative" in prison.