In November 2025, non-profit Jobs to Move America (JMA) filed a lawsuit against Korean car companies Hyundai and Kia in a California state court for the companies' reliance on incarcerated workers' labor, despite the alleged unsafe and exploitative working conditions. JMA claimed that the companies' use of incarcerated workers' labor in Alabama and Georgia is in violation of California state laws and California public purchasing standards, that incarcerated workers are working under forced labor conditions, and that the alleged underpayment and mistreatment of workers provides Hyundai and Kia an "unfair competitive advantage in the California automotive sales market." This legal angle, relying on economic competition, also echoes a key labor movement concept: Suppression of wages and working conditions for the most marginalized workers affects us all, and is fundamentally unfair.
Incarcerated Workers and the Legacy of Southern Labor Exploitation
The initial complaint for the suit is worth reading in its entirety, as it provides insight into how these companies—multi-national, publicly-traded corporations worth billions of dollars—may have control over prisoners and other marginalized workers in their supply chains under conditions which JMA alleges are "coercive" and perhaps even "unconstitutional." While the companies' supply chains may be sprawling and complex—spanning the globe and requiring materials and manufacturing in multiple complex stages—the suit claims the companies have very close "integration with and control" over the supplier factories in the Southern U.S., which employ prisoners as workers. The car companies, therefore, not only know of the poor conditions marginalized workers face, but they also willingly profit from and perpetuate the conditions, it alleges. Further, it provides information about these working conditions at supplier facilities, allegedly involving repeated and "systemic" workplace health and safety issues which could have been prevented (including "five separate amputations and one death"), "oppressive" child labor in violation of federal and state laws, exploitation of non-citizen workers, and "coercive" or "forced" prison labor, in which incarcerated workers "reported more frequent negative experiences, including wage theft, forced overtime, harassment, safety hazards, and lack of breaks," compared to non-incarcerated workers. Incarcerated workers in particular claimed they could face longer sentences, transfer to more dangerous prisons, or other repercussions for refusing to work or for raising the alarm.
The suit provides a window into labor exploitation as it often occurs, involving people who are already part of a marginalized group, like incarcerated people, non-citizens, or children, who, by virtue of their marginalized status, are made to work in poor or unsafe conditions for low pay. They may not report their working conditions to authorities, as they fear reprisals. Further, the lawsuit also touches on the South's long history of poor workers' and labor rights records. Union density in the South was hindered, in large part, because of state-corporate efforts, using racism to divide labor solidarity and prevent unionism. "Right to work" laws, pioneered in the South, further devastated worker power by inhibiting union stability and entrenching low wages. Poverty, structural racism, and mass incarceration frameworks created a skyrocketing, disproportionately Black, Southern incarcerated population. This also made the South the ideal location for "Detention Alley," where immigrant detainees are held in ICE detention centers, often without due process.
Workers in these conditions, formulated and perfected in the South, become more easily exploitable for their labor. These workers may be overworked or underpaid in unsafe conditions and still go without complaint, as they fear losing their livelihoods or even their freedom. While incarcerated people's labor is relied on throughout the country in both the public and private sectors, it is most prevalent in the South. This is because of its high incarcerated population and smaller tax revenue per capita, necessitating prisoners' labor for prison maintenance and public works. The chattel slavery system for the enslavement of African people and their descendants, which a United Nations Resolution recently named the "gravest crime against humanity," has a direct throughline to the labor exploitation of incarcerated people and marginalized workers in the U.S. South today.
The Importance of "Floors" in the Race to the Bottom
The JMA suit also has an interesting legal theory. First, it positioned these multi-national corporations as being far from ignorant about the conditions in their supply chains. Often, large companies like Hyundai and Kia shirk responsibility for labor and human rights issues occurring in facilities of their suppliers. Companies may claim ignorance or a lack of legal responsibility for workers not directly employed by the company itself. The suit paints a different picture; Hyundai and Kia are not only aware of these poor conditions, but actively profit from them, and bear legal responsibility for their profiteering from labor exploitation, it said. The suit also claims that in their knowing profiteering, Hyundai and Kia are violating California's Unfair Competition Law. JMA's theory is that marginalized workers' poor pay and working conditions are beneficial for Hyundai and Kia, which is why the companies do not act to prevent or rectify them—they can get away with paying less and with faster production times. This is an "unfair competitive advantage," JMA claimed. By enabling workers' meager pay and poor working conditions, Hyundai and Kia save big on production costs. They can then sell their products for less money than competitors and get a better foothold in the California electric vehicle market.
But why would "competitive advantage" matter, exactly, when the core issue is workers' rights and safety? Why bring business competition into a human rights conversation? The answer is because it provides an innovative legal theory, but also because the issue is primarily an economic one, and it is an issue that affects us all, regardless of whether we belong to the marginalized groups covered in the suit. This is because incarcerated workers' labor represents a "floor" for all workers throughout the economy. Many discussions about incarcerated workers center on how they will be used to replace people who are not incarcerated, becoming an essentially unpaid labor force which capital craves—a loophole to the Thirteenth Amendment prohibition on slavery. These claims have truth, but this analysis should go further.
Incarcerated labor can function to suppress pay and working conditions for everyone, as the JMA suit alleges, and as new research has shown. This is important to note because it has a more comprehensive systemic analysis—when the floors of wages and working conditions are lowered, we all suffer, and the converse is true—when we raise that floor, such as through setting higher wages, we all can benefit.
The Race to the Bottom in Legal History: U.S. Child Labor Regulation
A historical example of this in the U.S. is child labor regulation. In industrializing 20th-century America, many children faced horrific working conditions. Millions of children as young as five years old could work up to 12 hours per day doing dangerous, backbreaking labor. "Breaker boys" in the coal mines would break coal by hand for hours, inhaling cancer-causing dust. Child textile mill workers were utilized for their small size to change bobbins. They could be scalped, crushed, or killed when they crawled between massive, moving machinery. Even if they were not doing harmful work, they were severely overworked or underpaid. This was by design and was widespread, as child labor was profitable— more than 18 percent of children aged 10 to 15 were employed.
The Keating-Owen Act of 1916, a federal law prohibiting the interstate shipment of goods produced by children under certain specified ages, was created in response to these conditions and struck down by the Supreme Court. In Hammer v. Dagenhart, the Court claimed the Act was a constitutional overreach by Congress, as it would infringe on states' ability to regulate manufacturing conditions. Congress again tried to regulate child labor, passing a law in 1919 to impose a 10% tax on the net profits of companies using child labor. The Court found the law unconstitutional, too, as it was also deemed federal overreach. It took until 1941, with United States v. Darby Lumber Co., for the Court to overturn the Hammer decision and enable Congress to federally regulate child labor.
The Court in Darby Lumber Co. found that Congress was not overreaching its constitutional authority with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The FLSA, which, in part, established national minimum working ages for most employment, also relied on Congress's ability to regulate interstate commerce under Article I of the U.S. Constitution (called the "Commerce Clause"). While Congress conceded that the federal-state division of power could prevent it from directly mandating child labor minimums, it found a workaround with the FLSA. This is because the FLSA was based on economic competition. The theory was that if one state allowed for child labor under a certain age or wages below a certain minimum, it would attract businesses, as companies would move operations to where they could employ cheaper workers. Other states, which had higher requirements, would be undercut economically. This competition, the Court said, could be regulated by Congress under its Commerce Clause authority, so the FLSA could, therefore, impose federal minimum working age requirements as well as other standards. This then set the legal framework for federal child labor regulation in the U.S. It was therefore not moral outrage over the practice, but rather, the economic competition theory behind it, which legally grounded child labor regulation in the U.S.
Labor Solidarity for All: From the U.S. South to the Global South
While it seems uncaring and capitalistic to base the child labor legal framework on competition economics, it has material grounding—it provides a basis for regulation in the absence of an adequate legal rights framework and echoes the "floor" concept. When workers, whether they are children, undocumented, or incarcerated, are underpaid or mistreated, all workers ultimately suffer. It drives down standards for us all. This is the "race to the bottom" concept. Lawsuits like JMA's can be helpful in pointing out how the race to the bottom happens in the U.S. today and in naming and shaming the companies that take advantage of it. What's even more important to countering the race to the bottom is labor solidarity and workers' own power structures, like unions. They build lasting, countervailing power and can prevent exploitation from happening in the first place. Incarcerated workers' labor should be something all workers are keenly aware of, and their working conditions and wages should matter to us all. This logic extends to all working people, from the U.S. South to the Global South, who are all affected by the race to the bottom.
Labor solidarity with incarcerated workers should be nuanced. While work release programs and involuntary work assignments can be dangerous and coercive, described as "modern day slavery," some incarcerated workers in less poor conditions say they still want to maintain their jobs, though they know their work is complicated by the fact that their labor is inherently coerced and rooted in structural racism. Regardless, all incarcerated workers should have, at a minimum, the protections and standards that non-incarcerated workers have. Incarcerated worker-activists are already pushing to be recognized and respected as workers, and have organized nationwide strikes, reflecting these calls. Again, a labor movement notion of solidarity is helpful here, as this means we should be thinking in terms of a floor for all working people, incarcerated or not. Movement organizers, especially those in the South, should be thinking of strategies that include incarcerated workers' voices and demands. Southern states maintain low floors for wages and working standards, and lower them further with low-paid incarcerated workers. To change this, it requires solidarity-based thinking, affirming that a threat to any worker is a threat to all. We must raise those floors, in the South and everywhere. The JMA suit can provide a lesson in how to think about this structurally. Global supply chains like Hyundai's and Kia's connect us all economically, as workers or consumers. We can use economic levers of power, like boycotts, but primarily strikes or other coordinated, organized labor actions to push back.
News coverage of the JMA suit centers on its claims about incarcerated workers, but it is important to take note of the other workers the suit covers: immigrant or non-citizen workers. In addition to non-citizen adults facing labor exploitation, children have also been found working in the Southern car manufacturing facilities named in the complaint. They have Mexican citizenship or citizenship from Central American countries like Guatemala. There is a legal, social, and economic continuum of "detention" shared between immigration detention and prisons and jails, which means that non-citizen or immigrant workers often face the same issues incarcerated workers face, and for similar reasons.
The immigration detention system was created in the U.S. as a "deterrent". Those who created immigration "enforcement" infrastructures knew that they could not detain and deport every non-citizen in violation of immigration requirements. However, they believed that the threat of detention and deportation was enough to either prevent others from migrating to the U.S. without authorization or to keep the non-citizens in the U.S. fearful, so they may "self-deport." This rationale is officially documented in lawmakers' reports. However, what is unspoken, but is also likely known to them, are the "chilling effects"—the fear instilled by immigration enforcement and detention suppresses wages and working conditions of non-citizen workers. Chilling effects can be seen as an economic benefit to businesses and are frequently exploited by the businesses that employ undocumented workers. Immigrant labor exploitation can therefore operate in a similar way to incarcerated workers' labor exploitation—it can suppress wages and working conditions for all workers, not just other marginalized workers. That is why union leadership and labor movement members acknowledge that protecting undocumented workers is a key fight for the movement.
With the vast expansion of immigration detention centers and aggressive, racialized immigration enforcement across the U.S., the struggles of marginalized non-citizen workers, like those of incarcerated workers, are becoming more linked and important. Incarceration and detention are not only a means of using the Thirteenth Amendment "loophole," but they also function as a messaging tool, one of labor discipline, of lowering everyone's standards and rights expectations. It is essential that we realize them for what they are, and that we know how important it is to support each other and push back.