Hyundai Parts Supplier Stops Using Prison Slave Labor in Alabama
According to a New York Times report on December 18, 2024, Ju-Young Manufacturing America, Inc., a company that makes car parts for Hyundai, announced it was ending its arrangement with the Alabama Department of Corrections (DOC) to use prisoner labor.
Like many states in the Deep South, Alabama has a lengthy history of using prisoners as cheap workers—both within the DOC and for private businesses to contract for their labor. The state established a convict leasing system during the antebellum era, when laws known as Black Codes funneled freed slaves into prisons to be used for agricultural and mining labor. “These workers endured brutal conditions,” the Birmingham Free Press reported, “and many died while performing hazardous jobs.”
Convict leasing in Alabama ended in 1928, but prisoners are still contracted to for-profit businesses. Such arrangements have resulted in protests in DOC facilities—including a 2022 statewide strike with demands for fair pay and improved working conditions. There has also been widespread criticism of exploitive prison labor by those on the outside, which prompted Ju-Young to discontinue its contract with the state’s prison system.
Although Alabama’s constitution was amended in 2022 to remove a provision that allowed slavery and involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime—language still present in the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution—that had little effect on the state’s exploitive use of prison labor. Prisoners are used by hundreds of private businesses and government agencies, resulting in $450 million in savings over a five-year period according to a 2024 news article.
As PLN reported, a lawsuit filed by prisoners in December 2023 challenged the DOC’s labor practices, arguing that state officials had “engaged in an unlawful scheme to coerce prisoners in [DOC] custody, especially Black inmates, to work for little or no pay.” According to that complaint, “the main way [that] Plaintiffs allege [the defendants] have coerced inmates into performing labor is by conspiring with Alabama’s Board of Pardons and Parole to shut down the availability of parole in Alabama.” [See: PLN, Mar. 2024, p.32].
The complaint listed various companies that have used prison labor in Alabama as a “modern-day form of slavery,” including Koch Foods; Hwaseung Automotive USA LLC; Southeast Restaurant Group-Wen LLC; Pell City Kentucky Fried Chicken, Inc.; Masonite Corp.; Cast Products, Inc.; Southeastern Meats, Inc.; Paramount Services, Inc.; and Barna Budweiser of Montgomery, Inc.
Prisoners employed through the DOC’s work release program are paid “prevailing wages” for their labor—typically minimum wage—but the prison system deducts 40% of their pay for the cost of their incarceration, plus a $5.00 daily transportation fee. When employed at government agencies through the DOC’s work center program, performing janitorial, sanitation, highway maintenance and other tasks, prisoners are paid just $2.00 a day—the same wage set in 1927. Black prisoners are disproportionately assigned to work center programs instead of higher-paying work release jobs, the suit contended.
The district court dismissed the case on March 20, 2025, without prejudice; Plaintiffs then filed an amended class-action complaint on May 9, 2025, and the case remains pending. See: Council v. Ivey, USDC (M.D. Ala.), Case No. 2:23-cv-00712.
Public pressure and criticism apparently influenced Ju-Young’s decision to abandon its use of cheap prison labor. But the company left open the door to resume once the outcry subsides—though Hyundai’s “supplier code” forbids subcontractors from using “forced labor.”
For a handful of Alabama prisoners in work release centers—about 350, out of a total prison population of 20,469—there is often no work to be had; the unemployment rate there hit 26% in January 2024, almost ten times the state’s 2.9% average—yet only 106 prisoners had been paroled in the prior year, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, July 2024, p.54.]
Sources: Birmingham Free Press, New York Times