Get to Work or Go to Jail: Workplace Rights Under Threat
This research report explores how workers are threatened with incarceration if they fail or refuse to work to the government's satisfaction. We identify three areas where this occurs: probation and parole, child support enforcement, and collection of criminal justice debt. In each case, we explain the legal basis for this threat and present original data documenting both how often this threat is carried out and how it disproportionately affects low income people and people of color. We further identify four ways these threats may undermine workplace rights, drawing both on individual examples and on analogies to welfare work requirements, prison labor, and workplace immigration enforcement. These four mechanisms are depressing labor standards by forcing workers to take worse jobs, enabling employer retaliation by making job loss a potential trigger for incarceration, evading legal protections by forcing workers into work arrangements deemed not to involve employment relationships, and displacing or undermining other workers by giving employers access to a more vulnerable substitute workforce.