In a Tight Labor Market, Even Inmates Are Landing Jobs “When the unemployment rate is lower, employers will adapt to people rather than asking people to adapt to them.” The American economy hasn’t experienced this kind of fierce competition for workers since the late 1990s and early 2000s, the last time the unemployment rate — currently 4.1 percent — was this low. “When the unemployment rate is high, you can afford to not hire anyone who has a criminal record, you can afford to not hire someone who’s been out of work for two years,” said Lawrence H. Summers, the Harvard economist and former Treasury secretary. Amy Glaser, a senior vice president for Adecco, a staffing firm, said that especially during the recent holiday season, there was a surge in demand for warehouse workers, creating opportunities for people who might have struggled to find work earlier in the economic recovery. In Dane County, Wis., where the unemployment rate was just 2 percent in November, demand for workers has grown so intense that manufacturers are taking their recruiting a step further: putting inmates to work in factories even while they serve their prison sentences. “Our company is looking for new ways to find pools of people just because of our hiring needs being so high,” Ms. Yeadon said. Nearly every weekday morning for much of last year, Mr. Forseth would board a van at the minimum-security prison outside Madison, Wis., and ride to Stoughton Trailers, where he and more than a dozen other inmates earned $14 an hour wiring taillights and building sidewalls for the company’s line of semitrailers. Two years ago, Ms. Glaser said, companies required warehouse workers to have high school diplomas and experience with the scanners used to track merchandise.
