The Day I Spent in Jail

     Ralitsa and I knew it would be a special audit.  CSCC had never done a prison audit before, so we scoured the web for laws and guidelines on prison labor, looking to the ILO and European, as well as Hungarian, standards. What we didn’t count on was just how different our perspective would be from that of the factory management.  Because of this difference, we almost ended up spending the night in prison!
     Our interpreter, Tamas, facilitated introductions to factory management, and the day began in a promising manner.  The factory contact had set aside documents for us to review, and we discussed how to interview the prisoners in a way that would ensure our safety while still allowing for confidentiality.  The factory seemed to be well prepared for the audit.  However, we were soon to find that due to the radically different interests of the assessment parties, this was not the case.
     The factory was located in the prison and used both civilian workers and prisoners in about equal proportions, so Ralitsa asked to interview half civilian and half prison workers. Although the factory manager initially agreed to allow the prisoner interviews, he changed his mind, citing a Hungarian law that requires permission from the national prison authority for such an undertaking.  He also sought to rely on the legal distinction in work status at the facility.  The civilian workers, he said, were employed directly by the factory.  The prison workers were “employees” of the prison service, effectively contracted by the factory, and were subject therefore to prison service rules, not the Hungarian labor laws covering the civilian employees.
     This complication was only one obstacle we faced.  It turned out that the documentation provided was grossly inadequate because the prisoner information was allegedly private.  The management used the Hungarian Data Privacy Act as a reason not to show us the requested civilian data, even though Ralitsa had a copy of the Act and pointed to the section allowing us to see the data.  When Ralitsa picked employees to be interviewed, the factory manager initially appeared to ignore her choices and picked other employees.  And so the day continued in this manner, obstacle after obstacle, refusal after refusal, until at 5pm, after completing as much of the assessment as we were allowed to, Ralitsa decided to call the closing meeting.    
     Although they agreed with most of the assessment observations, the factory managers kept saying that we were not accounting for this “special situation,” that our audit tool was ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of a factory in a prison.  We insisted it was not ok that there was no emergency evacuation drill for the prisoners.  But we can’t show them how to escape, they pointed out.  Well, couldn’t they reach some compromise, we asked?  After all, they’re not just prisoners, they’re human beings too.  At that point, the factory management said, “we will not reach an agreement here – we are coming at this from perspectives too different to reconcile.” 
     And there it was.  We saw the prisoners as human beings, murderers and thieves though they may be.  Factory management saw the prisoners exclusively as a threat to human beings.  All of the legal and social theory I have studied was of no use.  We could not reach a practical solution to bridge our perspectives.

     It is interesting to note that while the prison audit was a new experience, some of the legal issues that arose during the audit are fairly standard.  First, the prison director’s assertion that the prisoners were contracted from another entity (if not an employer) is a common method employers use to get around employment standards they do not want to uphold.  In the UK (among many other countries), for instance, many factory managers hire agency workers and then fail to maintain payroll information for these workers on the ground that they are employees of the agency, not the factory.  Second, like the prison director, these managers claim that for data privacy reasons, they are not allowed to maintain the workers’ information at the factory – it is doubtful that this is the case.  Finally, in both instances, one can see how easy it is to manipulate the law, especially in murky areas that the laws were not designed to target.  In both cases, it is highly unlikely that legislation was intended to cover third party social auditors’ access to employee information, either civilian or prisoner.  This omission leaves a great deal of room for ambiguity and interpretation.  Therefore, while the motivations and excuses for evading legal standards will differ in given situations, the means of evasion are often common.

If you have comments or questions about this piece, please contact Lara Blecher at lblecher@intlcompliance.com