Quote Originally Posted by thir View Post
Tax payers do not get anything, the private firms do, and the convicts earn time off their sentence. Ordinary people loose jobs.
From the OP I got the impression that the prisoners were doing jobs which had formerly been done by county employees, doing county maintenance, not by workers in a private company. Granted, some county workers will probably lose their jobs, but that's almost a foregone conclusion anyway, with governments at every level having to cut back due to falling revenues. At least this way the necessary maintenance gets done.

I've worked in jobs which required union membership, and I've worked in jobs without unions. I much prefer the latter. In my experience, the only people the union leadership was interested in protecting were those who didn't want to actually do any work. Those of us who did our fair share, and then some, were threatened by the union for doing too much! While I realize that the unions have, or did have, their uses, making it mandatory to join in order to work is just plain wrong! If they want members they should be forced to compete, just like any other business.