Editorial: Would you work for $1 to $3 a day?

Each year, tens of thousands of people being held in the federal immigration detention system are put to work scrubbing floors, cooking meals and landscaping grounds, among other menial jobs. They can work as much as eight hours a day and 40 hours a week. The pay: $1 to $3 a day.

That’s right. Up to $3 a day in a nation where the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Since the work shifts are voluntary, it’s hard to call this slavery, but it is highly objectionable that the government takes financial advantage of detainees being held pending immigration hearings.

As The Times reported this week, Congress set the voluntary work program’s dollar-a-day minimum wage in 1950, when the hourly minimum wage nationwide was 75 cents. Congress reviewed the rate in 1979 but chose to leave it unchanged. Critics, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, point out that there is nothing stopping Immigration and Customs Enforcement from paying more than that unreasonably low minimum, but the government has chosen not to.

At one level, the voluntary work program seems like a reasonable idea. ICE officials say it helps detainees break the monotony of incarceration, shores up morale and reduces discipline problems. Wages are usually placed in individual accounts for use at the detention center commissary (where critics say prices are exorbitant), and any balance goes with the detainees when they are transferred, freed or deported.

The problem is the wage level: 13 cents an hour. It’s especially objectionable when the workers are not prisoners being punished for crimes but would-be immigrants and asylum-seekers awaiting word on whether they will be deported or allowed to remain in the United States.

There’s more at play here than fairness to the detainees. According to one estimate, the private contractors and local governments that run most of the facilities shave at least $40 million off their annual operating costs by having work done in-house for which they otherwise would have to pay minimum or market wages.

The Obama administration could fix this by raising the detainees’ minimum wage to the federal level. An even better solution would be for Congress to extend Fair Labor Standards Act protections to detainees who perform work supporting detention operations, add enough money in the budget to pay for their wages and establish an oversight structure to monitor compliance and working conditions. In other words, treat the job-holding detainees like the workers they are.

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