A shipyard that can’t hire a welder is not a shipyard with a worker shortage. It’s a shipyard that won’t pay what welding costs. In his Fox News column, John Koufos — a former criminal trial attorney turned consultant — proposes the elegant solution: train incarcerated people for the yards, because the free market has run out of free bodies. He reaches for national-security language and the “second-chance hiring” register, and he works very hard to keep your eyes off the wage column, which is where the actual problem lives, and which the proposal is the receipt for.
China is genuinely building ships at a rate the United States cannot match. The American maritime industrial base has atrophied. The last thirty years have not been kind to the shipyards. None of that is the columnist’s invention, and I won’t pretend it is.
But. The binding constraint on American shipbuilding is not the number of warm bodies willing to hold a stinger. It’s the wage. The market rate for a skilled pipefitter in the Gulf South runs north of what most U.S. shipyards pay — and that “what most yards pay” figure is, in turn, pinned down by Navy procurement contracts that reimburse labor at rates negotiated years in advance. “Just pay the welder” is shorthand for “rebuild the procurement system.” That is a fight worth picking. The work itself is harder than the building trades. The conditions are worse. The job security is shakier. The industry has been running on the labor of people who couldn’t afford to leave, and now that unemployment is low and the building trades are paying real money, the workers have left. The “shortage” is a wage story. It is a wage story every time. It is a wage story the consultant’s clients have no interest in telling you about, because the solution to a wage story is to pay the wage.
The proposal to use incarcerated workers tells you what the yards would rather do. Prisoners can’t quit. Prisoners can’t file a grievance. Prisoners can’t organize. Prisoners who slow down or talk back can be sent back to their cells. A captive labor pool is the dream of every employer losing workers to better-paying competitors, and it has been the dream of American employers, on and off, for as long as there have been American prisons. The convict-lease system that followed the Thirteenth Amendment was, in its economic logic, exactly this proposal: a population with no labor market alternative, put to work for somebody else’s profit. The “second chance” language is new. The mechanism is old.
I have no patience for a business model that only pencils out because it can access a workforce that cannot say no. That isn’t a national asset. It’s a welfare program for the yard owners. The state pays to cage the worker. The state pays to train the worker. And the shipyard gets the labor at a fraction of the cost of a free citizen.
The phrase the column keeps reaching for — “lowest-level offenders” — is doing a lot of quiet work. The offenders least likely to object. The ones with the shortest possible leverage against the people training them. “Honors program behind prison walls” is a phrase I will be thinking about for some time. I’m not anti-market; I’m anti-extraction, and what the column is describing is extraction in its purest form.
And the British precedent the column leans on is, if anything, a warning rather than a vindication. The United Kingdom is, in fact, considering prisoner labor for its shipyards — and the British shipbuilding industry has, for thirty years, run on the same basic playbook the American one runs on: aggressive contracting-out, falling real wages, dwindling apprenticeship pipelines, and the quiet assumption that someone will always be desperate enough to do the work. Two countries, same playbook, same outcome. Importing prison labor is not a deviation from the playbook; it is the playbook’s logical endpoint.
So. What would actually work?
Pay the welders. Match the wage the building trades are paying, and rewrite the Navy procurement contracts that make the current rates possible. The workers came back to construction after 2008 when those wages started to mean something. They will come to the shipyards.
Rebuild the apprenticeship. The boilermakers, the ironworkers, the carpenters — they all run apprenticeship programs that take people with no experience and produce journeymen in three to five years. The shipyards used to run these programs. They were killed in the consolidation era. Put them back. Fund them out of the procurement budget. Every Navy contract has a training line. Use it.
Steal Kaiser’s playbook. Henry Kaiser had never built a ship when the United States entered World War II, and his yards built at a pace no American shipyard has matched since. He did it by paying welders what welders were worth, by hiring people who’d never held a torch and training them on the clock, and by giving them a deadline that made the work feel like a war. The argument that you cannot do a version of this today is the argument that the American worker of 2026 is less capable than the American worker of 1942. I am not prepared to make that argument.
Build the public option. The United States already operates four public shipyards, in the form of the Naval Sea Systems Command’s own yards in Norfolk, Portsmouth, Puget Sound, and Pearl Harbor. They are old, underfunded, and do a small fraction of what they once did. The model — government-owned industrial capacity for strategic work — is what every serious maritime power runs. Korea has it. China has it. Norway has it. We used to have more of it, and the Finnish and Norwegian commercial yards that still build complex vessels today do it because the jobs pay a wage that makes the work worth doing.
And, separately, run real second-chance programs. The Center for Employment Opportunities runs a CEO Academy that prepares people with criminal convictions for trade school, places them in real jobs, and provides post-placement support. The building trades have always taken applicants with records alongside everyone else, because the apprenticeship model does not require a clean background check — just a willingness to show up. These programs work. They’re just less convenient for an employer than a captive workforce would be. The convenience is the tell.
A free worker with a living wage and a union card will build your fleet faster and better than a captive doing time. The shipyards are not empty because the country ran out of welders. The shipyards are empty because the country ran out of welders willing to work for what the yards pay. One of those is a real problem with a real solution. The other is a real problem with a captive answer, and we have tried the captive answer before, and it did not end well for the captives. Pay the wage. Rewrite the contracts. Train the worker. Build the thing. Anyway.