The Government Pen

Growing up, my house was full of government-issued Skilcraft pens. My dad worked for the U.S. Postal Service his entire life, so the pens were all over.¹ As a child, I thought it was extremely cool that working for the U.S. government meant that you could get a pen that said “U.S. Government.” For much of my life, the pen was an object outside of history. It was just there. But eventually I became curious: where did it come from? Did it spontaneously generate in the desk drawers and coat pockets of federal employees and their families?

In college, I developed an interest in the New Deal, specifically how the New Deal state constructed the value of labor. This interest led me to one of the New Deal’s more appalling legacies: the government-owned Federal Prison Industries, Inc., founded in 1934 and more commonly known today as UNICOR. Incarcerated people manufacture goods (like desks and work chairs) and provide services (such as data entry and call center operations to other federal agencies and non-public customers) and are compensated at a rate that is illegal in virtually any other setting — anywhere from 23 cents to $1.15 an hour.²

Is the Skilcraft pen the product of prison labor? I frantically researched the question and was relieved by the answer. The pen does have its roots in the New Deal, but it has nothing to do with UNICOR. Since their inception in 1968, Skilcraft pens have been made by blind and visually impaired workers employed by National Industries for the Blind (NIB). And the NIB was established by Congress in 1938, via the Wagner–O’Day Act.³

The Skilcraft pen’s 50th anniversary in 2018 made it the subject of some glowing press. The Associated Press called the pen “iconic” and cited some of the specifications that have won it praise from federal and military personnel. Each pen contains enough ink to draw a line a mile long; they can operate in both extremely cold and hot environments; they have even reportedly been used “to plug holes in pipes” and “perform emergency medical procedures.” NIB claimed that the pen “is more than just a pen; it’s a symbol of the strength of American manufacturing and the limitless capabilities of people who are blind.” An NIB manager at a Greensboro, North Carolina, factory told the AP that the workers took pride in creating such a storied product, and were paid considerably above minimum wage, with wages topping out at approximately $24 an hour.⁴

Living wages have not, however, always been the case for blind and disabled workers. The Fair Labor Standards Act, which Congress passed in 1938 to establish a federal minimum wage, specifically allowed sub-minimum wages for “those [whose] earning or productive capacity is impaired by age, physical or mental deficiency, or injury.” A 1968 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the average wage of a Skilcraft employee was $1.50 an hour, which was 10 cents lower than the federal minimum wage.⁵ In 1970, the NIB factory in Greensboro was the site of a prolonged strike led by Black workers protesting poor pay and “unbelievably unsafe working conditions.” (The workers successfully organized in 1973.)⁶ Only in October 2021 did AbilityOne, the committee overseeing the NIB and other similar organizations, move to officially end the sub-minimum wage for blind and disabled workers. This decision did not affect most workers — in 2016, all NIB employees were already paid at least the minimum wage — but it is still striking that it took AbilityOne so long. That decades-long delay reveals how built-in the assumption is that labor must be valued in terms of perceived capacity, rather than as an end in itself.⁷

The Skilcraft pen is indeed more than a pen. It’s the physical embodiment of New Deal social policies; it’s the product of disabled people’s labor, labor which has long been a site of contestation. The process of learning the history of and in the Skilcraft pen has mirrored my own burgeoning understanding of history as a political process, not just a recitation of events in the past. The pen never just appears in your drawer.

Wikimedia Commons.

1. Ylan Q. Mui, “Low-Tech Skilcraft Pens Endure in a High-Tech World,” Washington Post, April 18, 2010. The U.S. Postal Service bought approximately 700,000 Skilcraft pens in 2010, and in 2018, Skilcraft produced approximately 8 million pens total; Jonathan Drew, “Correction: Iconic Pen Story,” AP News, May 1, 2018.
2. “BOP: UNICOR,” Federal Bureau of Prisons, accessed Nov. 29, 2021; Factories with Fences: 85 Years Building Brighter Futures (Federal Prison Industries, Inc., 2019).
3. “SKILCRAFT U.S. Government Pen 50th Anniversary,” National Industries for the Blind, accessed Nov. 29, 2021; “Our History,” National Industries for the Blind, accessed Nov. 29, 2021. The original scope of the act was increased in 1971 by the passage of the Javits–Wagner–O’Day Act, which further expanded federal purchasing of goods and services manufactured by blind and disabled people.
4. Drew, “Correction: Iconic Pen Story”; “SKILCRAFT U.S. Government Pen 50th Anniversary.”
5. Curt Matthews, “Laboratory Seeking New Products and Techniques for Blind Worker,” Sept. 23, 1968, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 23, 1968, p. 22.
6. Milton Coleman, “Skilcraft Blind Workers Begin Picketing,” SOBU Newsletter reprinted in The Register [North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University], Oct. 30, 1970, pp. 11–12 (Register issue online here); Anthony James Ratcliff, “Liberation at the End of a Pen: Writing Pan-African Politics of Cultural Struggle” (PhD. diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2009), 212–13 https://doi.org/10.7275/5TEC-PA16.
7. Michelle Diament, “Federal Jobs Program Moves To End Subminimum Wage,” Disability Scoop, Oct. 22, 2021.