Counting Down

Our service industry today is broken, often when one obtains a service sector job, they stay in the service sector for longer than initially planned. Those who occupy these places are often individuals trying to make ends meet and those recently out of the pineal system. While a job, is a job and it is better to be with, than without, these jobs cause not only physical fatigue but also emotional fatigue, that is unique to this work environment. There is no growth, no promotion, no raise to your minimum wage. It is stagnating. This cycle of labor of prisoner to working poor again is not new.

It goes back to the time after reconstruction for the South when plantations were worked by African American tenements, along with some whites who’s living conditions were still terrible, but it would be like comparing apples and oranges. In this period one would grow their crop, cotton, but often would end up mortgaging the crop before it has even been planted. From this point on the general store merchant owns the yield. This practice led to stealing of cotton in the middle of the night in hopes to make some profit off the land. More often than not it leads to imprisonment and thus the cycle goes around once again.

We like to think of history as linear, the past, but it just evolves with us. The poor still get sent to prison, who work for nothing inside and nothing on the outside, like the cotton fields they become depleted. Our system is addicted to cheap/free labor, and while it took us 400 years to stop the continuation of free labor in this country, we failed to keep it from evolving.

Textile Installation. Summer 2018