Public Installation • Farmville, NC • Summer 2018
Our service industry today is broken; when one obtains a service sector job, they often stay in the service sector for longer than initially planned. Those who occupy these places are usually 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 physical and emotional fatigue, which is unique to this work environment. There is no growth, promotion, or raise to your minimum wage. It is stagnating. This cycle of labor from 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 whose living conditions were still terrible. Still, it would be like comparing apples and oranges. In this period, one would grow their crop, cotton, but often would end up mortgaging it before it was planted. From this point on, the general store merchant owns the yield. This practice led to stealing cotton in the middle of the night in hopes of making some profit off the land. Often, it leads to imprisonment and thus goes around again.
We like to think of history as linear, the past, but it just evolves with us. People with low incomes still get sent to prison, and they 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.