Hypertext #2 Proposal

A couple of years ago when I was in high school, I set up a service trip to the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota. It is a reservation in which the Lakota Indians inhabit, scratching for survival each and every day. Young children are brought to the local Main, a place for them to spend there days before they enter schooling. Their parents, can barely afford to provide ends meat, as they both struggle by with low-wage jobs they hold.
For my hypertext essay two, I would like to delve into and expose the low-wage lifestyle that so many endure, especially on the Indian reservations in the United States. After visiting that reservation in South Dakota two years ago, I was struck dumb by the low wages that workers received as compensation. While few Native American families make the money necessary for a family to live, I found that the driving trend on the reservation is either unemployment or the fragmented low-wage jobs on which the people can barely survive. One of the only forms of employment on the reservation is construction work, and this is only seasonal. Not unlike the marble in a women’s house that Ehrenreich refers too, the street’s decay is the “bleeding… [of] the world-wide working class – the people show quarried the marble, wove your Persian rugs…” (90). And who is sent to fix these streets; the seasonal construction workers who live low-wage job to low-wage job. These construction workers live in “a world of pain – managed by Excedrin and Advil, compensated for with cigarettes and, in one or two cases and then only on weekends, with booze” (89).
The reservation only perpetuates the problem that these seasonal low-wage workers have to overcome. In the meat packing industry, workers are paid absolutely nothing and are worth absolutely nothing, as their death only amounts to a $480 fine to the company (Schlosser 178). This meager amount reflects the status and conditions in which these workers are placed. It is not hard to believe then that these low-wage workers must fend for themselves in order to break through, however until that break through their value is nothing as they are deemed indispensable.
It is my hope, that through my research I can show the mountains that low-wage construction workers face on the reservation everyday.