Hypertext #2

For my second hypertext essay, I will focus on the small-town commercial fishing industry. Coming from a small fishing port, I have seen my entire life the struggles and dangers that fishermen face on a daily basis. They work in awful conditions, often out on boats for weeks or months at a time, and are never guaranteed that they will even get paid. Except for the elite few captains who control the industry and do extremely well, fishing is a consuming and often fruitless occupation. Fishermen (and women) leave their families constantly, traveling out into stormy waters to face bone chilling temperatures on unreliable boats, never positive that they will make it back to shore safely. From unsafe hooks and nets that can easily tangle a person and throw them to sea, the idea of sinking to the bottom of the ocean is never free from a fisherman’s mind. In the past ten years or so the industry has taken a severe hit, especially in my own town. Independent fishermen struggle to compete with huge corporations as well as the many regulations and taxes being placed on the industry. To explore this topic, I hope to employ the research quality of Schlosser and the personal connections of Ehrenreich’s work, and to help the reader to become more aware of the faults in America’s views of low-wage workers, as Shipler does.
My hypertext essay will show the fishing industry’s low-wage majority, as well as the few who are able to do well. I will explore the conditions of working on the boats, the actual income of an average independent commercial fisherman, and the group of men and women who have had to find other low-wage jobs because of the fishing industry’s degeneration. For many in the industry, fishing is all they know how to do. Most smaller fishing ports do not have another main source of income or industry, forcing those who cannot make it at sea to simply move to land’s low-wage work. In some ways, fishing is much like gambling. These men and women put their lives as well as their finances on each journey out of the harbor, and they rarely can beat the odds.