Intervention/Marv

 I decided to call my project “The Dream of Living a decent life.” Many workers dream about living decent lives where they earn enough to cover their bills and afford basic needs. My project is all about fighting for that dream to come true, and my way of doing it is by using activist artwork to spotlight the push for wages so workers can live that dream one day. 

My inspiration to talk about this topic comes from witnessing adults needing help to afford the cost of living a non luxury life with the amount they earn from their jobs, and it is an issue that needs to be discussed. According to the US Department of Agriculture, “The CPI for all food increased 0.1 percent from November 2023 to December 2023, and food prices were 2.7 percent higher than in December 2022.” It is also set to increase by 2.9 percent in 2024. We are in a place where the cost of living is consistently getting more expensive; however, it is not quite the case with the minimum wage. Data from the economic policy institute stated that, in 2020, the top 1% of earners in the United State made about 26 times more than the bottom 90%. There are changes that need to be made. I created a poster to help raise awareness and make a change .

My poster inspiration came from the Silence=Death poster created in 1987 by a group of men in New York City to spread awareness of the AIDS epidemic. I chose this artwork because it is a straightforward statement. A quote from the reading that inspired me to come up with my quote was, “Manifestos don’t work. Sentences barely do. You need sound bites and catchphrases crafted in plain language. The poster is exactly that.” (The 25 most influential works of American protest art). Some feedback I received from people about my poster was the following.

“We want equality in wages. We deserve it as much as the other people getting more than us. If everything is going up, why are our wages not? And as we do our jobs, we risk our lives for pennies that can't even support our needs.”

”This is a statement: yes, we deserve fair wages. If we work day and night, we shouldn’t have to fail to feed our family: the system and the people governing us need to treat workers as humans and not robots.”