The minimum wage machine

Check this out: artist Blake Fall-Conroy has designed a machine to help people understand the reality of exploitation in a mimimum wage job.

The box is full of (American) pennies, and you have to crank the handle hard in order to get out a penny every 5.04 seconds, which adds up to $7.15 (about £4.50) an hour, the minimum wage in the state of New York. If you stop turning the handle, you stop getting paid.

The artist says in his statement that he wants his projects to be “socially conscious”, “easy to understand,” and that he’s “more interested in communicating ideas than making art.”

This project is great at communicating the reality of what minimum wage labour is, drudgery for a pitiful reward. If you imagine that a boss was deriving some other benefit from you cranking the handle (generating energy say), and you only get paid every 5.04 seconds, then you come to realise that all the times you crank the handle for no reward you are basically a slave, receiving no compensation for your labour. This is where the money that makes rich people rich comes from: all the work you do that they don’t pay you for.

(Thanks very much to LydiaTeapot for being first to spot this and show it to me.)