Day Labor

One day Morrison proposed that I join him on the job site. He was likely very sore from doing this work for a few days, and was looking to divide the work load. The pitch was simple; ten dollars a board- removing nails. I thought it sounded alright so I agreed. I met Morrison in the lobby of CoRK at 6:30AM, where from we took his car to the jobsite downtown. At the intersection of Forsyth and Jefferson was a building which at a time around March of that year, Shaun and I had painted one of his crystal murals in preparation for his exhibition at the Museum. The building (the very same, as mentioned herein this post) burned down mysteriously. The city bid 800,000 for the deconstruction, which was a high figure. The property development firm (Pine Street) who developed the CoRK Arts District saw an opportunity and stole the contract. As a bonus to the opportunism, they acquired all of the property rights to the contents of the building (though most of them ashes), including all of the partially burned hardwood timber, laid in the early twentieth century. The timber could be stripped of nails (that's where we came in), stored, planed, processed, and reused in other building projects, of which pine street had no shortage. So, in this cold morning, Morrison and I with hammers in hand processed (that is, took nails out one at a time) plank by plank. The patterns and quantities of nails in the planks varied greatly. It was quite an operation getting one of them clean, and the ten-dollars-a-board figure began to seem more justified than before. Boss-man Mac came around in the early afternoon to give each of us one fifty dollar bill. Morrison and I used our bills to take a lunch break. Back to work for a few hours before boss-man Mac came back around. He wanted to take the boards which we'd cleaned thus far (a total of twenty-one for the day and sixty-something adding in Morrison's boards from pervious days) and load them on a trailer to bring to storage. We had our demo friends on the site help us by loading them on the trailer with a lift, then we buckled them down  to the trailer and drove them across town to one of Mac's warehouses in Springfield, where we unloaded them for storage. We did this twice, but it was not explained to us that we were still operating under the initial ten-dollars-a-board contract. In other words, we were working for free for more than half of the day. The deal soured. We were handed the rest of our payment, another fifty spot and thanked for our work. We'd made below minimum wage.