The Service Cycle
How modern-day service work and 19th-century farm labor may be more similar than you realize
Published in
6 min readNov 21, 2021
In the 19th century, more than 70% of the American labor force worked in agriculture. Today, when we think about that work — the cyclicality of harvest times, how external factors like the weather can create constant uncertainty about one’s income, the physical toll of the labor…