"Down on the Killin' Floor"

 “Dirty Work – Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America,” by Eyal Press, 2021

This is a muckraking reporter’s book about ‘dirty jobs’ – though Press doesn’t mean physically dirty and hard jobs as you’d think.  It is jobs that are ‘socially’ dirty… nasty work done behind the scenes that also impacts the perpetrators.  He looks at the prison system, which has become the main repository for mental health care in the U.S. Then at military drone operators, who kill people in a real life ‘video’ chamber. And border guards, tasked with an impossible mission.  Or workers in slaughterhouses who kill animals and injure themselves for a living. Included are oil rig workers providing dirty energy in the U.S. petrostate and lastly, upper-level white collars working tech surveillance companies like Google.  What they all share is that capitalist society finds them ‘essential’ but hides their work from the public because of what they do and how they do it.

Nearly all of these workers are from lower levels of the working-class, who take unpleasant jobs out of economic necessity.  It’s like the modern military, which after WWII and the end of the draft became more and more a repository for the unskilled, the poor and the least educated.  In the civilian world no one aspires to be a prison guard or a slaughterhouse worker.  The real culprits in prisons and the incarceration state are politicians, businessmen and the chattering class.  In that vein Press pillories liberal ‘class clueless’ organizations like Code Pink, some immigrant rights groups, prison abolitionist outfits and PETA, whose members attack all these workers as the enemy, as vicious brutes, instead of seeing how they are affected and controlled by the same system.

Press tells their depressing stories and that of the places they work, along with the supervisors, bosses and assorted big-wigs who never face the consequences of the cruelty and death dished out.  He shows how the work brutalizes everyone.  If there are scapegoats, it is these very same workers that are first chosen.  He focuses on ‘moral injury’ – not quite the same as PTSD, but related in how it damages the physical and mental health of the ‘dirty’ worker by the transgression of their ethical standards.  (I question the term ‘dirty’ as it borrows from squeamishness about the healthy role dirt actually plays in agriculture, labor and life.)

Other issues covered are the role of prison privatization in making the lives of prisoners, guards and mental health professionals worse through cost-cutting; the industrial meat industries’ toxic appetite for more production; the numerous flaws in drone imagery; the fact that Latinos are a majority of border guards and the huge role of secrecy in keeping all of these activities hidden.  While the latest Gaza invasion is playing out on screens daily, leading even non-political people to be repulsed - prisons, mental health sections, drone bases, ICE detention facilities, meat slaughterhouses and pens, carbon extraction sites and algorithms are invisible to the public on purpose.  Many people have even turned off the news to avoid any glimpse of what is going on. As the monkey says:  “Hear no evil, see no evil…”

The Stories

Press visits the limited mental health units in Florida and interviews some of the prisoners and former mental health staff.  The state underfunds or privatizes the prison and mental health sections on purpose, even though politicians are the ones demanding more and more arrests. Now inadequate prisons house the most mentally ill, as ‘society’ closed many poorly-functioning mental hospitals. Guards rule inside and if they are violent, few will stand up to them due to losing their jobs or being victims of physical retaliation. Their supervisors even give them promotions and they get off scot-free. The required mental health counselors cannot actually do their jobs and become profoundly disturbed by the situations they see or hear about.  This section is his best, as it dives deep into an issue few know about.

Press talks to former drone operators who worked just north of Las Vegas, Nevada and in northern Virginia.  They report losing sleep, hair and their complacency as they realize they are harming innocent civilians, or have made wrong kill decisions due to poor images and intel. The image of ‘clean’ drone hits is as fraudulent as that of ‘precision bombing.’  This policy increased under Obama and went higher under Trump, so the ‘workload’ and stress got even worse. 

He quizzes former border guards about what they saw along the new southern ‘battle-line.’  Latinos sign up because it is the only good job available, thinking some of their job will be humanitarian, with the Spanish language a useful help.  But they find out that it involves death, brutality and detention camps. 

In Texas he investigates the Latino workers in a poultry plant, one of the few better-paying jobs.  The supervisors refuse bathroom breaks, speed-up the line, harangue the workers to work faster, increasing the chance of accidents and carpal tunnel, all under the whip of their managers. Medical personnel in one chicken plant run by Sanderson Farms blamed repetitive stress injuries on ‘pre-existing’ conditions.  They were deemed essential by Trump and forced to work while sick and dying of CoVid.  88% of workers in these plants are non-white.  After strikes at IBP and Hormel, union shops were weakened, as many immigrants without papers do not join the union due to fear of termination.  That is the financial purpose for illegality – capitalists prefer the fear of deportation to a green card.  The immigration issue is not going to be ‘solved’ in this context.

Behind this picture is the enormous appetite for industrial meat, totaling 222.2 pounds per average person in 2020, far higher than it had been.  As one researcher remarked, the animal killing system in the U.S. is the biggest and most brutal in history. Over all this are the USDA and OSHA, which exercise almost no oversight. In a sly aside, Press notes that foodie locavores favoring ‘ethical’ and ‘sustainable’ food have no idea about the labor conditions in which their food is produced. They only care about their personal health and perhaps about animals. Local smaller farms also employ low-paid immigrants whose work is hidden and are unmentioned on the label.

Then there are U.S. energy workers in the carbon sector – working on oil rigs in the Gulf, in the fields of North Dakota fracking or drilling in the cold reaches of Alaska.  The immediate focus is on the Deepwater Horizon explosion and massive spill, and its effect on some of the workers who survived, along with oil politics in Louisiana.  The U.S. still uses carbon on a grand scale at 87% of energy use, as 5% of the world population consumes 25% of the world’s energy. Press closes the book by interviewing high-level white collars at Google, who find out they are involved in surveillance and collaboration with police states.  He makes the point that even fancy office workers with higher-pay are not immune from ‘dirty' work.

All of these people tell their stories, which sociologically reveal the dark underside of the U.S. economy, its capitalist nature and the destructive role of ‘dirty’ jobs in profiteering industries and institutions.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Strategy of Deception,” “The Jungle” (Sinclair); “Vegan Freak,” “Are Prisons Obsolete?” (A. Davis); “Prison Strike Against Modern Slavery,” “Lost Connections” (Hari); “Oil” (Sinclair); “This Changes Everything” (Klein); “On the Clock,” “Reviving the Strike” (Burns); “Embedded With Organized Labor” (Early); “Tell the Bosses We’re Coming,” “Save Our Unions” (Early); “On New Terrain” (Moody).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

November 14, 2023