But Someone’s Gotta Do It

Eyal Press, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality In America

Few Americans have seen an untrimmed chicken carcass with our own eyes, but we know such things exist. Somebody, somewhere, turns living livestock into the styrofoam-backed meats Americans consume in such quantities. Similarly, somebody has to push the “kill” button on unmanned military drones, someone has to house the prisoners created by America’s “tough on crime” policies, someone has to extract hydrocarbons from the mine.  We sure won’t do it.

Journalist and NYU sociologist Eyal Press gathers the term “Dirty Work” from Everett Hughes, whose post-World War II research dealt with how citizens of totalitarian nations dealt with shared culpability for government atrocities. Ordinary citizens, Hughes determined, created a mental barrier. Some work was necessary, but innately dirty. Therefore a designated underclass handled the distasteful responsibility of, say, conducting pogroms and prosecuting wars of conquest.

Dirty Work, Press emphasizes early, is different from dirty jobs. Some jobs, like construction, agriculture, or infrastructure maintenance, are widely regarded as somewhat crummy. But Dirty Work is morally tainted, and that moral condemnation transfers onto those who do it. But that work remains necessary, because the population wants the work done. Workers performing Dirty Work become agents of society’s collective id, and we reward them with our disgust.

Press focuses mainly on three categories of Dirty Work in America: prison staffers, military drone pilots, and meatpackers. Combining a broad statistical survey of each field with close, intimate stories of people doing the work, he guides readers through these fields’ intricacies. He unpacks the sorts of people who accept, even seek, these jobs. And he demonstrates how they express our collective will, even as we publicly disown them.

Prisons suffer a paradoxical push-pull influence. Like schools, Americans see prisons as necessary means of enforcing laws and creating order. Candidates campaign on pledges to build, and fill, new prisons. But also like schools, prisons are first on the chopping block when budgets get cut. This becomes especially dangerous because, with the mass closure of state-funded asylums in the 1970s, prisons are now America’s leading warehouse for the mentally ill.

Eyal Press

America’s military became reliant on drones because we still expect to maintain global military dominion, but distrust committing troops. Drone pilots, working from bases in places like west Texas or northern California, save the Administration the PR headache of deployments, while keeping America active in stopping militants and terrorists. But because of their technology, individual drone pilots kill far more targets than soldiers ever could. And many suffer catastrophic PTSD.

Industrial meatpacking plants satisfy America’s appetite for cheap, plentiful meat, but at great cost. Animal rights activists love showing footage of how livestock suffer on the killing floors. But plant workers are inordinately likely to be maimed, even killed, while those who emerge physically unhurt suffer PTSD symptoms, including nightmares and hair loss. Like prison guards and drone pilots, they’re despised in their communities, underpaid, and punished for speaking out.

These workers have significant commonalities. Ruralism, for one: prisons, drone bases, and meatpacking plants are built well away from population centers. Prison workers and today’s military are also likely to come from rural areas, where often, these secure government jobs are the only reliable source of income. The workers, and their work, are easily ignored because they remain isolated on the periphery of “polite” American society.

They’re also subject to bipartisan contempt. Whenever whistleblowers in these industries come forward, conservatives ridicule them as crybabies who don’t appreciate the opportunities these jobs offer. But progressives, who historically attribute poverty and crime to systemic, rather than individual, causes, make exceptions for workers doing Dirty Work. Progressives hold these workers individually, not their employers or the laws which regulate them, culpable for their industries’ worst excesses.

Press delves into other Dirty Work, like immigrations enforcement and hydrocarbon mining, though in less depth. For comparison, Press has a chapter on “dirty tech,” high-tech innovations that make society less free, like Google making alliances with Communist China, or Facebook selling personal data to Cambridge Analytica. But, Press notes, dirty tech workers aren’t personally tainted. They’re free to quit with minimal penalties, and seldom held individually responsible.

Overall, Press describes a stratified economy where despised workers get thrust into despised work. This exposé channels historically respected journalists, from Upton Sinclair to Eric Schlosser, who have revealed the two-tiered rot in American society. The product is chilling. And maybe, this time, we’ll learn enough from the lessons Press offers that we won’t repeat these mistakes in the future. Though admittedly, the precedent isn’t good.