Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America by Eyal Press.
This book discusses the fact that many jobs in the United States involve unpleasant work that needs to be done but that many of us would never do. Author Eyal Press looks at the prison industry, remote drone warfare, meat processing, energy production, and digital media as employment areas that put employees in compromising positions concerning the morality of what they do day-to-day.
He begins by recounting a situation at a meeting in Frankfurt, Germany, in May of 1948. An American sociology professor, Everett Hughes, was spending a semester teaching abroad. He socialized with “liberal intellectuals” who, while acknowledging the horror of the Nazi’s annihilation of Jewish people, also believed that the “Jews were a problem” who dominated the economic world and ended up living in nice houses that “they didn’t deserve.” While these elite people would never stoop to do the work in the concentration camps, they looked the other way and blamed unsavory things on bad actors.
The author briefly references the mistreatment and lynching of Blacks in the South for decades. Press sees this as another example of people making occasional protestations about horrible behavior while looking the other way. Because of their indifference, there was rampant discrimination and violence against Blacks. Again, the local citizens would never beat up a person because of skin color, but they had no problem with other people doing that.
Press sees the growing economic inequality in the United States as an enabler and catalyst for dirty work. As poorer people run out of job options, they have to work in prisons, slaughter houses, and on oil rigs. Some of the smarter ones may end up operating remote drones, but even those workers tend to be lower class, with few other options that pay as well. The one group he talks about who are not disadvantaged are well educated high techies who work for Facebook and Google. But their jobs may end up being just as dirty as the less-advantaged people he describes.
Behind the Walls The first chapter of the book focuses on the prison industry. Press features the Dade Correctional Institution in Florida. In 2010, Harriet Krzykowski took a job there as a mental health counselor in the prison’s Transitional Care Unit (TCU). She was thirty years old and was committed to helping inmates who had fallen on hard times and just needed professional counseling and personal attention to turn their lives around. Early in her work there, she was shocked to find that many inmates were not being fed regularly and she saw that some correctional officers (CO’s - also known as guards) regularly insulted and demeaned inmates. She reported incidents to her supervisor who assured her that inmates lied all of the time and that all was well.
In theory, the TCU was supposed to provide mental health services to people who had been diagnosed with serious mental illness and prepare them for reentry into society. In reality, most offenders were locked up all of the time, occasionally let out for an hour or two on weekends for exercise. When Harriet brought this up the command chain, the correctional officers made her life miserable.
She was finding it hard to be positive about her work. Her husband was an unemployed computer programmer and she needed the job. She had a tough upbringing with a single mother who wasn’t very good at being a mother. After she settled down and got her degree during the Great Recession (2007-2012), jobs in her field were scarce, except in prisons which had a growing population. The deinstitutionalization of mentally ill people began in the 1970s; by 2000 correctional facilities had become the primary mental health/substance abuse treatment providers across the nation.
Others at Dade Correctional Institute had noticed that inmates were being ignored and abused. Even no-cost reasonable classes and programs to help inmates overcome their issues were routinely rejected by management under very flimsy pretenses. A respected psychotherapist - George Mallinckrodt who was way above Harriet’s influence level - made formal complaints to his superiors who were way up the institutional command chain. He was also ignored.
In June, 2012, a troubled inmate, Darren Rainey, was acting out. He had severe schizophrenia and was receiving no substantive treatment. After one outbreak, the guards suggested that Rainey needed a shower to straighten him out. Harriet had no idea what that meant but it didn't sound too bad. The CO’s turned the shower up to 180 degrees and shoved Rainey into it and kept him there. After a brief stay in the hospital, he died. He had serious burns over 90% of his body.
Harriet knew what the CO's had done but she was afraid she’d lose her job if she said anything. After it became clear that no one was going to report the attack, Mallinckrodt contacted his bosses and filed a formal incident report. Shortly thereafter, he was suddenly fired. Supposedly for taking too long for lunch. Two of the officers who dragged Rainey into the shower were promoted.
In 2014, reporters from the Miami Herald started to look into reports of prisoner abuse at Dade. Harriet connected reporter Julie Brown to Harold Hempstead, an inmate who had witnessed Rainey's death. The expose resonated and the prison warden was briefly put on administrative leave. Nothing else changed.
National surveys found that one-third of mental health providers in prisons felt that their professional ethics were regularly compromised in their work. A 2015 report by Human Rights Watch of 360,000 American prisoners with mental health issues found that there was little treatment and a lot of punishment. Mental health counselors were often afraid to try to improve the situation for fear of retribution. Rikers Island prison in New York City was particularly well known for the violence inflicted on its inmates, with no accountability for the perpetrators.
Professional counseling associations took some interest in the reports of prison violence but were not very engaged in trying to fix things. Since deinstitutionalization of mentally ill people, prison was where many ended up. This was fine with most Americans – better to put troubled men and women in jail rather than in my neighborhood. Another problem was that highly educated psychiatric professionals looked down on their colleagues who worked in correctional facilities - they could have done better. Elite professionals had no interest in trying to fix prison problems. That was beneath them.
Harriet left Dade and moved to Missouri to help take care of her husband's ailing mother. Harriet had serious PTSD as a result of her Florida experience. Gradually her condition improved - the nightmares went away - but she never fully recovered from her years at the Dade Correctional Institution.
The author interviewed others who had worked with Harriet. Their stories were pretty consistent. They saw cruelty to inmates on a daily basis, but it soon became obvious that reporting any wrongdoing would be career-threatening. These people also suffered from PTSD after they left Dade.
There was a formal inquiry into Daren Rainey’s death which absolved the guards from any responsibility. Eventually, prisoners’ rights groups won some small changes at Dade - cameras to record what CO’s did and some shifts in top personnel - but nothing really got much better. An agreement to mandate reporting of any observed prisoner abuse was never implemented.
The other prisoners This section of the book looks at the impact of a brutalized work environment on the employees who toil there. The author moves to the Charlotte (FL) Correctional Institution (CCI) and focuses on the career of Bill Curtis, a Vietnam veteran who, in 2004, began working at the prison after a career in furniture sales. He found his new job as a CO challenging. He was always on edge, worrying about being attacked by an inmate without warning. After a few months, he learned how to deal with the inmates but he noticed that many of his fellow workers bent or broke the rules when dealing with offender behavior.
Curtis began to keep a journal at work. As a Vietnam veteran, he had seen the ugly side of human behavior but he had “never seen real cruel things like what you see in prison - real cruelty, just intentional cruelty. It’s like husbands who beat their wives. That’s how some of these guys beat their inmates.”
He described some of his fellow correctional officers as “serial bullies” which probably wasn’t in the job description. Curtis thought that the fact that Florida underpaid its correctional officers affected the quality of the workforce. Republican statewide candidates routinely ran on cutting the Department of Correction budget because criminals didn’t deserve coddling.
To save money, Florida had brought in contract vendors to run prisons. Corizon, a private sector health care company, worked at Dade. Mental health counselors like Harriet were private sector employees. She received no specific training on how to deal with offenders’ issues and no support when she tried to improve things. Similarly, Curtis received no specialized training which would cost money.
Curtis never received any training in dealing with inmates with mental health issues which most of them had. He also quickly figured out that in the absence of resources – and training – to deal with the real issues offenders presented, brutality and repression were the way guards responded to challenges.
National legislation pushed by Bill Clinton in the mid 1990s put more people in prison so there was an increased demand for prison employees, which was good for local economies, especially in places that were hurting for good jobs. Prisons tended to be located in economically challenged communities in the middle of nowhere, a locus that did not present a lot of job options. The author drove around the communities that were home to the prisons he wrote about and indeed found that there were very few jobs that paid even a living wage. Working in a prison was as good as it got for many people.
The author cites research that shows that corrections officers are in their jobs for the money and job security while police officers say that they want to help ensure public safety. Corrections officers have a very high suicide rate compared to most criminal justice careers. Eyal Press talked to several mental health professionals whose practice revolved around treating corrections officers. These professionals confirmed that many CO’s suffered from serious mental illness and depression and a high rate of alcoholism and divorce. They were a “hidden population” suffering PTSD. They were the “other prisoners” in the corrections world. Black corrections officers were often ridiculed by offenders for working for the man, a major offense.
After eight years on the job, Curtis went to work for the newly-formed union, helping CO’s who were accused of bad behavior defend themselves. While there certainly were evil corrections officers doing bad things, most of the people Curtis worked with had done nothing wrong but were being scapegoated by their superiors who were actually responsible for the heinous actions. In Florida, the entire criminal justice system - top management, most elected officials, judges - supported this charade that blamed the little guy for all that was wrong in the penal system.
The author points out that nobody praised corrections officers who stayed on the job during the pandemic as essential workers doing an important job. Part of the problem was that the macho culture of the paramilitary structure of corrections workers disdained wearing masks and keeping social distance while grocery store workers and other essential workers played by the rules. In 2020 nearly 100,000 corrections workers were infected by the virus which disproportionately hit inmates as well. In some facilities, 75% of inmates were infected.
As was the case with the Dade Correctional Institution, investigations of wrongdoing at the Charlotte Correctional Institution always resulted in exonerating management and CO’s from any responsibility for inmate deaths and mistreatment.
Since the health care vendors were private companies, they could bury any complaints and problems without having to face any public accountability. Around 2015, some activists got the Florida legislature to look at prison irregularities. There were some cosmetic changes but nothing substantive was ever implemented to improve anything. In Florida, each year activists brought evidence that more and more inmates were dying or being harmed by shoddy medical services. The public really didn’t care about prisoner rights and politicians only respond to public pressure, not moral imperatives. Lately Florida, like many states, has begun to divert some non-violent mentally ill and addicted offenders to non-custodial treatment.
There was some closure for Darren Rainey’s family. They sued the state and Corizon for wrongful death and received a hefty settlement. Darren's brother, Andre, appreciated that finally there was an acknowledgement that Darren had been wrongfully killed. Andre mused that it would have been a lot better for everybody if Darren, a non-violent, mentally ill, low-level drug dealer, had received treatment instead of prison when he was arrested.
Joystick Warriors is the title of the chapter on drone pilots. Much of the US drone activity was conducted from Langley, VA, the home of the CIA and the Counterterrorism Airborne Analysis Center (CAAC!). Christopher Aaron worked there and observed video feeds from various drones all over the terrorist world. The unit relied on infrared sensors and high-resolution cameras. Sometimes dust storms and weather obstructed the view a bit. On some days he could see individual people on the ground. Chris had become involved in drones after 9/11. He spent several years trying to figure out what was a legitimate terrorist target and what wasn’t. Sometimes he was right. Other times, he blew up an innocent family. After a while, he couldn’t sleep at night and had other symptoms of PTSD. He left his job.
Army personnel involved in the “enhanced interrogation” of suspects in Iraq were brought to justice for their actions. Not so much concerning drone operators, who often did more harm than the soldiers on the ground. While Abu Grhraib and other torture situations happened under George W. Bush’s tenure, Barack Obama really cranked up drone activity. Between 2010-2020 drones killed between 9,000 and 17,000 people, including a lot of civilians. The drone strikes were kept secret from the American public. Even if people had known about them, a lot of Americans would probably have been OK with using drones to blow up bad guys, even if you sometimes missed and harmed innocent people. Drone activity did not put American soldiers’ lives at risk, a huge plus.
Creech Air Force Base in Nevada is home to 900 drone operators as well as a large complement of counselors, psychologists and clergy who are there to help the operators cope with the guilt and stress they feel from their work. Clergy especially were aware of the moral questions raised by the young men and women who flew the drones and called in the air strikes. Many of them would leave work at 5 PM, go home, and be forbidden from discussing any aspect of their day with loved ones.
The PTSD that drone operators experienced was a new phenomenon. Usually PTSD resulted from close interpersonal contact with violence. Drone operators were literally 10,000 miles away from the action. This new PTSD was called “moral injury” which referred to the changes in a person's identity that resulted from doing bad things remotely. Moral injury raised questions about society’s role in supporting morally confounding activities. The drone operators were there because Americans wanted them there as part of the war on terror. Again, American citizens would not do this dirty work themselves but they were OK with other people doing it.
One of the moral conundrums of the drone program was that in combat you and the enemy had a chance to fight each other. A soldier knew when he or she was in a battle. Deadly drone missiles came out of nowhere, with no warning, and with no chance to fight back. When the target was a truly evil terrorist who also blew things up without warning, that was probably OK. The problem was that you were not always sure that the target was who you thought it was. Often other people in the vicinity were also killed – “collateral damage”.
One problem was that while, under President Obama, drone activity dramatically increased, the size of the workforce remained static. Operators were working longer hours, with less time to decompress and talk to the chaplain.
Chris Aaron and other former drone operators eventually came together and organized a group to tell the public about what was going on with drone strikes. While government officials were not happy, going public did act as therapy for many former drone operators.
Another person who is featured in the book is Heather Linebaugh, who lived in rural Pennsylvania and came from a troubled home environment. There wasn’t much money available to buy even the basics. Heather got through high school and enrolled in community college. She really couldn’t afford it, so, after a bad relationship with an abusive boyfriend, she joined the Air Force. She was bright and got a high score on the vocational aptitude tests. In 2008 she was offered a position in ground station imagery analysis, which sounded interesting. She was sent to a base north of Sacramento, CA, and was given basic instruction on how to identify Afghan bad guys so the drones could take them out.
At first, she was happy. She thought that all Afghans were terrorists so helping destroy them was a good thing. After some time, she came to realize that a lot of the targets were innocent people, often families. She had trouble sleeping and ground her teeth at night. She applied for a transfer but it was denied.
Some people thought that drone warfare was really bad and organized regular protests against them. Toby Blome was a veteran of Vietnam War protests in the 1960s. She organized the locals. She believed that there were two sets of victims - the Afghans who were attacked and the military personnel who targeted and operated the drones.
Heather, who was having serious mental problems trying to reconcile her job with her values, was irritated at some of the more affluent protesters who had been born with a smorgasbord of college career options but who looked down on the drone people as heartless oppressors. Factors that people who worked in Heather’s job had in common were poverty, lousy family situations, and little education. The military wasn’t going to make anyone rich (except defense contractors) but you did receive a steady paycheck and were given meals and a place to live. For people like Heather, that looked like a good deal, at least until her conscience roared up and made her question what she was doing.
Again, the drone operators were doing a job that ostensibly was for the benefit of US citizens – ridding the world on terrorists. But if we were in their shoes, many of us might feel strange about calling down airstrikes on human beings, not all of whom were bad. It’s a dirty job but someone has to do it.
One point the author makes is that today’s military, with the volunteer army, is very different from the traditional military with lots of draftees. In WWII, the casualty rates of soldiers from high-income and low-income communities were about the same. During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, those who were killed or wounded on average made considerably less than the nation's average income. The volunteer army was a good deal for people who didn't have any other deals on the table. Another unsettling problem of modern warfare was that wounded and paralyzed soldiers often returned to low-income communities that couldn't provide the services these veterans needed.
Heather came to believe that the drone program really wasn’t helping American soldiers fight the Taliban, which continued to grow stronger over time. That was reminiscent of Vietnam, where the harder we thought we were hitting them, the stronger the Vietcong got. She also saw – during her post-operation analysis – that many of the people killed in drone strikes were innocents who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, sort of like the car full of innocent Afghan civilians who were blown up at Kabul Airport during the chaotic August American evacuation.
After three years, Heather was such a mental mess that she was given an honorable discharge. She had lost a lot of weight and had nightmares. People who knew what she had done would taunt her about how she had killed innocent babies.
Heather eventually became part of the anti-drone movement, but she was often vilified by protesters as being part of the problem. She did get an article published in The Guardian, a respected liberal British publication, but even then, she was trolled, criticized, and demeaned as a baby killer. The protesters weren’t big on forgiveness or redemption.
Heather quickly figured out that there was no place for her in the anti-drone movement. Her low-class background - compared to the upper-income elite status of the beautiful people who led the protests - probably did her in as much as her work with drones. She worked on fixing herself, with yoga and meditation and therapy. The last time the author spoke with her, she was finally in a better place.
The book spends a few pages examining the life of US Border Patrol agents in Texas who sometimes do bad things to illegals. Donald Trump’s presidency lowered the decency standard for the agents. Things that weren’t done previously were now routine.
Most of the people working on the border were Latinos, usually of Mexican descent. They didn’t sign up to persecute and beat up illegals but they did recognize their responsibility to interdict people crossing into the US without following the rules.
While Donald Trump put his own brand into the effort to crack down on border crossers, the author faults previous presidents, beginning with Bill Clinton, for basically ignoring the problem or crafting their own harsh responses to the challenge of too many illegals trying to get into the country. Author Eyal Press really comes down hard on Barack Obama here.
Shadow people is a term used to describe undocumented immigrants who have a lot of the dirty jobs in our country. Because they are illegal, these workers are not fussy about the jobs they do and the wages they earn. Many of these people work at meat processing plants, also known as slaughterhouses. Workers on an assembly line do the same thing every minute of every day - cutting off genitals, removing legs, trussing and bagging carcasses. The jobs pay better than minimum wage but are disgusting.
We are introduced to Flor Martinez, who began as an illegal immigrant and later got her green card, a work permit. Flor worked in a poultry processing plant bagging bird parts. She developed some repetitive stress pain problems but her supervisors didn’t care so she kept on working. On the assembly line, workers could not go to the bathroom because that would stop production. Ironically, Flor’s husband was a supervisor at the plant who told his wife to “suck it up” and keep working on the line.
Flor finally reached her breaking point and quit her job. She later became a leader of the movement to improve working conditions although she still worked at a fast-food restaurant which was better than being in a slaughterhouse but paid less. She was very active after Covid hit, trying to force meat producers to do social distancing and provide personal protective equipment to workers on the processing lines. She wasn’t too successful since the Trump administration prioritized supporting corporate interests over helping labor not get sick. She got Covid herself.
Because undocumented people will work for much less than American citizens, wages drop in industries that primarily employ illegals. That makes those jobs less desirable to other potential employees and ensures that soon the industry will have an entire workforce of undocumented people. Dirty jobs get less and less attractive to Americans which means that employers don’t have to worry about providing decent working conditions and good wages.
Conservatives railed against hiring illegals because they took away jobs from real Americans. Liberals often saw slaughterhouses as inhumane so naturally the people who worked there were a big part of the problem. Meat packers got attacked from each side of the ideological aisle.
There is huge worker turnover in meat processing plants. The jobs are awful, the pay is low, and if you get hurt - which most people do - you get little help from the company. In theory, a worker injured on the job receives workmen’s compensation benefits until he or she can go back to work. That is not the case in many meat processing plants staffed by illegals. After an injury, most just quit.
For most of the twentieth century, white men, often new immigrants, worked in slaughterhouses. In the second half of the century, women came onto the job. By the 1970s, Black women comprised most of the workforce. Over the next few decades, they were replaced by illegal immigrants.
Wages declined and corporate profits increased as more and more Americans enjoyed eating meat and poultry. Since the turn of this century, large meat packers acquired smaller ones so that today a handful of firms produce almost all of the meat in the country. This allowed greater control of pricing with increased profits.
Many meat processors are located in rural areas in states like Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas, with little or no protection for labor. These states also do not support any rights for illegals, which is convenient for the employers who exploit them. Meat plants tend to discharge a lot of foul effluent into rivers, which is not a problem in these states that don’t pay much attention to environmental issues. These jobs are “dirty” in many ways. The companies stonewall any request by reporters or non-profits to understand what’s really going on. As long as the company puts out nice press releases praising its transparency and quality working conditions, all is well.
Of course, if Americans didn’t want inexpensive meat and chicken, processing plants could raise prices and perhaps use the additional revenue to increase wages, improve working conditions, and limit environmental damage. That’s the part of the dirty jobs story that many people miss: Without hundreds of millions of Americans enabling the meat processors' sleazy activities, these companies might actually clean up their acts, at least a bit. Of course they might just increase their profit margins.
Two things were happening during the Trump administration that ensured that the meat packing industry would continue to be able to keep its business model of lousy working conditions in place, Non-public sector union membership continued to decline to less than 10% of the workforce, and in 2017 the new president called for two regulations to be rescinded for every new one. There just wasn’t the traction needed to change anything on the slaughterhouse floor.
Dirty Energy is the chapter about the oil and gas industry. The author details what went on during and after the April, 2010, explosion at the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Sara Stone heard about the accident and panicked since her husband, Stephen, worked there. He survived the blast but paid a steep price down the road.
Stephen, a Navy veteran with no college, made a six-figure salary on the rig. He was away from home for three weeks at a time but he and Sara, a free-lance artist, needed the money. In the Gulf, the locals love the rigs which propped up what would have been struggling local economies, so everyone looked the other way on potential safety problems. A lot of people in other more environmentally concerned parts of the country looked down on the rig workers who were literally doing dirty work. Of course, these same people usually drove cars that used a lot of gasoline and lived in homes that needed carbon-based energy for heat and cooling.
Investigations identified the cause of the explosion, which killed eleven workers, as a methane bubble that shouldn’t have been there. Oil gushed into the sea for 80 days before the leak could be capped off. Over 210 million gallons of oil was discharged, twenty times the output from the Exxon Valdez incident off the coast of Alaska in 1989. Subsequent digging showed that safety was notoriously lax on the British Petroleum oil rig with inspections being eliminated to cut costs and increase oil output. The official cause was “systemic failures in risk management by BP and its support vendors.”
Working on an oil rig or a gas fracking facility was dangerous, with many workers suffering serious on-the-job injuries. Again, the employees thought that the good salary made up for the potential danger. They had few other options for making a good living.
The United States has four times more deadly accidents in energy production facilities than Europe, although the same companies do work in both places. European countries responded to a number of bad incidents by passing strong regulations that made international energy companies take safety much more seriously than these same companies do in the USA.
Stephen had PTSD as a result of the incident so he left the business. He and his wife, Sara, wandered around doing various things, but they never really settled down. In addition to PTSD, Stephen had lingering physical injuries with Sara being his caregiver. They eventually took a settlement from BP but Stephen never really got back to work. He stayed at home and read science fiction novels. He drank too much and smoked a lot of marijuana. After years of supporting her husband and putting up with his bad behavior, Sara filed for divorce.
The Dirty Tech chapter talks about how digital media giants like Facebook and Google also are fertile venues for dirty work that harms our country but makes tens of billions of dollars for corporate leadership. These two tech companies are always listed as among the ten best places to work. The pay and the stock that workers receive are off the charts, but a lot of what the companies do is bad, including using shame and bullying to induce fragile people to click buttons frantically, often to their detriment.
Many of the bright young men and women who go to work at these companies are idealistic. They want to make more information available to more people, a noble goal. The book profiles Jack Poulson of Google, a math PhD who liked to read real math textbooks on weekends for fun and amusement. He learned about a program, Dragonfly, that Google was doing with the Chinese government. Dragonfly would spy on Chinese Google users and report activity that might be seen as critical of the government to officials. Google was the repressive government’s partner in doing intense secret surveillance on its citizens. Similarly, Facebook provided surveillance information to the repressive government of Myanmar which enabled the persecution of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority.
Back to Jack, who was so outraged about Dragonfly that he complained to his managers. Workers at correctional facilities, remote drone stations, and meat packing plants have no clout with their bosses. Genius PhDs, however, do have a better chance of being heard. Besides his doctorate in applied math, Jack had a master’s degree in aerospace engineering. He was a very desirable employee.
Other employees found out about Dragonfly and shared Jack’s disgust. This group had a meeting with the big bosses who dismissed their concerns by saying that the US government does a lot of spying too. Jack quit. Unlike other workers in dirty jobs, he soon had good job offers. He also had so much money and stock from Google that he could take his time finding a new position. He did high-paying consulting while looking for his next job.
Another Google employee, Laura Nolan, was working on Project Maven, to improve the interpretation of classified imagery and data. She found out that the work was being done for the US Department of Defense to improve the accuracy of drone surveillance. She complained to her bosses, helped by the fact that a group of concerned engineers had leaked information about the project to the press and created a public backlash. Google execs assured Laura and her colleagues that the program was a one-off. She had information that led her to not believe this so she left, quickly finding a good job as a site engineer for a better company.
Press finishes the book by describing how no top bank executives lost anything as a result of the 2007 real estate market crash that they had caused. He also talks about the horrible working conditions in the mines in Africa that produce some of the rare elements needed to build the tech gadgets that we all love.
In the last few pages, the author writes, “But collectively, we are not powerless to alter these things. As I noted at the outset, a core feature of dirty work is that it has a tacit mandate from ‘good people’ who refrain from asking too many questions about it because its results do not ultimately displease them.”
Eyal Press doesn’t have any solutions to what to do about dirty work. He does believe that if enough people learn about and think about what goes on in many hidden industries, things will get better.
Bob’s Take
This was an interesting book. I never thought much about all of the jobs that people do that I wouldn’t do, which was what the book focused on.
– The whole field of criminal justice is one that could probably use a makeover. People want to feel safe knowing that criminals are in secure facilities but this country has gone overboard in incarcerating people.
While over the past ten years we’ve seen a decline in the prison population, we still have a really high incarceration rate compared to other developed countries. There are a lot of jobs supporting our prison system. The book does pick up on the fact that jobs in corrections are essential to public safety but they're not held in high regard by most people. The jobs do pay relatively well, especially in rural parts of the country where jobs are scarce.
Changing the corrections system is really hard. In progressive states, correctional officers’ unions resist reengineering services to do more front-end diversion and treatment, which would mean hiring fewer correctional officers. In conservative states, unions aren’t a problem, but a lot of people make a lot of money from the current system so they will not push change.
– I never thought too much about drone operators but it makes sense that they would have second thoughts about blowing things and people up based on hazy imaging.
As I noted earlier, the book looked at two people and the impact of their work on their well-being. Christopher Aaron was a college graduate who chose drone service as a way to contribute to the war on terror. The other, Heather Linebaugh, had a rough upbringing and didn't have the money for higher education. Joining the military and working on finding targets for drones seemed like a good job at a good wage. Both of these people paid a high price for doing the work that they did.
I don’t see the US shutting down the drone program, regardless of who’s president. As our active military presence shrinks in the world, remote operations – drones – become more important.
– Meat packing plants have always been icky. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 book, The Jungle, focused a lot of attention on the horrible working conditions in the meat plants and got the federal government to take steps to clean things up. Again, a lot more Americans enjoy meat and chicken than want to work in a place that processes meat and chicken parts.
Meat packing industries are supported by both Republicans and Democrats. Bill Clinton spearheaded some “reforms” that actually strengthened the hand of corporate meat processors. Donald Trump did not let federal inspectors (OSHA) do any serious oversight of the plants, especially after Covid hit and the workers were in real danger of getting infected. No other president, regardless of party, did much of anything to improve working conditions.
– Conservative indifference and liberal hypocrisy are bookends here. Author Eyal Press writes that many liberals “care more about their own health and about a certain kind of purity - the purity of not eating meat laced with antibiotics, the purity of keeping artificially processed food out of their kitchens and bodies - than about fair wages and labor abuses.” That sums up the whole dirty jobs issue. We benefit from having dirty jobs done so we’re in no hurry to eliminate them.
