In October 1978, The Progressive ran a cover story by Sam Day, then the magazine’s associate editor, under the headline, “The Nicest People Make the Bomb.”
It was about Day’s guided tour of U.S. factories that built components for nuclear weapons. The people he met along the way confounded his expectations: They were friendly, outgoing, often holding liberal views, “as innovative and flexible as any you will find in business or government.”
Not monsters at all.
And yet, the people Day encountered were doing something monstrous: building weapons that could cause unfathomable devastation and misery.
Eyal Press, a former contributor to The Progressive who now writes for outlets including The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Nation, explores this paradox in his new book, Dirty Work, about the people whose jobs the rest of us would rather not even think about. They include a prison mental health worker and a prison guard, a Border Patrol agent, drone operators who deliver death remotely, workers in slaughterhouses, and those engaged in defiling the environment and infringing on individual liberty.
These people, he stresses, are working on our behalf.
Dirty work, he explains, “is contingent on a tacit mandate from the ‘good people,’ who see this work as a necessary part of the social order but don’t explicitly assent to it and can, if need be, disavow responsibility for it.” Such work is “chiefly reserved for less privileged people who lack the skills and credentials, and the social mobility and power, that wealthier, more educated citizens possess.” And, to literally add insult to injury, they are then “stigmatized and shamed for doing low-status jobs of last resort.”
Press, a good reporter and even better writer, introduces us to people who have worked these jobs, without the harsh judgment they have encountered elsewhere. We meet Harriet Krzykowski, a former worker for a private contractor providing mental health services at a prison in Florida where, in 2012, guards killed a mentally ill incarcerated Black man by spraying him with scalding water until his skin fell off. (None of them were ever charged.) Harriet’s efforts to flag abuses were met with shrugs; years later, she still cries about not having done more to intervene.
We meet Christopher Aaron, a U.S. drone program worker who would help identify targets for drone strikes in Afghanistan from his chair in Langley, Virginia. The use of drones, which expanded greatly under President Barack Obama and even more under Donald Trump, has killed 17,000 people in four countries, including up to 2,200 civilians, many of them children. The workers in this program, which has continued under Joe Biden, are haunted by their role.
And then there’s the meat packers, in one description spattered “in manure, blood, vomit, offal (the cow’s entrails and internal organs)” as they process the meat eaten by people who never have to see what goes on behind the slaughterhouse walls. Press tells the story of Juanita, an undocumented immigrant who worked at a poultry plant in Bryan, Texas, making what she thought was a lavish salary of $12.20 an hour. When she was splashed in the eye by chemicals used to disinfect raw chicken and ended up needing eye surgery, the company nurse deemed it was caused by an allergy and not work-related.
Workers like Juanita remain largely out of sight and out of mind, which enables their victimization. Press contrasts this with workers at Google who forced changes by raising a stink about the company’s collaborations with China and other bad actors interested in limiting individual freedom. These, he notes, were highly skilled workers not easily replaced. When they stood up for themselves, they won.
Press suggests that the public could bring similar pressure against the purveyors of dirty work by refusing to keep looking the other way. The “tacit mandate” he posits is “important . . . but not set in stone. The attitudes and assumptions that it rests upon can change, and indeed have changed.”
One way to make this happen is by getting to know dirty workers as people. Dirty Work gives us a guided tour.