Eyal Press’s Dirty Work explores the areas of the economy that the general public ignores. Press’s thesis is that there are certain jobs that the public condemns and treats as immoral while tacitly endorsing. He spotlights the lives of the workers who are morally exploited at the margins. Dirty Work is important and interesting because it forces us to confront what we would rather not, but its inability to point to any alternatives reveals the deeper exhaustion at its core.
Press borrows the concept of “dirty work” from midcentury sociologist Everett Hughes, who wrote an essay titled “Good People Doing Dirty Work” based on his visits to Germany after World War Two. Hughes observed that upper-class Germans professed horror at what happened in the concentration camps and condemned those who worked there as beasts. Yet when Hughes pressed these Germans, they would admit that they believed there had been a “Jewish problem.” The public gave the concentration camp workers a tacit mandate to commit horrors, even as they condemned them. Hughes thought this dynamic was at play even in less horrific examples.
Press applies the dirty work framework to the present day. “What kind of dirty work takes place in contemporary America? How much of this work has an unconscious mandate from society?” Press describes how these workers are exploited victims. They face the moral reality of what the public would rather not know about. He uses first-hand stories and interviews to explore the worlds of prison guards, military drone operators, slaughterhouse workers, and those who work on oil rigs.
All of these jobs are morally alienating. Prison guards are condemned for being harsh and abusive, but the public refuses to fund prisons or seriously deal with the mentally ill. Drone operators are condemned for running assassination programs and don’t receive the same accolades as soldiers, but the public doesn’t want to contend with the reality of forever wars or put more soldiers’ lives at risk. Slaughterhouse workers are condemned for killing animals on an industrial scale, but they are often illegal immigrants laboring for low pay to provide meat for consumers who refuse to acknowledge reality. Those who work on oil rigs risk horrific personal injury to power the modern world, even as hysterical neurotics condemn them over climate change.
The triumph of Dirty Work is in simply giving these people their recognition and drawing attention to their plight. The book works in its primary goal, which is to humanize those laboring in the industries it describes. The condition of advanced society is often taken for granted, and few pay attention to the logistics of how our day-to-day lives are made possible. For example, almost everyone eats meat daily, but we purposefully hide from the blood, guts, and gore that go into putting meat on our plates.
The book justifies itself with the chapter on prisons alone. Press builds it around an incident in which Florida prison guards most likely murdered an inmate and were cleared of charges. The chapter works so well because Press examines all the complicated forces that victimize prison guards. At first, these guards are presented as villains who bullied the prison’s mental health staff into ignoring obvious abuse, but then we see how both the therapists and the guards work financially precarious jobs. The guards are often overworked and come from areas where the prison is the only economic opportunity. Though they may sometimes be harsh, this is in part because our prisons are filled with the mentally ill. Severely disturbed people used to be held in insane asylums, but when these closed, they were moved into the prison system.
Dirty Work is consciously in the tradition of Upton Sinclair and George Orwell, and both The Jungle and The Road to Wigan Pier are mentioned in the chapters on slaughterhouses and oil rigs. Yet the implicit question isn’t asked: If prior generations of progressives spotlighted similar issues, then why do these issues persist? Press’s book, while informative, seems to indicate that progressivism has entered something like a reactionary phase, in which its main ideas for progress consist in the rolling back of prior achievements. Drone warfare is ugly but in a sense is an improvement from physical combat that puts soldiers at risk. Slaughterhouses are ugly, but middle-class access to affordable meat is a historic achievement. In the case of prisons, the reform offered is explicitly rolling back the asylum reform of the past. The moral and therapeutic framework of “dirty work” might be helpful in getting the public to sympathize with workers and appreciate the complexity of social problems, but it doesn’t offer many solutions. Progressivism has reached a point where it must shed some aspects of its exhausted worldview.
In the chapter on slaughterhouses, for instance, Press discusses how the Trump administration’s immigration policies led to raids on exploitative slaughterhouses. Once illegal immigrants were deported, black people began to work the higher-paying slaughterhouse jobs. On the surface, this seems to be a solution: It eliminates an easily exploitable shadow labor pool, it gives better-paying jobs to nonwhite people, and it creates a situation where workers can demand better working conditions. But Press dismisses it because he thinks enforcing immigration law is racist.
The chapter on prisons is one of the few that offers a concrete solution, but here, too, Press is limited by the exhaustion of his worldview. Press blames intellectual fashions — the work of Michel Foucault and the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest — for convincing the general public that mental asylums were repressive and corrupt. But the more important intellectual trend was the resurgence of lobotomies in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The innovative “transorbital lobotomy” was considered a miracle of science. It didn’t require a surgeon to drill holes in a person’s skull. Instead, they inserted ice picks into a person’s eye socket, squeezed behind the eyeball, and then used a small mallet to chisel away at the brain. Trust the experts! My great-grandmother was the last person lobotomized in the state of Connecticut.
The popularity of this procedure, which at the time was seen as a solution to overcrowded asylums, surely had a larger impact on the public’s distrust of asylums than French philosophers. Progressivism is still afflicted by the myopic rationalism that caused the lobotomy to spread through our “institutions,” and in the age of “gender reassignment surgery,” it’s not difficult to think of ways a new asylum system would perpetuate old mistakes.
Dirty Work is an interesting and informative exploration of the workers our society depends upon. It offers a humane vision of our society’s problems and an invitation to think of new solutions.
James McElroy is a novelist and essayist based in New York.
