Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

  To be sure, not all dirty workers see what they are doing as compromised. Some derive satisfaction from their jobs. There is, moreover, an argument to be made that a certain amount of dirty work is inevitable in any society and that plenty of elite white-collar professionals—Wall Street bankers who sell shady financial products, software engineers who design hidden tracking mechanisms that enable companies to collect users’ personal data without their knowledge—do jobs that are morally suspect. But for these elites, there are significant upsides: in the case of Wall Street bankers, lavish salaries and bonuses; in the case of software engineers, a place in the upper tiers of the meritocracy. In a society where worldly success has long been perceived as a mark of good character, accomplishing such feats has a positive moral valence, conferring virtue on the winners who have risen to the top of the social order. Successful meritocrats may also feel more emboldened to complain or resign when pressed to do something ethically compromising. Exercising such options is never free from risk, but it is invariably easier for people with the skills and credentials to land other desirable jobs.

  The dirty workers featured in this book lack this luxury. Most feel trapped in what they are doing, clinging to their jobs in order to make ends meet and because they have no better options. Not all of these workers are poor. For some, dirty work may indeed offer a path out of poverty. In some cases, it is the one job within reach that comes with health benefits or that pays slightly more than the minimum wage. But the benefits or higher wages come at a steep price: the cost of feeling degraded and defiled, of dirtying one’s hands in a disreputable job that others look down on. Insofar as their livelihoods depend on such jobs, dirty workers are doubly burdened, experiencing economic precarity while simultaneously bearing the psychic toll of doing morally treacherous work.

  The familiar, colloquial meaning of “dirty work” is a thankless or unpleasant task. In this book, the term refers to something different and more specific. First, it is work that causes substantial harm either to other people or to nonhuman animals and the environment, often through the infliction of violence. Second, it entails doing something that “good people”—the respectable members of society—see as dirty and morally compromised. Third, it is work that is injurious to the people who do it, leading them either to feel devalued and stigmatized by others or to feel that they have betrayed their own core values and beliefs. Last and most important, it 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. For this to be possible, the work must be delegated to other people, which is why the mandate rests on an understanding that someone else will handle the day-to-day drudgery.

  This book does not present a comprehensive survey of all the jobs that share these features. What it offers instead is a series of case studies that illuminate the dynamics of dirty work in different areas of American life. Part 1 examines the dirty work that takes place inside the mental health wards of the nation’s prisons, where chilling abuses are perpetrated on a regular basis. While these abuses are easy to blame on low-ranking guards who behave sadistically, the custodians of our jails and prisons are the agents of a society that has criminalized mental illness, making brutality and violence all but inevitable. Part 2 examines another kind of violence, carried out from a distance by imagery analysts who help select targets for lethal drone strikes. Public officials have often portrayed these strikes as “pinpoint” and “surgical”—that is, as the opposite of dirty. As we’ll see, the reality for many of the “virtual warriors” involved is more disturbing, suggesting that distance and technology can make warfare and violence more rather than less morally troubling. Like prison workers, the combatants in the drone program perform government functions, executing policies that have the presumed backing of public officials and many citizens. But dirty work can also take place in institutions with no formal connection to the state—industrial slaughterhouses, for example, where part 3 of the book is set. The workers in these slaughterhouses are our agents as well, not because they carry out public functions, but because they cater to our consumption habits. The lifestyles of many Americans—the food we eat, the cars we drive—are sustained by dirty work. In the final section of the book, I explore how this is true not only in America but in much of the world, examining the dirty work behind the lubricants of global capitalism: the fossil fuels that are drilled and fracked by dirty workers in places like the Gulf of Mexico; the cobalt that is mined in Africa before making its way into the wireless devices that have propelled the digital revolution.

  One characteristic common to nearly all forms of dirty work is that they are hidden, making it easier for “good people” to avoid seeing or thinking about them. The desire not to witness things that are filthy or repugnant is hardly new. “Dirtiness of any kind seems to us incompatible with civilization,” observed Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents. “Indeed, we are not surprised by the idea of setting up the use of soap as an actual yardstick of civilization.” Among the thinkers Freud influenced was the German social theorist Norbert Elias, whose best-known work, a two-volume study titled The Civilizing Process, traced the evolution of morals and manners in the West, showing how behavior that came to be seen as disturbing or distasteful (spitting, displaying violence and aggression) was gradually removed from public life. Elias completed his book in 1939, which may explain why for several decades it was ignored: in the shadow of Nazism, it seemed to many that the savage face of Western civilization had been unmasked. But Elias did not equate the “civilizing process” with moral progress. Like Freud, he linked it to rising social inhibitions, which led to practices regarded as unseemly being carried out more discreetly. In theory, this could make objectionable practices more rather than less pervasive. “The distasteful is removed behind the scenes of social life,” Elias observed. “It will be seen again and again how characteristic of the whole process that we call civilization is this movement of segregation, this hiding ‘behind the scenes’ of what has become distasteful.”

  Behind the scenes is where the dirty work in America unfolds, in the chambers and recesses of remote institutions such as prisons and industrial slaughterhouses—institutions that tend to be located in isolated areas with a high concentration of poor people and people of color. The workers who toil in these zoned-off worlds are, in a sense, America’s “untouchables,” performing morally tainted jobs that society depends on and tacitly condones but that have been rendered invisible. The invisibility is sustained with physical barriers—fences and walls that cordon off the places where dirty work takes place. It is reinforced by legal barriers—secrecy laws that limit what the public is permitted to know. But perhaps the most important barriers are the ones in our own minds, mental filters that block out uncomfortable realizations about the things we are willing to countenance.

  In the margins of the journal he kept while in Frankfurt, Everett Hughes jotted down a phrase for people who erected such barriers. He called them “passive democrats.” Passive democrats were people with seemingly enlightened attitudes “who don’t mean ever to do anything about anything, except carry on delightful, disinterested conversation.” The problem with such people was not that they didn’t know about the unconscionable things going on around them. It was that they lacked what Hughes called “the will to know.” To maintain a clean conscience, they preferred to be kept in the dark.

  It’s hard to say how much of a difference it would have made if the passive democrats in Nazi Germany had been more active; they lived in a dictatorship, after all, where dissent was crushed and the state demanded absolute obedience from its subjects. But as noted, Hughes wasn’t thinking primarily of Nazi Germany when he wrote his essay about dirty work. He was thinking of his fellow Americans, citizens of a democracy in which active engagement could make a difference, stirring debate about whether morally objectionable practices should go on.
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  In the decades since Hughes’s essay appeared, the passivity of Americans seems only to have deepened. In recent presidential elections, tens of millions of voters have not bothered to exercise a right for which prior generations fought and died. Thanks to technology, information has never been easier for ordinary people to access. It has also never been easier to avert one’s eyes by clicking on another link when something disturbing comes up. In a culture of distraction and diminishing attention spans, who has the patience to wade through troubling revelations that might make one feel implicated in some way? Or to feel the flicker of conscience for long enough while surfing the internet to remember the experience the next day? Studies of college graduates have documented a decline in empathy in recent years. Along with the will to know, the will to imagine what it is like to stand in someone else’s shoes appears to be slackening.

  A nation of passive democrats is a nation where disturbing practices can flourish without too many questions asked. This is unfortunate, for a great deal can be learned about the moral condition of our society by tracing the threads of dirty work through the fabric of American life. As we’ll see, we are all entangled in these threads, even if they are imperceptible to us. The philosopher Charles Mills has argued that the advantages accorded to whites in Western societies are enshrined in an invisible “racial contract,” an implicit agreement that nonwhites are “subpersons” that governs the racial order, even though it is unnoticed and unacknowledged by many of its beneficiaries. An invisible contract governs dirty work as well, the terms of which ensure that those who tolerate and benefit from it don’t have to know too much about it. Like the racial contract, this arrangement is not spelled out in any formal document, which makes it easy to ignore and, when it is noticed or brought up, equally easy to blame on others or attribute to large external forces that cannot be changed. This is a mistake. As immutable as it may seem, the dirty work in America is not foreordained. It is a product of specific decisions made by real people that could, in theory, be unmade: policies that were enacted; laws that were put in place; decisions that were reached about everything from how to fight our wars to where to confine some of our most vulnerable fellow citizens. How we think about this work reveals something fundamental about our society—our values, the social order we unconsciously mandate, and what we are willing to have done in our name.

  PART I

  BEHIND THE WALLS

  1

  Dual Loyalties

  Shortly after Harriet Krzykowski began working at the Dade Correctional Institution in Florida, a prisoner whispered to her, “You know they starve us, right?” It was the fall of 2010, and Harriet, a mental health counselor, had been hired by Dade, a state prison roughly forty miles south of Miami, to help incarcerated people with clinical behavioral problems follow their treatment plans. The prisoner was housed in the facility’s mental health ward, known as the Transitional Care Unit, a cluster of two-story buildings connected by breezeways and equipped with one-way mirrors and surveillance cameras. At first, Harriet assumed he was just imagining things. “I thought, oh, this guy must be paranoid or schizophrenic,” she said. Then she heard a prisoner in another wing of the TCU complain that meal trays often arrived at his cell without food. After noticing that several of the men in the TCU were alarmingly thin, she decided to discuss the matter with Dr. Cristina Perez, who oversaw the inpatient unit.

  At the time, Harriet was thirty years old. She had pale skin, blue eyes, and an air of shy reserve. The field of correctional psychology attracted its share of idealists who tended to see all prisoners as society’s victims and who distrusted anyone wearing a security badge; corrections officers called such people “hug-a-thugs.” The label did not fit Harriet, who had never worked in a correctional facility before and who arrived at Dade acutely aware of the risks of her new job. There were, she knew, rapists, pedophiles, and murderers at the prison, convicted felons who inspired fear in her, not pity. The guards at Dade performed a difficult job that merited respect, she believed, not least for watching the backs of less experienced employees who did not wear security badges. If any corrections officers behaved improperly, she assumed her superiors would want to know about it.

  Dr. Perez was in her forties and had an aloof, unruffled manner. When Harriet told her that she’d heard “guys aren’t getting fed,” she did not seem especially concerned. “You can’t trust what inmates say,” she reminded Harriet. When Harriet informed her that the complaints were coming from disparate wings of the TCU, Dr. Perez assured her that this was not unusual, because prisoners often devised innovative methods to “kite” messages across the facility.

  Harriet mentioned that she had overheard some security guards heckling prisoners. “Go ahead and kill yourself—no one will miss you,” an officer told one of them in her presence. Again, Dr. Perez seemed unfazed. “It’s just words,” she said. Then she leaned forward and imparted some advice: “You have to remember that we have to have a good working relationship with security.”

  Not long after this conversation, Harriet was working a Sunday shift when a guard told her that because of a staff shortage the prisoners in the TCU would not be allowed into the facility’s recreation yard. The yard was a cement quadrangle with weeds sprouting through the cracks and little in the way of amenities, but for many people in the TCU it was the only place to get some fresh air and exercise. Overseeing this activity was among Harriet’s weekend responsibilities. The following Sunday, access to the recreation yard was again denied. The closures continued for weeks, always with a new explanation that sounded to Harriet increasingly like a pretext. When she eventually pressed a security officer on the matter, he told her, “It’s God’s day, and we’re resting.” In an email to Dr. Perez, Harriet relayed this exchange and indicated her frustration.

  A few days later, Harriet was running a “psycho-educational group”—an hour-long session in which prisoners gathered to talk while she observed their mood and affect. After a dozen participants filed in, she peered up and noticed that the guard who had been standing by the door had wandered off. She was on her own, in a roomful of prisoners. Harriet completed the session without incident; afterward, she assumed the officer must have been summoned to deal with an emergency. But later, when she was in the rec yard, the guard on duty vanished as well, once again leaving her unprotected amid a group of prisoners.

  Around the same time, the metal doors that corrections officers controlled to regulate the traffic flowing through the different units of the TCU started opening more slowly for Harriet. Not infrequently, several minutes passed before an officer in one of the security bubbles buzzed her through, even when she was the only staff member in a hallway full of prisoners. Harriet tried not to appear flustered when this happened, but, she later recalled, “it scared the hell out of me.”

  * * *

  In theory, the TCU was designed to provide mentally ill prisoners with a safe environment in which they would receive treatment before returning to the main compound at Dade. In reality, Harriet noticed, many of the people in her care were locked up in single-person cells for months, rarely interacting with anyone. Solitary confinement was supposed to be reserved for individuals who had committed serious disciplinary infractions. In forced isolation, the men in the TCU often deteriorated rapidly, appearing haggard, stricken, vacant-eyed. “So many guys would be mobile and interactive when they first came in, and then a few months later they would be sleeping in their cells in their own waste,” Harriet said.

  Despite her inexperience, Harriet was coming to doubt whether the TCU was fulfilling its stated mission. She was also convinced the guards at Dade were punishing her for the email she had sent to Dr. Perez about her difficulty accessing the rec yard. But complaining about the situation would only lead to more retaliation, she feared. She didn’t even tell her husband, Steven, out of concern that if she voiced her misgivings, he would insist that she give notice, further unsettling their precarious financial situation.

>   At the time, Harriet and her husband lived at her mother’s house, in Miami, with their two young children. He was an unemployed computer-systems engineer. She was earning twelve dollars an hour at Dade. To get by, they supplemented her modest paycheck with food stamps and occasional loans from her mother. The experience of hardship was familiar to Harriet. Born in a small town in northwestern Missouri, she was seven years old when her mother drove her and her older sister to a battered women’s shelter to escape the furies of her father, a heavy drinker who precipitated their departure by hurling the family cat against the wall. Five years later, after her parents divorced, Harriet found herself in an even smaller town in Illinois, where her mother’s dream of making a living as an artist (she was a potter) quickly ran aground. They survived instead on public assistance and a job her mother found as a clerk at a gas station, living in a modest house where the cupboards were often bare.