#eyal press

[itellmyselfsecrets]

“Unlike the harsh interrogation methods that were adopted after 9/11, which sparked vigorous debate about the morality of torture and indefinite detention, drone warfare scarcely registered in public discourse. One explanation for this is that since the Vietnam era and the end of the draft, Americans had grown increasingly disengaged from the wars fought in their name...On the rare occasions when civilians did pay closer attention, as with the debate about torture during the Bush era, the outrage and opprobrium tended to be directed at individual perpetrators rather than at the system within which they operated…As with the brutality in Americas prisons, which was often pinned on a handful of sadistic guards, the violence in America’s military campaigns could be attributed to a few "bad apples," diverting attention from the system of war, which retained its moral legitimacy.” - Eyal Press (Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality)

[cafehopping]

Work till you drop

Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in AmericaBy Eyal Press270 pp. Farrar, Straus Giroux. $28. A deep dive into what capitalism has wrought in America and its labor force today. You know the truth — a lot of the work that’s deemed “essential” in this country, and throughout much of the West, is work that’s heavily stigmatized. By the same token, many of those who are…

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[whatdoeschronicevenmean]

Cont. to read Dirty Work

Ch. 3 Prisons have always been geographically isolated and visually lackluster, I assumed after these visits, the better to avoid attracting unwanted attention from outsiders. As I subsequently learned, this assumption was wrong. During the Jacksonian era, “Americans took enormous pride in their prisons, were eager to show them off to European visitors, and boasted that the United States had ushered in a new era in the history of crime and punishment,” notes the historian David Rothman.

Among the visitors invited to see the early prisons of the new republic was Charles Dickens, who toured the grounds of Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary in 1842, chatting freely with convicts as he passed from cell to cell. “Nothing was concealed or hidden from my view,” Dickens wrote in his American Notes, “and every piece of information that I sought, was openly and frankly given.” In both America and England, prisons in the nineteenth century tended to be built in prominent places that were exposed to the public. Some boasted soaring turrets and stone arcades and were likened to palaces.

At the time, America’s penal system was shaped by a belief that prisons could be designed to foster moral uplift and turn chastened offenders into law-abiding citizens. By the 1980s, a more punitive philosophy had taken hold, which made prison administrators and public officials all the more inclined to limit access to their grounds.

But the shift to the margins of society could also be attributed to something else. In Pratt’s view, it reflected the triumph of “civilized punishment”—civilized not in the conventional meaning of the term, but in the sense that Norbert Elias described, whereby distasteful and disturbing events were removed from sight and pushed “behind the scenes of social life.”

...In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argued that the transition to the more refined technologies of punishment in the modern era—most notably, the prison—was driven by the desire to control and observe the bodies of criminals, rendering them docile and obedient. Criminologists influenced by Elias have emphasized another rationale, arguing that the shift was propelled by a desire to hide these bodies from respectable citizens who no longer wanted to glimpse the sordid business of punishment with their own eyes.

The fact that corporal punishment came to be viewed as sordid was, in theory, a sign of progress. Yet as Elias’s disciples have noted, the “civilizing process” he outlined did not suggest that brutal violence would cease, only that it would be relegated to more private spaces. According to the scholar David Garland, who introduced Elias’s work to the sociology of punishment, violence would not offend civilized sensibilities so long as it unfolded behind closed doors or could be sanitized.

...Flogging prisoners clearly violated the “threshold of repugnance” among modern Americans. But caging them in hidden, segregated “isolation units” did not. The fact that solitary confinement’s “ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye,” as Dickens had observed in 1842, was precisely why so many people failed to find it offensive. “Routine violence and suffering can be tolerated on condition that it is discreet, disguised, or somehow removed from view,” observed Garland. What mattered was not the level of brutality, but its visibility and form. Viewed in this light, the remoteness of Florida’s prisons was not an accident. Throughout the Western world, “the civilized prison became the invisible prison,” Pratt observed, hiding the system’s violence and making it that much easier for “good people” to ignore or forget about what was happening behind the walls.

[gatheringbones]

[“The belief that the troubling circumstances we have come to tolerate are impervious to change can itself become an excuse for resignation. It can fuel the kind of apathy that prevailed among the “passive democrats” that Everett Hughes described in his Frankfurt diary. The resignation is unwarranted, because, like most aspects of the social order, dirty work is not immutable. It is a function of laws and policies, of funding decisions, and of other collective choices we have made that reflect our values and priorities. Among these choices is whether to recognize the immense harm it causes, not only to innocent people and the environment but also to the people who carry it out.

The anguish such workers experience may elicit little sympathy from those who feel that anyone who participates in a cruel or violent system must be held accountable for the suffering they cause, even if, afterward, they harbor shame or regret about what they have done. As Primo Levi affirmed in “The Gray Zone,” doubts and discomfort expressed after the fact by oppressors are “not enough to enroll them among the victims.” But Levi also called for judgment of the low-ranking functionaries in oppressive systems to be tempered by awareness of how susceptible we all are to collaborating with power, and by an appreciation of the circumstances that lead relatively powerless people to be pushed into such roles. In contemporary America, the chief circumstance to consider, I have suggested, is inequality, which has shaped the delegation of dirty work no less than the distribution of wealth and income. More privileged Americans are spared from any involvement in such work, knowing it can be outsourced and allotted to people with fewer choices and opportunities. The result of this moral inequality is to ensure that an array of hidden injuries—stigma, shame, trauma, moral injury—are concentrated among those who are comparatively disadvantaged. These moral and emotional burdens have barely factored into the debate about inequality, perhaps because economists cannot measure and quantify them. But their effects can be equally pernicious and debilitating, shaping people’s sense of self-worth, their place in the social order, and their capacity to hold on to their dignity and pride.

Inequality also shapes the geography of dirty work and who is held responsible for it. As we’ve seen, the blame is rarely directed at the companies that profit from it or the public officials who have passed laws and policies that perpetuate it. More typically, it falls on the least powerful people in the system, “bad apples” who are singled out after the periodic “scandals” that shock the public—the same public that spent the preceding months or years ignoring what was being done.

In fairness, one can hardly expect the public to register concern about conditions it rarely sees. Dirty work is obscured by structural invisibility: the walls and barriers that keep what happens inside prisons and industrial slaughterhouses hidden; the secrecy that envelops the drone program; the nondisclosure agreements that the middlemen overseeing the cobalt supply chain are required to sign. These arrangements have had a “civilizing” effect, pushing disturbing events “behind the scenes of social life.” Yet there are limits to what even the most elaborate mechanisms of concealment can hide. In spite of the isolation and impenetrability of institutions like prisons and industrial slaughterhouses, plenty of information about what transpires within them leaks out. The secrecy cloaking the drone campaign has not stopped writers and documentary filmmakers from producing illuminating work about it, nor have nondisclosure agreements prevented NGOs from issuing detailed reports about the cobalt supply chain. The problem is not a dearth of information but the fact that many choose to avert their eyes, not only from dirty work but also from those who get stuck doing it, people with whom they almost never interact and find easy to judge.

What do we owe these workers?”]

eyal press, from dirty work: essential labor and the hidden toll of inequality in america, 2021

[gatheringbones]

[“While “essential workers” in the poultry industry were made to feel dirty, nonessential workers in fields like finance and computer engineering—the “people with laptops”—were sheltering in place, more distant from what transpired in industrial slaughterhouses than ever before.

Thanks to FreshDirect and Instacart, consuming meat no longer even requires coming into contact with a deli butcher or grocery clerk. With a few taps on a keyboard or the swipe of a screen, consumers can get as much beef, pork, and chicken as they want delivered to their doors, without ever having to think about where it comes from. And yet, as the popularity of bestselling books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals attests, a lot of Americans do think about this. In recent years, more and more consumers have begun to carefully scrutinize the labels on the packages of the meat and poultry they buy. The ranks of such consumers have grown exponentially, paralleling the rise of the “good food” movement, which promotes healthier eating habits and reform of the industrial food system.

Although the movement is, in Pollan’s words, a “big, lumpy tent,” composed of a broad coalition of advocacy organizations and citizens’ groups that sometimes push for competing agendas, one of its aims is to persuade consumers to become more conscientious shoppers and eaters. Among those who put this idea into practice are so-called locavores, who buy food directly from local farms, ideally from small family-run enterprises that embrace organic, sustainable practices: ranchers who raise grass-fed cows that never set foot in industrial feedlots; farmers who sell eggs that come from free-range chickens reared on a diet of seeds, plants, and insects rather than genetically engineered corn and antibiotics.

Locavores engage in what social scientists call “virtuous consumption,” using their purchasing power to buy food that aligns with their values. The movement appeals to the growing number of Americans who want to feel more connected to the food they eat and to the people who raise it, with whom locavores can interact directly at farmers markets or through community-supported agriculture programs. It is a captivating vision, and the benefits of eating locally grown food—which is likely to be more nutritious, to come from more humanely treated animals, and to be better for the environment—are manifold.

But locavores have some blind spots of their own, most notably when it comes to the experiences of workers on small family farms. As the political scientist Margaret Gray discovered when she set about interviewing farm laborers in New York’s Hudson Valley, the vast majority of these workers are undocumented immigrants or guest workers who toil under abysmal conditions, often working sixty- to seventy-hour weeks for dismal pay. “We live in the shadows,” one worker told her. “They treat us like nothing,” said another. In her book Labor and the Locavore, Gray asked the butcher on a small farm why so few of his customers seemed to notice this.

“They don’t eat the workers,” the farmer told her.

“He went on to explain that, in his experience, his consumers’ primary concern is with what they put in their bodies,” Gray wrote, “and so the labor standards of farmworkers simply do not register as a priority.”]

eyal press, from dirty work: essential labor and the hidden toll of inequality in america, 2021

[gatheringbones]

[“Chris began working as an imagery analyst at the NGA in 2005, studying satellite pictures of countries that had no link to the “war on terror.” Not long after he arrived, an email circulated about a Department of Defense task force that was being created to determine how drones could help defeat al-Qaeda. Chris answered the call for volunteers and was soon working at the Counterterrorism Airborne Analysis Center. He found it exhilarating to participate directly in a war he saw as his generation’s defining challenge. His pride deepened as it became clear that the task force was having a significant impact and that the use of drones was increasing.

Chris spent a little over a year at the task force, including several months in Afghanistan, where he served as the point of contact between the drone center in Langley and Special Forces on the ground. After this, he worked for a private military contractor for a while. In 2010, an offer came from another contractor involved in the drone program to serve as an imagery-and-intelligence analyst. But as Chris mulled the terms, something strange happened: he began to fall apart physically. The distress began with headaches, night chills, joint pain, a litany of flu-like symptoms that, every few weeks, would recur. Soon, more debilitating symptoms emerged: waves of nausea, eruptions of skin welts, chronic digestive problems.

Chris had always prided himself on his physical fitness. Now, suddenly, he felt frail and weak, to the point that working for the contractor was out of the question. “I could not sign the paperwork,” he said. Every time he sat down to try, “my hands stopped working—I was feverish, sick, nauseous.” Chris went back to Lexington to live with his parents and try to recuperate. He was twenty-nine years old and in the throes of a breakdown. “I was very, very unwell,” he said. He consulted several doctors, none of whom could specify a diagnosis. In desperation, he experimented with fasting, yoga, Chinese herbal medicine. Eventually, his health improved, but his mood continued to spiral. Chris couldn’t muster any motivation. He spent his days enveloped in a fog of gloom. At night, he dreamed that he could see—up close, in real time—innocent people being maimed and killed, their bodies dismembered, their faces contorted in agony. In one recurring dream, he was forced to sit in a chair and watch the violence unfurl. If he tried to avert his gaze, his head would be jerked back in place so that he had to continue looking. “It was as though my brain was telling me: Here are the details that you missed out on,” he said. “Now watch them when you’re dreaming.”]

eyal press, from dirty work: essential labor and the hidden toll of inequality in america, 2021

[gatheringbones]

[“One author of the Clinical Psychology Review article was Shira Maguen, a researcher who began to think about the moral burdens of warfare while counseling veterans at a PTSD clinic in Boston.

Like most Veterans Affairs psychologists, Maguen had been trained to focus on the aftershocks of fear-based trauma—IED blasts that ripped through soldiers’ Humvees, skirmishes that killed members of their unit. The link between PTSD and such “life-threat” events was firmly established. Yet in many of the cases she observed, the source of distress seemed to lie elsewhere: not in attacks by the enemy that veterans had survived, but in acts they had observed or carried out that crossed their own ethical lines.

Soldiers were not, of course, the only people who risked committing such transgressions. All of the counselors I interviewed at the Dade Correctional Institution struggled with inner conflicts related to horrifying things they’d witnessed but failed to prevent. What kind of person was she? Lovita Richardson wondered after seeing a prisoner bound to a chair get bludgeoned and not intervening to help him. “Why didn’t I do more?” Harriet Krzykowski asked herself after learning about the “shower treatment.” Many of the prison guards I’d interviewed had alluded to incidents where they’d done things they knew they shouldn’t, as when Bill Curtis slammed a man to the ground, nearly fracturing his skull. Moral injuries were an occupational hazard for anyone whose job involved “perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs.” For most dirty workers, that is.

Among the veterans she counseled, Maguen grew particularly interested in the emotional toll of killing, which was sanctioned in the military but not when defenseless civilians were involved. “I was hearing about experiences where people killed and they thought they were making the right decision,” she told me, “and then they found out there was a family in the car.” To find out how heavy the burden of killing was, Maguen began combing through the databases in which veterans of conflicts dating back to the Vietnam War were asked if they had killed someone while in uniform. In some cases, veterans were also asked whom they killed—combatants, prisoners of war, civilians. Maguen wanted to see if there might be a relationship between taking another life and debilitating consequences like alcohol abuse, relationship problems, outbursts of violence, PTSD. The results were striking: even when controlling for different experiences in combat, she found, killing was a “significant, independent predictor of multiple mental health symptoms” and of social dysfunction.

Later, when she started directing a mental health clinic at a VA hospital in San Francisco, Maguen convened groups where veterans came together and talked about the killing they had done. In the VA no less than in the military, this was a taboo subject, so much so that clinicians often referred to it euphemistically, if at all. To ease the tension, a scene from a documentary was shown at the beginning of each session in which a veteran said, “Out there, it’s either kill or be killed. Nothing can really prepare you for war.” Afterward, Maguen would ask the veterans in the room a series of questions about how killing had impacted their lives. Some reacted angrily. Others fell silent. But many seized the opportunity to talk about experiences they later told Maguen they had never spoken about with anyone, not even their spouses and family members, for fear of being judged.

The veterans in Maguen’s groups didn’t talk a lot about fear and hyperarousal, emotions linked to PTSD. Mostly, they expressed self-condemnation and guilt. “You feel ashamed of what you did,” one said. Others described feeling unworthy of forgiveness and love. The passage of time did little to diminish the depth of these feelings, Maguen found. Geographic distance didn’t lessen them much either. Maguen recounted the story of a pilot who was haunted by the bombs he had dropped on victims far below. What troubled him was, in fact, precisely his distance from them—that instead of squaring off against the enemy in a fair fight, he had killed in a way that lacked valor. Obviously not all pilots felt this way. But the story underscored the significance of something Maguen had come to regard as more important than proximity or distance in shaping moral injury—namely, how veterans made sense of what they had done. “How you conceptualize what you did and what happened makes such a big difference,” she said. “It makes all the difference.”

Unlike PTSD, moral injury was not a medical diagnosis. It was an attempt to capture what could happen to a person’s identity and soul in the crucible of war, which is why it struck a chord among veterans who did not feel their wounds could be reduced to a medical disorder. “PTSD as a diagnosis has a tendency to depoliticize a veteran’s disquietude and turn it into a mental disorder,” observed Tyler Boudreau, a marine officer who served in Iraq and came back haunted by doubts about the war’s morality. “What’s most useful about the term ‘moral injury’ is that it takes the problem out of the hands of the mental health profession and the military and attempts to place it where it belongs—in society, in the community, and in the family—precisely where moral questions should be posed and wrangled with. It transforms ‘patients’ back into citizens and ‘diagnoses’ into dialogue.”]

eyal press, from dirty work: essential labor and the hidden toll of inequality in america, 2021

[gatheringbones]

[“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.”]

eyal press, from dirty work: essential labor and the hidden toll of inequality in america, 2021