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Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America
Most of us are happy to remain in the dark. We don’t want to see how the sausage is made, don’t want to know how the mentally ill are treated and accept drone strikes as “surgical” interventions. Eyal Press examines those dark spots in Dirty Work.
Sausages and drone strikes are made by people working out of view. Likewise, the staffs of prisons where the mentally ill are warehoused. This “dirty work,” defined by Press as harmful to people or the environment, is usually done by the poor and disadvantaged, the left-behinds of our alleged meritocracy. Often, our society grants an unspoken mandate to the systems that perpetrate the dirty work.
Press cites Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, who “called for judgement of the low-ranking functionaries in oppressive systems to be tempered by an awareness of how susceptible we all are to collaborating with power.” That the U.S. is a democratic society—far removed from the terror state of Nazi Germany—might only increase the culpability of “good citizens” who prefer to look away.
