Eye opening though not surprising. The author makes some nuanced points that have me looking at jobs like these in a different light. ( )

Really good, horrifying book about the way that we make low-paid workers responsible for doing the worst things in our society, then blame them for having done those things within structures that make their bad behavior almost inevitable. This “dirty work” requires the tacit consent of “good people,” maybe even more in a democracy than in an autocracy. After all, how are we going to deal with all the mentally ill people we have decided not to care for outside of prison, or fight the wars we’ve decided to fight without lots of troops on the ground? Covers prison health care, military drone operators, slaughterhouse workers, and other jobs that most people don’t aspire to or pretend are noble (not, for example, police officers and teachers, who are also given individualized blame for structural failings including the structural failings that socialize them into behaving badly, but are also lionized in the abstract). For example: “Nobody told Curtis and his fellow guards to get brutal. But no one really needed to tell them this. It was enough to pay them modest salaries to enforce order in overcrowded, understaffed prisons that were neither equipped nor expected to do much else.”
These jobs tend to evoke disgust and shame, affecting both how others see the workers and often how the workers see themselves—Press discusses the idea of “moral injury,” especially in the context of drone operators. Although you might think they’d treat death like a video game, many of them instead react negatively—and they end up seeing more death and destruction than most Special Forces on the ground. Moral injury is a useful concept, Press argues, because PTSD, while also descriptive, can depoliticize and individualize what is a problem of what the system asked the individual to do. Meanwhile, drone operators aren’t seen as “real” soldiers, a status deriving “from the very thing that made drone warfare appealing to politicians and the public”—it saved money and lives on our side.

Press emphasizes that many of the workers he talks to are not the primary victims of the systems they work in—prisoners, foreigners subject to drone strikes, and maybe animals are--but they are also suffering as they cause suffering, and we should not let individualized blame obscure that they are doing what we as a society want them to do. This is particularly true because these are jobs disproportionately filled by poor people without other opportunities and people of color, walled off from others by geography, fences, and other barriers so we don’t have to think about them. Hedge fund guys, disproportionately white, don’t face the same stigma even as they do lots of damage, and they are rewarded with money and prestige for doing so. So, when the BP oil rig exploded, even the workers’ families understood that images of oil-covered birds would generate more public outrage than pictures of the loved ones they’d lost. But when these workers try to challenge unsafe conditions, they find they’re easily replaced, unlike high-tech workers whose protests are often heeded. (Interesting contrast to Tyler Schultz’s narrative of whistleblowing about Theranos—he definitely suffered, but his suffering had a point, which most of these workers can’t say.) “What do we owe these workers? At a minimum, it seems to me, we owe them the willingness to see them as our agents, doing work that is not disconnected from our own daily lives, and to listen to their stories, however unsettling what they tell us may be.” (Of course, this framing accepts that they aren’t likely to be reading the same books as “we” are.)

You should read it; it’s mostly about the US though there are a few fascinating comparisons, such as to research on the prison system in France, which also found that guards were ashamed of what they did for a living. In Norway, where the prison system is much more rehabilitative, the staff seemed much prouder (though he doesn’t have the same depth of ethnographic data). ( )

This book is so thoroughly researched and so very readable about the layers of parts that make a society/world work in terms of the human beings performing the tasks that keep everything operating.The real questions are what to do to help? Robots will not be the answer to the problem of dirty work. In many ways the structure is up-side-down. Those doing the dirty work need to be much more in charge of the ways all of these layers of work are allocated and how they get accomplished for people to live together in some sort of peace. Of course peace is a huge chunk of the problem in terms of the power of the military industrial complex combined with the tech giants. This books is refreshing for the individual stories and depressing in terms of where how to make any individual efforts work in trying to help straighten things out. We can't just sit on the sidelines and watch to see what happens. Where....does one start? ( )

Disclaimer: I received this book as a NetGalley ARC. No compensation was received other than the chance to read this work.

Dirty Work focuses on the jobs that society needs to keep certain things working, but society doesn't respect or value. Jobs like prison therapists, meat floor production workers, etc.

This book does a good job of looking into the psychological aspects of each job, using anecdotal evidence to show the impact this work has on those in the field, and positions each job within the political and sociological context in America.

Recommended for those who enjoy works such as The Sum of Us and works that discuss behind-the-scenes at various jobs. ( )