What does it mean to take America's "jobs of last resort"?
What does it mean to take America’s “jobs of last resort”?
Author Eyal Press on the nation’s most morally troubling labor — and why many refuse to acknowledge it.
By Jamil Smith@JamilSmith Updated Apr 22, 2022, 10:57am EDT
What does it mean to take America’s “jobs of last resort”?
Harriet Krzykowski was a mental health aide in a South Florida correctional facility, making $12 per hour, when she learned of the death of Darren Rainey. Rainey was a mentally ill man who had been incarcerated at the prison where she worked, and prison guards had killed him.
The details were particularly horrifying. The guards responsible had trapped Rainey in a shower and tortured him with scalding water until he collapsed. The temperature had reached as high as 180 degrees. By the time of Rainey’s autopsy, he had burns on 90 percent of his body. Rainey’s skin, reportedly, would fall off if touched.
Krzykowski wanted to quit her job upon hearing of the 2012 incident. She couldn’t afford to. She was one of the many American workers whose stories journalist Eyal Press tells in his book, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, published late last summer. Press, whose feature reporting appears in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Guardian, shines light upon the lives of undocumented immigrants working on the kill floors of poultry slaughterhouses, Americans deputized to carry out drone warfare in their country’s name, and others, such as Krzykowski, who have been toiling in jobs that the most powerful castes pass on to the poorly educated and compensated. Those jobs often serve to empower the very system that maintains and exacerbates social and economic inequity — and robs workers of their dignity along the way.
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https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23013404/dirty-work-eyal-press-slaughterhouse-prisons-jobs
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