An astonishing exposé of the American meatpacking industry’s exploitation of its incarcerated and immigrant workforce.
A freelance journalist uncovers the inhumane conditions plaguing the Tyson Foods meatpacking plants in Arkansas.
In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, Driver, author of More or Less Dead, returned to her home state of Arkansas and began interviewing poultry workers at Tyson plants across the state. Although she risked infection, she felt the investigation couldn’t wait. “Confronting a powerful company worth billions was daunting.…However, as meatpacking workers began to die of COVID,” she writes, “I continued to interview their families, hoping that people were ready to listen.” The author reveals disturbing stories of workers whose lungs were destroyed by a chemical accident that Tyson failed to acknowledge; whose repetitive motion led not only to carpal tunnel syndrome, but to unconsciously continuing to imitate these motions in their sleep; and who worked for a pittance as an alternative to incarceration. “In addition to employing undocumented workers,” writes Driver, “Tyson also exploits vulnerable prison populations.” Throughout these experiences, the workers encountered unsympathetic administrators holding up oppressive systems, including managers who waited outside restroom doors to ensure that workers took inhumanely quick breaks, nurses and doctors who denied workers proper care, and politicians who ignored these practices in order to line their own pockets—most notably, Bill Clinton. “As the governor of Arkansas,” writes the author, “Clinton oversaw lax regulations on the meatpacking industry, leading to the contamination of drinking water and hundreds of miles of rivers and streams.” This devastatingly frank, brutally detailed peek into the meatpacking industry brilliantly exposes a damaging system that must be reformed. While the ending of the book, which briefly comments on lab-grown meat, feels disconnected from the rest of the story, overall, this is a vital work of journalism.
An astonishing exposé of the American meatpacking industry’s exploitation of its incarcerated and immigrant workforce.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781668078822
Page Count: 256
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Swift, photographic prose defines the dimensions of hell—and of humanity. (8-page photo insert)
Two New York Times reporters take us inside the World Trade Center on 9/11 to give us a more capacious view of heroism.
Dwyer (Subway Lives, 1991, etc.), who won a Pulitzer as part of the group that covered the 1993 WTC bombing, teamed with special-projects editor Flynn to interview scores of survivors and their families; the pair also studied e- and voice-mails from those inside. From these sources they’ve pieced together a powerful account of the disaster that hesitates neither to confer laurels nor point fingers. Their technique is not novel: we move around the buildings, getting to know some folks employed there and learning names and histories of rescue workers. We know the buildings will fall; those inside do not. (Most people fleeing the north tower didn’t discover until they got outside that the south had fallen.) The authors lard their tale with surprising and alarming detail. The Marriott swimming pool caught fire. A man carried a disabled woman 54 floors down to the street. A fireman was killed by a falling human being. Molten aluminum from a melting airliner poured from an 80th-floor window. A dead cop’s gun went off in the searing heat. Their account of the rescue efforts is equally disturbing. The various agencies were unable to communicate with one another; firemen carrying 57 pounds of equipment struggled slowly up stairs choked by smoke, heat, and debris; 911 dispatchers gave mixed messages to those inside; about a hundred firemen died in the north tower because they had stopped to rest on floor 19 and didn’t hear the evacuation order. The authors conclude that most of the rescuing was done by civilians helping one another, not by policemen and firemen. Flynn and Dwyer do not seek to diminish what the safety officers did; instead, they celebrate the extraordinary capacities of ordinary folk.
Swift, photographic prose defines the dimensions of hell—and of humanity. (8-page photo insert)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7682-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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