The article in the url below details a category of jobs that the author terms "dirty work." It is a subject he has studied for multiple years and recently wrote about in the book, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America. In order to understand this type of work and its consequences, the author has spent a lot of time studying the people who do it:
"… mental health aides and guards who patrol the wards of America's jails and prisons, many of which are rife with brutality and violence; Border Patrol agents who enforce America's inhumane immigration policies; undocumented immigrants who man the 'kill floors' of industrial slaughterhouses, where animals are hacked apart under brutal conditions in order to satisfy the popular demand for cheap meat; and drone operators who carry out 'targeted killings' in America's never-ending wars, which have faded from the headlines even as the number of lethal strikes conducted with little oversight steadily increased under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump."
While he recognizes the moral opacity of the situations these people are in, what is essential to his argument is that he does not absolve the rest of us:
"To the extent they are noticed at all, the people who perform such functions tend to be harshly judged, denounced for their involvement in or proximity to violence. Such judgments are not necessarily wrong, but they obscure an uncomfortable reality: We are all implicated in this dirty work, even if the people who do it are conveniently hidden from us."
The term "dirty work" is established in sociology and captures the idea that, although we may criticize people for doing such work, we are secretly pleased they are doing it, which allows us to adopt a sense of moral superiority as people who would not 'stoop so low':
"Contemporary America runs on dirty work. Some of the people who do this work are our agents by virtue of the fact that they perform public functions, such as running the world's largest penal system. Others qualify as such by catering to our consumption habits — the food we eat, the fossil fuels we burn, which are drilled and fracked by dirty workers in places like the Gulf of Mexico. The high-tech gadgets in our pockets rely on yet another form of dirty work — the mining of cobalt — that has been outsourced to workers in Africa and to foreign subcontractors that often brutally exploit them."
The job of recycling our waste is another example that comes to mind – so easy for us to drop off our trash in the single-stream recycling bin, not even having to sort it, allowing us to feel virtuous without any sense of the risk involved for those who have to do the hazardous work of processing it on our behalf. The point is that the various forms of work that can be classified as "dirty" are plentiful, yet those who do this work are a narrow subset of society:
"Although there is no shortage of it to go around, dirty work in America is not randomly distributed. It falls disproportionately to people with fewer choices and opportunities such as high-school graduates from depressed rural areas, undocumented immigrants, women and people of color. Many of these workers are victims in their own right, susceptible not only to exploitation and physical injury — as is true of so many people in low-status occupations — but also to another, less familiar set of hazards, owing to the unpalatable nature of the jobs they do."
The danger is that by turning the other cheek while others toil to enable the lives we lead, we are condemning them to a life of "moral injury":
"For dirty workers, [the burdens they bear] include stigma, self-reproach, corroded dignity and shattered self-esteem. In some cases, they include 'moral injury,' a term that military psychologists have used to describe the suffering that some soldiers endure after they carry out orders that transgress the values at the core of their identity."
And, the harshest imposition falls on those who enter their positions with the highest intentions of serving others, but end up morally compromised:
"The moral slide … may be particularly unsettling for those who are well intentioned, including the legion of psychiatric aides who work in jails and prisons, which in recent years have effectively become America's largest mental health institutions. As I have reported elsewhere, mental health staff routinely violate medical ethics by standing by while incarcerated people with mental illness are mistreated and abused."
The author's conclusion about what to do about this situation speaks to a level of community and empathy that is increasingly rare in our society:
"What we owe dirty workers is the willingness to see them as our agents and to grapple with our own complicity. We also owe many of them the right to have their stories listened to with respect and curiosity."
Take care
David
David Chandler
© Sage Publications, 2020
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America's Ethically Troubling Jobs
By Eyal Press
August 15, 2021
The New York Times
Late Edition – Final
SR4-5
See also:
Necessary Evil
By Tamsin Shaw
August 29, 2021
The New York Times Book Review
Late Edition – Final
10
