Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America

Dirty Work makes a powerful case that, instead of vilifying dirty workers, Americans must reckon with what is being done in their name . . . Dirty Work is about weighty moral questions, but it's also about people, profiling dozens of workers and empathetically engaging with their crises of conscience. While never absolving his interviewees, [Press] forces readers to ask themselves whether, under similar circumstances, they would have behaved any differently . . . A rigorously argued, compassionately framed moral appeal that for some readers might serve as a wake-up call. --Hank Stephenson, Shelf Awareness

Engrossing and frequently enraging . . . Press's lucid narrative is studded with gut-wrenching scenes . . . This deeply reported and eloquently argued account is a must-read. --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Essential reading. --Caren Nichter, Library Journal (starred review)

Probing . . . A provocative book that will make readers more aware of terrible things done in their names. --Kirkus

Long before the COVID pandemic highlighted our dependence on essential workers, our existence as consumers and citizens was underpinned by an army of people doing jobs we might prefer not to think about. In this penetrating, astutely observed, beautifully written book, Eyal Press explores the lives of those who work these jobs: the corrections officer, the drone operator, the woman who slaughters chickens for a living. Dirty Work makes no easy judgments, but instead confronts a series of deep and vexing moral questions. It exposes the bonds of complicity that make this not just someone else's story, but one which implicates us all. A masterful, important book. --Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain

This is a scathing and thoughtful book about labor and principles--or, rather about when the former sabotages the latter, in the brutal industries that prop up American life, from our appetite for cheap meat and fossil fuel to mass incarceration to remote killing as part of our foreign policy to the tech industry's amoral profit seeking. Though the moral injury impacts the workers first, it belongs to us all. Eyal Press brings this home in a series of powerful portraits of workers, and through considerations of both their industries and the ways we look away or are prevented from seeing what they do. Ultimately, Dirty Work is a book about human sacrifice and the forces that disguise it. --Rebecca Solnit, author of Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

"In this richly reported, disquieting book, Eyal Press highlights the stigmatizing, morally injurious work we ask some of the least advantaged members of society to perform in our name. Prison guards, slaughterhouse workers, and drone operators who carry out high-tech killings perform society's 'dirty work' out of public view. This book will prompt a public reckoning with inequality in work by revealing how we are all implicated in the dirty work we outsource to others." --Michael J. Sandel, author of The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?

Our society fights wars, imprisons criminals, produces food, and makes energy. However necessary it may be, the work involved is often ugly and violent. We want it done, cheaply, but don't want to see it done. Enter Eyal Press, a writer in the tradition of George Orwell and Martha Gellhorn, who asks us to look at the dirty work that men and women do in our name. With measured prose and exquisite poise, Press describes the moral burden these workers assume, and analyzes the systemic inequities that burden reflects. The result is as stunning as it is disturbing. --Corey Robin, author of The Enigma of Clarence Thomas