Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America's Largest Meatpacking Company

by Alice Driver

Overview

Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, and a New Yorker best book of 2024, a “startling glimpse into the meatpacking industry’s abuse of undocumented and incarcerated workers” (The New York Times Book Review) and those who had the courage to fight back.

On June 27, 2011, a deadly chemical accident took place inside the Tyson Foods chicken processing plant in Springdale, Arkansas, where the company is headquartered. The company urged everyone return to work, although the spill left their employees injured, sick, and terrified. Over the years, Arkansas-based reporter Alice Driver was able to gain the trust of the immigrant workers who survived the accident. They rewarded her persistence by giving her total access to their lives.

During the course of Alice’s reporting, the COVID-19 pandemic struck the community, and the workers were forced to continue production in unsafe conditions, watching their colleagues get sick and die one by one. These essential workers, many of whom only speak Spanish and some of whom are illiterate—all of whom suffer the health consequences of Tyson’s negligence—somehow found the strength and courage to organize and fight back, culminating in a lawsuit against Tyson Foods, the largest meatpacking company in America.

A richly detailed, fiercely honest, and deeply reported “tour de force” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), Life and Death of the American Worker will forever change the way we think about the people who prepare our food.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668078822
Publisher:	Atria/One Signal Publishers
Publication date:	09/03/2024
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Alice Driver is a J. Anthony Lukas and James Beard Award–winning writer from the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. Driver is the author of Life and Death of the American Worker, More or Less Dead, and the forthcoming Artists All Around, a memoir about her family’s relationship with Maurice Sendak, the author of Where the Wild Things Are. She is also the translator of Abecedario de Juárez. She lives in the Ozark Mountains.

Editorial Reviews

07/29/2024

The horrifying labor violations of meatpacking behemoth Tyson and the harrowing ordeal of the undocumented immigrant workforce that fought back are revealed in this shocking exposé from journalist Driver (More or Less Dead). The company’s ill-treatment of workers at a plant in Springdale, Ark., included startlingly unsafe conditions leading to accidents and subsequent cover-ups. In one incident, a toxic gas leak resulted in the hospitalization of 173 workers (managers insisted workers remain at their stations, even as some began to faint; afterward, the company forced workers to sign liability waivers). One of those workers, Plácido Leopoldo Arrue—whose story Driver follows closely—became seriously disabled by the exposure; he died of Covid in July 2020, likely made more vulnerable by the lung damage. Covid was the initial impetus for Driver’s project—in 2020, as meatpacking workers in cramped conditions fell ill, Driver began investigating. Her subjects were reluctant to communicate by phone, and so her story takes her on road trips across the South to conduct in-person interviews, an intrepid effort of gumshoe journalism resulting in an intimate, unprecedented glimpse of the lives of America’s undocumented workforce during the pandemic—which includes efforts by some workers to organize with a union and file lawsuits against Tyson. Throughout, Driver’s prose is sumptuous and empathetic (“Looking down... they see their faces reflected in a pool of blood,” she writes of workers on the assembly line). This is a tour de force. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

From the lush descriptions in the very first pages, it feels clear that Driver has longed to write about the state for some time. .... A work of journalism that seeks at once to draw attention to injustice and to philosophize, insisting on material equity and a specific notion of the good life. Driver frames the book in terms of ‘moral beauty’: an ethic of looking outside oneself, to the Other, in which she locates the good and the just. The work ethic and steadfast organizing of the people she chronicles transcends political activism and approaches something conceptual and timeless. ... It’s when she calls on her experience as a reporter and an Arkansan that her doggedness and closeness to the story—and, in turn, her book’s emotional importance—best shine through.... The warmth that Driver must have developed with the people she was chronicling is evident. This rapport puts into practice Driver’s conceptual approach of ‘moral beauty.’ The combination of the two is perhaps the book’s most important contribution.... This book most reminded me of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans....Driver is a worthy inheritor of this tradition. .... Her lens of “moral beauty” enables her to create art without aestheticizing the workers’ suffering. In part, it’s her training as a literary scholar—and specifically as a scholar of the literature of death in Mexico—that enables her to ground and humanize the exploitation she observes. ... No matter how foreclosed the legal possibilities for holding Tyson accountable, Driver demands that the company answer on a higher plane—to see that it has done wrong in the courts of what is human, ethical, and morally beautiful.”
—Caroline Tracey, The Nation

"Intimately reported."
—The New Yorker

"[Alice Driver] offers incredible insights into the expendable lives powering an “essential” industry."

—Philip Johnson, A Conversation Best Book of 2024

"A startling glimpse into the meatpacking industry’s abuse of undocumented and incarcerated workers."
—The New York Times Book Review

"A tour de force"
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"The workers who feed us are some of America's poorest and most exploited. Alice Driver tells their stories with enormous compassion and grace. A fearless, wonderful book."
—ERIC SCHLOSSER, author of Fast Food Nation

"Life and Death of The American Worker is not only a horror story of corporate negligence but a deeply humane work about what we owe each other. How chilling it is to think that no one else but Driver could have written such a vital book."
—SLOANE CROSLEY, author of Grief Is For People

"An extraordinary feat of reporting—a gripping investigation into the brutal, often life-threatening conditions faced by America's most vulnerable workers. It's hard to imagine a more urgent or timely book, one written with rigor, deep compassion, and moral clarity. A vital, infuriating book - an absolute must-read. Highly recommended.”
—BRIAN GOLDSTONE, author of There Is No Place For US

“Not since The Jungle has a book punched me quite literally in the stomach like this one has. Alice Driver's invitation to sit at the table with the workers who package our dinners, who create the nuggets we hand our children in the backseats of our cars, is an unforgettable experience. Life and Death of the American Worker is a masterpiece that will be referenced for generations.”
—STEPHANIE LAND, bestselling author of Maid and Class

"An unforgettable piece of literary journalism that illuminates the way our world really works. Driver is bighearted and tireless as she plunges into the darkest reaches of the modern food system, and the story she reveals is shocking but also deeply humane and surprisingly inspiring. A landmark book about power in America today."
—CHRISTOPHER LEONARD, New York Times bestselling author of The Meat Racket and Kochland

"In heartbreaking detail, Life and Death of The American Worker focuses on the very human consequences of our choices and the appalling ways that people in power dodge our nation's labor and environmental laws in pursuit of profit."
—RACHEL SLADE, author of Making It in America and Into the Raging Sea

“This is one of the most vital books of our time. An antidote to the racist propaganda behind the rise of Trumpism, Life and Death of the American Worker honors the invisibilized people who sacrifice blood and well-being to feed us, who are too often killed in the shadows by profit-hungry companies that escape accountability with the help of corrupt politicians from both political parties. Alice Driver is a rare type of journalist: one who can journey into the most bloodstained and deplorable corners of this world without getting lost in the dark. She carries the light of the victims. She'll light a fire under you. May every American read this book.”
—JEAN GUERRERO, author of Crux and Hatemonger

"Alice Driver's deep dive into the lives and losses of the workers who process our food will haunt you. Meatpacking work was brutal before the COVID-19 pandemic; when the virus came, these workers were expected to volunteer to sicken and die so that Americans could keep up our meat consumption. They were called 'essential' but treated as expendable, as so much replaceable human machine equipment. In Driver's pages, their worries and fears, their pain and their care, their love and laughter and their determination to find justice remind us that no matter how much capitalism tries to reduce us to robots, humans will always find a way to resist. An essential read."
—SARAH JAFFE, author of Work Won't Love You Back

“As much an act of attention and care as it is a work of rigorous investigation, Alice Driver has given us a radicalizing, clear-eyed portrait of workers and their circumstances.”
—ALEJANDRA OLIVA, author of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration

From the Publisher

2024-05-25
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 ofMore 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.

Kirkus Reviews

Lori Felipe-Barkin's narration brings listeners into the everyday life of a Salvadoran migrant worker, but there's something about him that isn't everyday: his repetition of chicken-killing motions while asleep. Alice Driver talked to Tyson Foods workers in Arkansas to report on the company's working conditions, including its reluctance to maintain Covid safety. Felipe-Barkin delivers accounts of a chemical leak at the plant dramatically to get listeners involved in the events. She makes the killing of chickens sound macabre and sharpens her tone to narrate the ingredients list for chicken nuggets. Driver also calls out politicians, whose relationships with the meatpacking industry she considers cozy. This audiobook may be enough to give listeners doubts at the supermarket. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2024 - AudioFile