Somebody’s Gotta Do It: On Erin Hatton’s “Coerced” and Eyal Press’ “Dirty Work”
Erin Hatton | Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment | University of California Press | March 2020 | 281 Pages
Eyal Press | Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | August 2021 | 303 Pages
On the first Friday of every month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes its jobs report. Among political junkies, the “Employment Situation” report is adrenaline-inducing, even though it is quite anodyne with terms like “household survey data,” “nonfarm employment,” and “hospitality and leisure.” Lawmakers spar over the details for a few days, and then the buzz dies down until the next report comes out. Insofar as the data offer quantitative information, though, they lack qualitative description and nuance. What are these jobs like? How do the people working the jobs feel about them? Are they good jobs? Since the 2008 Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, questions about the lived experience of labor have become salient, with a growing demand for answers and action.
Two recent monographs on the state of labor in the US, Coerced by Erin Hatton and Dirty Work by Eyal Press, ought to trouble readers. Hatton writes about workers who are in the public eye, while Press considers categories of labor that many prefer to remain ignorant about. The authors, both of whom are sociologists, document forms of work that are premised on coercion, harm (both to the self and to others), and morally compromising actions. This work is necessary to the functioning of society and large systems—especially higher education, the carceral state, and food production—even if it is sometimes hidden in plain sight. Most Americans have the luxury of turning their heads to workers whose labors sustain their comfortable lifestyles: “Just as the rich and the poor have come to inhabit starkly different worlds, an equally stark gap separates the people who perform the most thankless, ethically troubling jobs in America and those who are exempt from these activities,” Press writes. Coerced and Dirty Work provide readers a conceptual basis to understand the impact this work has on the people who do it and the labor relations that underpin it.
At first glance, graduate students in the sciences, college athletes, workfare recipients, and prisoners might not have much in common. But Erin Hatton, a professor at SUNY Buffalo, draws out their parallels. Each group clashes with cultural assumptions about “workers.” Nobody would deny that a forklift operator moving a pallet from a semi-truck to a warehouse or a radiologist processing an MRI are “workers.” But what about a college junior who plays point guard on her school’s basketball team, or a felon serving a fifteen-year sentence who separates clothes in the prison laundry? There’s a lack of consensus about whether the basketball player and prisoner can be considered “workers” and if they are entitled to a share of the profits they generate for their university or have the right to quit a prison job that negatively impacts their health.
The exclusion of Hatton’s subjects from workplace regulatory regimes has significant material consequences. For the most part, they do not have the protection of laws governing hours of work and overtime, minimum wage, or health and safety, and the right to organize. These exclusions, Hatton argues, render them vulnerable to something she calls “status coercion,” which is more insidious than the typical economic compulsion facing most workers. It’s instructive to compare Hatton’s subjects with those in “caring” occupations like nursing and early childhood education. In spite of gendered stereotypes that deem them selfless caregivers driven by altruism, they have legal recognition as workers and enjoy basic rights on the job. However, the power relationship between prisoners, graduate students, student athletes, workfare recipients, and their supervisors is remarkably one-sided. Hatton delineates what this lack of status means:
Their supervisors have the power to discharge them from a particular status—as prisoner, welfare recipient, college athlete, or graduate student “in good standing”—and thereby deprive them of the rights, privileges, and future opportunities that such status confers.
In most workplaces, bosses can fire workers for any or no reason at all under “at-will'' employment doctrines, and in many states their access to unemployment benefits depends on the nature of the termination. Of course, a corrections officer can’t “fire” a prisoner, but he can send him to solitary confinement; a college basketball coach can bench a point guard that they don’t like; a workfare supervisor can sanction a recipient; and a doctoral advisor can take credit for a student’s research. Status coercion can cut deep, wound a person’s dignity, and affect their families in far-reaching ways.
Workers’ voices are a major strength of Coerced. The five chapter titles are derived from Hatton’s interviews with her informants. In the third chapter, “They Talk to You In Any Kind of Way,” Hatton discusses how workers are coerced by their respective institutions and supervisors. Prisoners and workfare recipients are “surplus populations” that must be dominated for their transgressions. Graduate students and student athletes, meanwhile, are “creators of capital and therefore the primary goal of their subjugation is their exploitation rather than domination.” For example, in the fourth chapter, “I’m Getting Ethiopia Pay for My Work,” a basketball player explains how she and her teammates received watches from her school in recognition for making it to the Final Four championship while their coaches received monetary bonuses. That the NCAA is fighting the organizing efforts of college athletes to collectively bargain suggests how lucrative an industry it is for coaches, administrators, and colleges and universities—everybody, that is, except the athletes.
The cultural, institutional, and legal gatekeepers that determine who is and isn’t a “worker” rest on shifting ground. On the one hand, not all of Hatton’s informants even consider themselves workers. These assumptions, indeed, amount to a sort of “common sense.” On the other hand, cracks in consent are challenging their hegemony. Prisoners in the United States and United Kingdom are channeling their grievances through the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee. In September of 2022, its members organized work stoppages in Alabama’s thirteen state prisons as striking prisoners refused to clean laundry, prepare food, and perform maintenance and custodial tasks that they were not paid for. At the close of 2022, the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that governs private sector labor relations, concluded that student athletes are employees under the National Labor Relations Act, creating a path for them to unionize. Coerced makes an important contribution to these efforts because it shines a spotlight on attitudes, practices, and policies that many people accept as natural and self-evident and, therefore, can be changed through collective action.
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In Dirty Work, Eyal Press examines the types of work that most people, when exposed to it, would rather look way from. In popular parlance, “dirty work” means getting your hands calloused and working up a sweat. Television host Mike Rowe hawked these tropes on his show Dirty Jobs as he interviewed blue-collar laborers going about their work. Press, a veteran journalist with a doctorate in sociology from NYU, has a different perspective: “dirty work” harms humans, animals, and the environment. The people who perform it “feel devalued and stigmatized or to feel that they have betrayed their own core values and beliefs.” “Good people” look askance at this work and those who do it, even if they recognize it as essential to a functioning society and to their lifestyles. A key factor in all of this, Press argues, is that others do this work: women, people of color, undocumented immigrants, the poor.
“Others” process chicken, the most popular meat in America. Flor Martinez, an undocumented immigrant from north-central Mexico who worked at a poultry plant in Texas, is a typical example. One of her jobs required her to hang live birds on a belt (sixty-five per minute), which led to debilitating repetitive strain injuries. The nonstop labor caught up with Flor, and she quit working at the plant that regarded her “like a disposable piece of trash.” Dirty Work was published in 2021, but recent events support Press’ contentions. In early 2023, the Department of Labor fined Packers Sanitation Services, Inc., a company that cleans meatpacking facilities, $1.5 million for employing over one hundred children on overnight shifts to clean facilities belonging to JBS Foods, Tyson Foods, and Cargill in eight states. Most of the children were immigrants, some as young as thirteen.
One of the most affecting sections of Dirty Work describes what happens when public sector jobs are privatized. Harriet Kryzkowski, a mental health counselor in the Florida prison system, became distressed about inmates’ health care and guards’ treatment of prisoners. Technically, she worked for Corizon, a prison healthcare provider that operates in several states, which was contractually obligated to spend seven percent less than the state of Florida did on health care. Stress caused Harriet’s hair to fall out and her appetite to diminish. She witnessed guards abuse prisoners, but didn’t report it for fear of retaliation, and reasoned with herself that some of the guards were decent people in tough situations. “Was she a victim of the system, or an instrument of it?” Press asks. Moral ambiguity can leave deep scars on a person, just as it did to Harriet.
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Coerced and Dirty Work raise thorny questions about the future of work. Can people who are not considered “workers” gain recognition as such? Can “dirty work” lose its tarnish? These are variations of what labor historians call the “labor question”: who does the work, and under what terms and conditions? To be sure, unionization, collective bargaining, and tight labor markets all have a positive impact on workers’ power and paychecks. But it’s not that simple for everyone. Prisoners and workfare recipients, for instance, have long been labeled “undeserving” even if they’ve served their time and worked hard. Race, gender, and ethnic prejudices compound the stigmas attached to them. Sex workers deal with similar forms of censure. Then there are workers who occupy dubious ethical spaces, such as drone operators for the US military. As Press indicates, they kill targets and support ground forces from computer screens thousands of miles from real conflict. Several have written of the guilt they feel for not knowing whether they’ve killed combatants or people just going about their daily lives. Within the military, drone operators are regarded as “joystick warriors” and not accorded the same prestige as soldiers who’ve served on the front lines. It’s doubtful whether this work can ever become “clean,” so the Pentagon took the prudent step of outsourcing some of it to private military contractors.
“It’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it” is an overused punchline in film and television, but it has value in this context. Reading Coerced and Dirty Work might lead people to ask “who are these somebody’s, who gets to tell them what to do, and why do they get to do that?” Indeed, these books raise more questions than offer answers, but the picture they paint is far from ambiguous. Hatton and Press render visible what capital would rather keep invisible. Power doesn’t always come from brute force; in many cases it operates through obfuscation and mystification. Illuminating all of this is the easy part, of course. The challenge is figuring out how to empower the people who work under these conditions. Organizing against capital and the bosses isn’t for the faint of heart, but as the writer and socialist Irving Howe was fond of saying, “it’s steady work.”