YouSaid · the spoken record

Eyal Press

lines on the record: 48
first: 2022-02-14
most recent: 2022-02-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I wish I could say I had the solutions. I mean, a simple one is labor unions, but labor unions in the United States have been decimated and weakened. And that again gets back to the collective policies and decisions that society has made to tilt the playing field away from these workers, to make their lives more difficult. I'm not a policymaker. I'm a reporter and a storyteller, and I hope that the stories in this book move people and lead to those conversations about solutions because we need them, but I'm not the one who's going to be leading the way in sort of pointing to what the solutions are.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great question. I don't think that capitalism could survive without some form of dirty work taking place. This is a critique in some ways of capitalism and of late capitalism and of the sort of moral order that capitalism leads us to.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Will change the form that dirty work takes. I don't think it will necessarily phase it out or let alone alter the reality that there will be jobs that feel sullying in some way.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that dirty work is as old as human history. And, you know, I think that there is a question that I raised in the book late in the book about whether technology will just sort of phase out this kind of work. And the drone program is sort of a premonition of that in that, you know, you've got these quote-unquote unmanned aerial vehicles. But as I note at one point and quote someone saying, That's actually a misnomer because the vehicles, the drones are not unmanned. They're hypermanned, as one soldier put it to me, because you have imagery analysts and you have sensor operators and then the pilots and a whole chain of command watching what's happening and making decisions about it. So I do think that technology”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This, can we actually tolerate on into the future when it is putting the planet in peril? And so there are sort of nuances there that I don't explore in detail in the book, but there probably wouldn't be not seeing eye to eye with the workers necessarily on that.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting. I don't think that I say one issue I don't address in the book is should this dirty work just be stopped altogether or should the conditions under which it takes place be changed to make it safer? And those are obviously two very different things. And I think that if you spoke to people who work as roused about or who work on the fracking industry in the United States or elsewhere, they're not going to say let's shut the industry down. They're going to want safety and better conditions. And that's understandable. And I think that that's at the very least what they are owed. I think, though, as a society, when it comes to the fossil fuel industry, we have to ask a different question, which is how much of”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About what were the safety measures on the rig? And he learns that they were cutting corners all the time and that this is actually routine on oil rigs. And he gets this sense that these guys were expendable. His life was expendable, that safety was not a concern. And that sense of betrayal came out in his sort of talking about what he'd undergone. And I think that it leads to moral injury, a kind of different kind of moral injury. You know, Chris Ehra and the drone operator also felt that. He was told a story about Afghanistan that turned out not to be the story of what was really happening on the ground.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This oil rake worker, this rousabout that I profile. His name is Stephen Stone. And he worked on the rig that actually blew up and is known internationally because it was the Deepwater Horizon. It's one of the biggest explosions and caused one of the most drastic, drastic pollution throughout the Gulf. Stephen, when he took that job, from a small town in Alabama doesn't know that much about what being aroused about involves, but he sees the oil industries flush with money. At least they're going to go all out for safety measures and not cut corners. And then after the blast, which he survives, but which several of his crewmakers do not, he starts reading.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think it's really central to this whole concept of moral injury that I talked about. That term was actually coined by a guy named Jonathan Shea, a psychiatrist, and he wrote a book called Achilles in Vietnam. It's about Vietnam veterans. And what he said in that book is that a lot of the pain, the wound that the veterans he'd worked with many over decades, counseling them, the pain began with a sense of betrayal, betrayal by their leaders. Their leaders told them, you know, you were fighting for one thing, and then they kind of came home and realized, whoa, this was a war built on lies. There was no way what we were fighting for was going to work out the way we were told. And in a very similar way, I detected that sense of betrayal.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They get to spend no more than five or ten minutes per patient because they have six or eight at a time. So I think when we hear politicians, whether it's in the UK or in the United States, refer to workers as heroes, the first thing we should be is suspicious. Something is going on. It's not just an appreciation of what they do.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And I should say, I think I have an allergy to the word hero generally. It's kind of ironic because the previous book I wrote, Beautiful Souls that you mentioned at the outset, is about moral courage. So it's about people who are often labeled heroes for speaking out, for resisting dirtying their hands. But I don't use that term in the book, and I don't use it in dirty work because I think that the term is slippery and it's an evasion of the ugly reality. You know, even in the case of nurses, I mean, nurses in the United States right now, the level of distress is extremely high. And I know for a fact from some recent reporting I've done, that they don't like this term. You know, we're heroes of the pandemic. If we're heroes of the pandemic, let's look into staffing levels at hospitals that have been cutting staff, right? Let's look into the mandate that”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A psychological toll. And even if that toll shows up in a kind of callousness or a kind of I don't mind this, that doesn't mean that the person is not scathed by it. And so that's kind of one of the points I make in the book, that what we accept on the surface says people not really being affected by this work, we shouldn't necessarily accept.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are a lot of prisons and jails. It's one of the hubs of the carceral state in Colorado. And I spoke to this warden at the jail, and I said exactly what you just asked me. I said, okay, I've talked to some guards who are kind of troubled by what they do, but I imagine a lot of them aren't. What do you say about that? And he said, those are the guys I worry about. And what he meant was, you know, there's this sort of tough, like, I'm not affected by this, but that can lead to what we see in the occupational health literature on prison guards, high rates of hypertension, high rates of suicide, high rates of substance abuse and alcoholism, all of those things, you know, it's when you're in this kind of warlike environment and you see day after day violence and tensions, some of which you're trying to avoid, some of which you're meting out, it has, I believe.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it's a great question, and inevitably my book is shaped by these sort of intimate portraits that I drew of people who, as you know, end up feeling, not always initially, but Chris Ahren's case, the drone operator, he wasn't initially troubled, but he became troubled. And that did afford me an entry point into that world. There certainly are a lot of people who, at least on the surface, are untroubled, though I wouldn't say that they are therefore unscathed. There is a difference between those two things, and I'll relay that in an anecdote I heard. I went to a jail in Colorado. This is a part of Colorado that is just surrounded by prisons and jails, beautiful area, by the way. If you go there, all you'll see is, you know, whitewater rafting and beautiful hills, and you'll think, what a wonderful place to live. And it is. But tucked away in those hills.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they know they're expendable, they know how easily they can be replaced. So I think there's a different level of power, and this really is a book about power and the lack of power that exists for the people who are delegated society's dirty work.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Partnering with the Pentagon to sharpen the imagery on drones, actually, which is what one of the tech workers I write about was troubled by. So I do think that the moral conflicts are analogous in some ways in these higher paying white-collar professions. But what you said in the beginning is also very important. There's a different degree of what's called voice and exit that people who work in white-collar high-tech jobs or in banking can exercise. They make more money. They have generally advanced degrees and more sort of marketable skills. So leaving or even just not leaving but saying something to their boss about how they object to this and they don't want to do it. We've seen that again and again, you know, at Google and other companies. These workers very admirably coming out and saying, you know, I don't want to do this. You don't see slaughterhouse workers do that very often.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's funny when I was working on this book and I told people I'm writing a book about dirty work or dirty jobs. A lot of people said to me, oh, you mean lobbyists? Or do you mean the hedge fund managers who just skim all these profits? And so that got me thinking, well, I really have to address this in some way. Why am I not writing about those people? And I did in the end of the book, as you mentioned, there's a chapter called Dirty Tech, where I decided, okay, I'm going to write about people at companies like Google and other high-tech Silicon Valley firms who recently in recent years have started to come forward and say, you know, we don't feel so good about what we're doing. You know, we were told this is about making information freely available to the entire world. What a nice mission that is. We weren't told that Google would be”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anthropologist asks how come people don't ask that when they go to the farmer's market. And this guy says, well, they don't eat the workers. And people think about a sense of wanting to be clean and not sort of eat pesticide treated meat, not want to eat something that has been an animal that's been raised on a factory farm or in the United States, cows that are never fed grass, that are always just, that are grain-fed and their whole diet has changed. All of that creates, I think, a direct sense of disgust in consumers. And as a result, there's a very large movement in the United States for buying meat that is, for lack of a better way to put it, less dirty, right? That is, that is produced under more humane conditions. But the workers are really...”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was really struck by that. And by the way, that point is not lost on the workers. They will tell you, you know, yeah, there are so many consumers who want chicken and pork that is humanely raised. How about humanely treated workers who process it? They know that this is less of a concern to a lot of the people who are shopping for the meat that's processed in these plants and slaughterhouses. And I think that the sort of most evocative comment on that that I heard or actually read came from a farmer who's quoted in the book at one point. And he's asked this very question. It's at a local farmer's market. And it turns out that labor conditions in a lot of local farms in the United States are not that much better than in these sort of large factory farms. And so this”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Deported, or they could get in trouble with immigration authorities. And I know that some of those dynamics do exist in some of the hidden job market throughout Europe and the UK. But I think that the way to change what these workers experience is, first of all, to have frank conversations about what they do and how they're doing it in society's name. And then secondly, to think about the policies and the laws, the collective decisions that shape both the demand for this work and the conditions under which it takes place.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that what I conclude in the book is that we owe the people who do society's dirty work, the right to be heard, the right to have their stories told, and that's why I wrote the book in that sense. It's a piece of writing and hopefully a piece of education about kind of illuminating an America that is there, but that few people see. There are ways to pass laws to change the conditions in some of the institutions I write about and I mention in the section on slaughterhouses, I do draw comparisons with Europe, not favorable comparisons for the United States where the labor conditions, the regulations are much more lax, the dependence on transient labor, on undocumented workers who are very easy to silence and exploit because they're worried if they say anything they could be”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back to societal complicity. It's not that anyone would want what happened to Darren Rainey to happen. It's a horror. But it's that we countenance it and kind of keep it out of sight and out of mind.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last year about prison conditions. And during the course of that story, I came across a testimonial given by a prisoner who said he'd been locked in a scalding shower. This was in Georgia, in another state. No one has heard anything more about that. But it just gives you a sense that these things are happening behind the walls of these institutions. And again, to go to the question of essential, I just want to explain because it's not necessarily the case in other countries or in the UK. The United States deinstitutionalized its mental health institutions, shut down these sort of large asylums for humanitarian reasons. Because the thought was people would be better off getting community care. But the community care was never funded. And what took the place of those asylums were jails and prisons, which are the largest mental health institutions in the United States. And in that sense, we go”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not less severe what was going on there. We today would know nothing about this case and about this abuse but for an inmate, another inmate at the prison named Harold Hampstead who heard Rainey that night crying for help and who felt himself somewhat responsible for the chain of events that had led Rainey into the situation. And he becomes obsessed with getting the word out and he eventually leaks the story to the Miami Herald and that's how society learned that this had happened to Darren Rainey. It's chilling to me just the details are obviously terrible but what's particularly chilling is the idea that this could have happened without anyone hearing about it. And I have since reported on prison conditions in the United States recently. In fact, I wrote an article for the New York.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so this is a story, as I mentioned, Harriet Kriskovsky is this mental health aide, and she arrives at work one day and hears that a prisoner, an inmate named Darren Rainey, has been taken to a shower, and she had heard that he had been in his own cell and smearing feces on the wall. And so initially she didn't make anything of it. And then she learns, no, he died in this shower, and that the shower was actually a punishment, that the guards at this prison had rigged it up, they controlled the water temperature and the flow of the water from the outside, and Rainey, who was trapped in there, collapses, and he dies this very gruesome death, the autopsy suggests, burns on something of the order ninety percent of his body. So this is abuse really on the level of Abu Graham.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And thought, did we really know who we were hitting? Can we really be sure that grainy imagery and all of that? So I do think that you're giving these imagery analysts and drone pilots this power to play God in a certain sense.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that it's interesting you say that one of the other drone operators I write about at length, a guy named Chris Aaron, he's a very spiritual guy, and I think we never really talked in those terms about this, but he described the awakening he went through, and he sort of started out very gung-ho about the drone program, thinking he was getting the bad guys. The people in his unit were high fiving when a strike would happen. He was among them. And then he went to Afghanistan and he started to question the story he'd been told about all the progress that had been made. And he started thinking, actually things are worse now than when we started. And that jarred him and he then went through what he called a dark night of the soul, where he just sort of replayed these strikes.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think what distance warfare actually does because it's a very different moral calculus, right? You're not yourself under threat. You are actually watching all of this. And I think that on the one hand, society wants that because we certainly don't want more casualties in these wars. On the other hand, you're giving people, you know, as one lieutenant colonel told me, you know, you're turning soldiers into assassins. And what does that do? So the moral questions are profound.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of what's happening and actually then have to make the call. Can you go into this area or this building or not? And sometimes it doesn't work out. And a soldier will, that's actually the first thing that bothered and really upset one of the drone operators I write about this woman, Heather, who was horrified to see that this wasn't always the right call and sometimes fellow soldiers would die. But then there's also the people in the crossfire and thinking you've hit an enemy and then seeing that it's civilian structure and seeing that there's a funeral through the streets with more coffins than had been anyone had thought were involved in the strike. It has a huge psychological impact. I think it also is compounded by the fact that we're only going to know in 10, 20, 30 years.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was very surprised the military itself has done a number of studies that I cite in the book and what those studies show is that they were trying to figure out why is there such a high rate of burnout in the program? Why is there so much turnover? Why are people leaving? If it's just the stereotype is joystick warriors, you press a button, you don't think about it, you go home. And that's chilling in a different way. But that's not what the military found when they did these studies. They found very high levels of moral conflict and distress just from seeing these images of graphic violence over and over again. And if you think about it, being in the kill chain, you know, which is what it's called, means two things. One, you're making decisions that can affect the lives of your fellow soldiers, right? So you have this sort of view.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are eliminated or the conditions under which they take place change, but in the existing America that we have, they do perform a kind of essential role.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Extend its force and potentially lethal force on a kind of geographically limitless scale. And drone warfare becomes the convenient solution for that. If we go back to Everett Hughes, I think it had a kind of and still has a kind of unconscious mandate from a lot of people who may not want to hear the details and may not explicitly assent. And if you tell them, oh, this drone strike hit a wedding procession, they'd be horrified. They'd say, you know, that's a shame. On the other hand, they're not bothered enough about it that they actually want their political representatives to be talking about it and debating it. And I think there is a lot of that tacit kind of mandate for the work. So is it essential? It's not essential if public opinion changes. You can imagine an America where these jobs either are”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great question. I sort of play with that idea at various points in the book and the subtitle of the book refers to essential jobs. I think that the jobs I'm talking about are essential to the existing social order in America. What I mean by that is, you know, I think that the drone wars, for example, were a very convenient way for the United States to, on the one hand, and this was under Obama, on the one hand, address the global criticism of Guantanamo, of the black sites, of Abu Ghraib, of these kind of torture scandals with detainees abused. And Obama didn't want to continue that, and he made that very explicit. He didn't like the term, but really the war on terror, the global war on terror, and the right of the United States to kind of”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Prevalent among veterans and among people in the drone program, it's also prevalent for Harriet, the mental health aid, who wondered, you know, how could I want to come forward, she told me, and sort of expose the abuses she'd seen. But she ended up not doing that”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are not exposed to the kind of life threatening events that we associate with PTSD. PTSD obviously being very prevalent among veterans of America's recent wars. But what they do experience is this other kind of wound called a moral injury. And moral injury is about bearing witness to or participating in things that go against one's own core values. In the course of doing your job, of doing your duty in the case of these soldiers. And so for these drone operators, you know, put very starkly to me by a psychologist on one of these drone bases actually who said to me, you know, that one of the guys had come up to him and said, you know, what is Jesus going to say about all the killing that I've seen and done? And that kind of question, that kind of wound is not just...”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that in all of the cases that I look at, you have the sociologist Richard Sennett called the hidden injuries of class. And this is really a book about those hidden injuries. In some cases, it can take the form of, you know, just not saying what you do to other people, not telling them. This was true of not just the mental health aides in prisons, but also of some of the guards that I got to know. They don't have the social prestige of, say, police officers in the United States. But in more severe cases, those hidden injuries can be trauma. They can be moral distress. They can be moral injury, which is a concept that's sort of threaded through the book. I look in particular at drone operators. You know, the folks in the drone program don't actually set foot on the battlefield,”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She would be fired, as did the other members of the staff, and she also feared she would be blackballed, which she saw happen to people who had challenged the guards in this institution, so she ends up feeling she has to silence herself and continue to do this job without saying anything. And that story is sort of a metaphor for what happens in case after case in this book. You have people who kind of have these small awakenings and think, you know, I don't really like what I'm seeing. I wish I could say something, but they don't have much voice. They don't have much power and they don't have many choices economically. And, you know, when it comes to how are they then going to support themselves and their families.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Folks at Harvard who study psychiatry, who get degrees, generally they'll practice in different places and get paid much more. But what she experiences at that prison is witnessing and seeing that the patients she's in charge of caring for are being abused. They're being denied meals. They're being physically abused and verbally abused. And yet she can't say anything about it because she feels beholden for protection to the very guards who are carrying out the abuse. She really learns about terrible abuse, in particular the case of one prisoner who is locked inside of a shower and not let out. And he ends up dying in that shower from scalding burns. And when one reads about that or hears about it, one thinks, well, how could she not say anything? How could she not quit? Well, if she said something, she feared.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think there's no question that there are choices that people can make not to do the kind of work I describe in the book. But if I can bring it to a very particular, let's just bring it to the story of this mental health aid Harriet Kraskovsky, who opens the book. It's post-recession Florida. It's after 2008, the financial crash has really impacted the job market in America profoundly, and particularly in Florida, a state that relied so much on tourism, but also had a massive housing bubble that went bust. She's looking for a job. She's got two kids. Her husband's unemployed at the time. And the only job she can find is working as a mental health aid for $12 an hour at this prison that Dade Correctional Institution. Now, Harriet goes in there thinking, she's a little bit afraid. She's never worked in a prison before, but this is not her aspiration, as it is not the aspiration of”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So think of the folks who work on the kill floors of a poultry slaughterhouse or who work in the mental health ward of a prison.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in all of those cases, these are jobs that I think I set out to show are pretty central to the existing social order and really the way of life in America, but that are also kind of concealed and hidden from a lot of the people who enjoy the fruits of that labor but don't actually see the labor taking place.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Advanced and clean, it actually is a form of warfare. Some people have used the term immaculate warfare for drone warfare. I look at the folks who actually stare at the screens and watch the strikes and see the not-so-clean aspect of it, which is, you know, innocent civilians who are caught and hit. And of course, that's been in the news a lot lately with the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And then finally, I also look at the fossil fuel industry and people in America who work on the front lines of that industry, including in offshore oil rigs. Again, this is an industry that a lot of people say, oh, that's dirty, it's not only for pollution reasons, but obviously climate change and fossil fuels. And yet America continues building roads and being a society that consumes a massive amount of fossil fuel.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are built in remote areas in America. They're built with tax dollars, and they've been built over a 20, 30, 40 year period with really bipartisan support for what was called tough on crime policies. So in that sense, again, the people who work in prisons, and I look at both guards and mental health aides, because prisons in America are the largest mental health institutions at this point. They perform the job of warehousing the mentally ill. The folks who work in these prisons are agents of society. That's actually a term Everett Hughes used. The agents carry out this dirty work. I think prison workers are very much that. I also look at drone operators. This is a very different kind of dirty in the sense that the popular perception of drone warfare is that it actually is very technical.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So I look at really in depth, I look at sort of four different areas. I look at industrial slaughterhouses, as you mentioned, particularly poultry slaughterhouses. Chicken. Chicken is America's most popular meat. So when I look at the unpleasant and morally troubling things that happen on the kill floors of poultry slaughterhouses, you can't really think and talk about that without also taking account of consumer demand. And that gets to your point about sort of shared complicity in this. But then I also look at some government functions, some jobs that take place in government institutions or government agencies, in particular the prison system. America's prison system, as many folks in the UK know, is the largest prison system in the world. And although prisons are sort of tucked away and generally exist,”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are going on and that are morally troubling, but that they don't raise too many questions about. It's sort of done out of sight, out of mind. And Hughes said, you know, we have to ask, how much of this has a kind of unconscious mandate from society? I took that idea and applied it to the contemporary United States, though I think it could be applied to any society today.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were not Nazis. These were not supporters of Adolf Hitler. And he asked them just how did they think about the dirty work that happened under Nazi Germany. That is the atrocities and of course the genocide of the Jews. And what Hughes heard from many of these people were sort of this on the one hand, on the other hand. So they began by saying, you know, well, we're ashamed of this. This is a terrible. We're ashamed for our fellow countrymen. But then they would go on to say things like, you know, but the Jews, they were a problem. And something had to be done about this problem. And Hughes kept hearing this and out of these conversations, he developed this theory. And essentially it was that in Germany, as in every society, there are certain kinds of, you know, what he called dirty work tasks that people”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So dirty work is, of course, a colloquial expression, and I think generally makes people think of unpleasant jobs like taking out the garbage or picking up the garbage from the streets that is physically dirtying jobs. But my book does not look at that. It looks at dirty work as defined in the sociological literature. There's a literature on this term. And in that literature, dirty work refers to something else. It refers to morally troubling activity that society depends on and tacitly condones, but generally doesn't want to hear too much about. The book begins actually with a little excursion through that literature, in particular the figure of Everett Hughes. He was an American sociologist. He went to Germany after the war, after World War II, and he talked to what he referred to as the good people in Germany.”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Intelligent Squared Business Weekly. I'm Connor Boyle. Today we're talking difficult jobs and those that undertake them with ALP Press. Our guest this week is a writer and journalist who contributes to the New Yorker and the New York Times among others. AL Press is the author of three books Absolute Convictions, Beautiful Souls, and His Most Recent Title, Dirty Work, Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality, which he joins us to talk about today. In the book, AL explores some of the professions and roles that society simply doesn't like to think about. He meets those working in jobs that raise ethical, moral and even existential questions, work that might take more than just a lunch break to explain. Our host today is Rosmond Irwin, journalist at the Sunday Times. Here's Rosmond with more”
2022-02-14 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: the Jobs We Don’t Talk About, with Eyal Press · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT