On this edition of Your Call, we rebroadcast our conversation with journalist Eyal Press about his recent book, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America.
The pandemic has brought unprecedented attention to essential frontline workers and the health and safety risks faced by farmworkers to slaughterhouse workers.
Dirty Work examines a less familiar set of occupational hazards: psychological and emotional hardships such as stigma, shame, PTSD, and moral injury. These burdens disproportionately fall on low-income workers, undocumented immigrants, women, and people of color. What kind of dirty work takes place in contemporary America? And how much of this work has an unconscious mandate from society?
Guest:
Eyal Press, author of Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, Puffin Foundation Fellow at Type Media Center, and contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times
