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Alice Driver - Life and Death of the American Worker, Inbunden

Inbunden, Engelska, 2024

Life and Death of the American Worker

The Immigrants Taking on America's Largest Meatpacking Company

Av Alice Driver

Del i serien Atria/One Signal Publishers

221 kr

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Beskrivning
Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, an explosive exposé of the toxic labor practices at the largest meatpacking company in America and the immigrant workers 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 quickly covered it up 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. Having spent hours in their kitchens and accompanying them to doctor’s appointments, Driver has memorialized in these pages the dramatic lives of husband and wife Plácido and Angelina, who liked to spend weekends planting seeds from their native El Salvador in their garden; father and son Martín and Gabriel, who migrated from Mexico at different times and were trying to patch up their relationship; and many other immigrants who survived the chemical accident in Springdale that day. 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. Richly detailed, fiercely honest, and deeply reported, Life and Death of the American Worker will forever change the way we think about the people who prepare our food.
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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.

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“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

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