Author: Eyal Press
ISBN No: 9781801107235
Review date: 17/12/2025
No of pages:
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Publisher URL:
https://www.eyalpress.com/
Year of publication: 14/12/2022
Brief:
Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality
price
£-
‘Dirty work’ used to mean work that made you black with dust or dirt – as a coal miner or docker. The journalist Eyal Press has showed how the meaning has changed, and ‘dirty work’ means anything that society would rather not see or have to face. Such as the imprisoning of criminals; it’s necessary for society, but those paid to do the task are out of sight, and mind.
A prison guard, or in American speak a ‘corrections officer’ is quoted on page 64. “Your morals change. It’s a coarseness, a lessening of concern for people …. You become jaded. You become more callous.”
Such workers were hailed during the covid pandemic, because they kept on doing their job. But, as officers tell Press, no-one chooses the job. In the United States as in the UK, private prisons are sited in remote places, where they offer one of few options for steady, if ill-paid work. Besides what those who speak to Press describe as the ‘lousy’ pay, ‘dirty’ yet ‘essential’ jobs come with low prestige. As society cares little about what goes on in prisons, or mental health hospitals, that can lead to abuse of inmates, quite apart from mental health problems in the workers.
While Press does a worthwhile and able job of chronicling the new reality of work, he also looks to the global tech supply chain, that he says is ‘anything but clean’; meaning morally rather than literally, such as mines in Africa that are supplying the raw materials for common western consumer goods. The two don’t necessarily hang together.
