Life and Death of the American Worker

July 29, 2024
The horrifying labor violations of meatpacking behemoth Tyson and the harrowing ordeal of the undocumented immigrant workforce that fought back are revealed in this shocking exposé from journalist Driver (More or Less Dead). The company’s ill-treatment of workers at a plant in Springdale, Ark., included startlingly unsafe conditions leading to accidents and subsequent cover-ups. In one incident, a toxic gas leak resulted in the hospitalization of 173 workers (managers insisted workers remain at their stations, even as some began to faint; afterward, the company forced workers to sign liability waivers). One of those workers, Plácido Leopoldo Arrue—whose story Driver follows closely—became seriously disabled by the exposure; he died of Covid in July 2020, likely made more vulnerable by the lung damage. Covid was the initial impetus for Driver’s project—in 2020, as meatpacking workers in cramped conditions fell ill, Driver began investigating. Her subjects were reluctant to communicate by phone, and so her story takes her on road trips across the South to conduct in-person interviews, an intrepid effort of gumshoe journalism resulting in an intimate, unprecedented glimpse of the lives of America’s undocumented workforce during the pandemic—which includes efforts by some workers to organize with a union and file lawsuits against Tyson. Throughout, Driver’s prose is sumptuous and empathetic (“Looking down... they see their faces reflected in a pool of blood,” she writes of workers on the assembly line). This is a tour de force.