156. Eyal Press: What’s the cost of Dirty Work?

Eyal has spent his life thinking about the kind of dilemma we mostly seek to avoid. What is it like to work in a prison or a meat packing plant? How does this affect the way you relate to others?
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374140182/dirtywork

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/books/review/dirty-work-eyal-press.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/16/podcasts/the-daily/the-sunday-read-the-moral-crisis-of-americas-doctors.html

Eyal Press is a writer and journalist who contributes to The New Yorker, The New York Times and other publications. He is also a sociologist with a PhD from New York University which along with his family background goes some way to explaining his deep sensitivity . He was born in Israel and grew up in Buffalo, which served as the backdrop of his first book, Absolute Convictions (2006). His second book, Beautiful Souls (2012), examined the nature of moral courage through the stories of individuals who risked their careers, and sometimes their lives, to defy unjust orders. His most recent book, Dirty Work (2021), examines the morally troubling jobs that society tacitly condones and the hidden class of workers who do them. A recipient of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, he has received an Andrew Carnegie fellowship, a Cullman Center fellowship at the New York Public Library and a Puffin Foundation fellowship at Type Media Center. Eyal is also a Podcaster himself cou can see the link in the shownotes.
We wanted to talk with Eyal because we have always intended our podcast to consider the deep moral, social and psychological reasons of why terrible things happen and what underlies the decisions people make when in such situations. Eyal’s book, Dirty Work, argues that people are mainly pressured to do tasks which mostly the rest of us hold in disdain while being complicit in their continuation. The book studies three areas prison work in the USA, drone pilots in war situations and workers in meat and poultry factories. Each of these are shocking and deserving of a conversation of their own but in this conversation we shall mainly focus on prison work in the southern Unites States.