An astonishing exposé of the American meatpacking industry’s exploitation of its incarcerated and immigrant workforce.
A freelance journalist uncovers the inhumane conditions plaguing the Tyson Foods meatpacking plants in Arkansas.
In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, Driver, author of More or Less Dead, returned to her home state of Arkansas and began interviewing poultry workers at Tyson plants across the state. Although she risked infection, she felt the investigation couldn’t wait. “Confronting a powerful company worth billions was daunting.…However, as meatpacking workers began to die of COVID,” she writes, “I continued to interview their families, hoping that people were ready to listen.” The author reveals disturbing stories of workers whose lungs were destroyed by a chemical accident that Tyson failed to acknowledge; whose repetitive motion led not only to carpal tunnel syndrome, but to unconsciously continuing to imitate these motions in their sleep; and who worked for a pittance as an alternative to incarceration. “In addition to employing undocumented workers,” writes Driver, “Tyson also exploits vulnerable prison populations.” Throughout these experiences, the workers encountered unsympathetic administrators holding up oppressive systems, including managers who waited outside restroom doors to ensure that workers took inhumanely quick breaks, nurses and doctors who denied workers proper care, and politicians who ignored these practices in order to line their own pockets—most notably, Bill Clinton. “As the governor of Arkansas,” writes the author, “Clinton oversaw lax regulations on the meatpacking industry, leading to the contamination of drinking water and hundreds of miles of rivers and streams.” This devastatingly frank, brutally detailed peek into the meatpacking industry brilliantly exposes a damaging system that must be reformed. While the ending of the book, which briefly comments on lab-grown meat, feels disconnected from the rest of the story, overall, this is a vital work of journalism.
An astonishing exposé of the American meatpacking industry’s exploitation of its incarcerated and immigrant workforce.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781668078822
Page Count: 256
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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