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Life and Death of the American Worker
The Immigrants Taking on America's Largest Meatpacking Company
By Alice Driver
Table of Contents
About The Book
A New Yorker and The Conversation Best Book of 2024
“A startling glimpse into the meatpacking industry’s abuse of undocumented and incarcerated workers.” —The New York Times Book Review
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.
“A startling glimpse into the meatpacking industry’s abuse of undocumented and incarcerated workers.” —The New York Times Book Review
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.
About The Author
Photograph by Luis Garvan
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.
Product Details
- Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers (September 3, 2024)
- Length: 272 pages
- ISBN13: 9781668078846
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Raves and Reviews
"Intimately reported."
—The New Yorker
"[Alice Driver] offers incredible insights into the expendable lives powering an “essential” industry."
—Philip Johnson, A Conversation Best Book of 2024
"A startling glimpse into the meatpacking industry’s abuse of undocumented and incarcerated workers."
—The New York Times Book Review
"A tour de force"
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"The workers who feed us are some of America's poorest and most exploited. Alice Driver tells their stories with enormous compassion and grace. A fearless, wonderful book."
—ERIC SCHLOSSER, author of Fast Food Nation
"Life and Death of The American Worker is not only a horror story of corporate negligence but a deeply humane work about what we owe each other. How chilling it is to think that no one else but Driver could have written such a vital book."
—SLOANE CROSLEY, author of Grief Is For People
"An extraordinary feat of reporting—a gripping investigation into the brutal, often life-threatening conditions faced by America's most vulnerable workers. It's hard to imagine a more urgent or timely book, one written with rigor, deep compassion, and moral clarity. A vital, infuriating book - an absolute must-read. Highly recommended.”
—BRIAN GOLDSTONE, author of There Is No Place For US
“Not since The Jungle has a book punched me quite literally in the stomach like this one has. Alice Driver's invitation to sit at the table with the workers who package our dinners, who create the nuggets we hand our children in the backseats of our cars, is an unforgettable experience. Life and Death of the American Worker is a masterpiece that will be referenced for generations.”
—STEPHANIE LAND, bestselling author of Maid and Class
"An unforgettable piece of literary journalism that illuminates the way our world really works. Driver is bighearted and tireless as she plunges into the darkest reaches of the modern food system, and the story she reveals is shocking but also deeply humane and surprisingly inspiring. A landmark book about power in America today."
—CHRISTOPHER LEONARD, New York Times bestselling author of The Meat Racket and Kochland
"In heartbreaking detail, Life and Death of The American Worker focuses on the very human consequences of our choices and the appalling ways that people in power dodge our nation's labor and environmental laws in pursuit of profit."
—RACHEL SLADE, author of Making It in America and Into the Raging Sea
“This is one of the most vital books of our time. An antidote to the racist propaganda behind the rise of Trumpism, Life and Death of the American Worker honors the invisibilized people who sacrifice blood and well-being to feed us, who are too often killed in the shadows by profit-hungry companies that escape accountability with the help of corrupt politicians from both political parties. Alice Driver is a rare type of journalist: one who can journey into the most bloodstained and deplorable corners of this world without getting lost in the dark. She carries the light of the victims. She'll light a fire under you. May every American read this book.”
—JEAN GUERRERO, author of Crux and Hatemonger
"Alice Driver's deep dive into the lives and losses of the workers who process our food will haunt you. Meatpacking work was brutal before the COVID-19 pandemic; when the virus came, these workers were expected to volunteer to sicken and die so that Americans could keep up our meat consumption. They were called 'essential' but treated as expendable, as so much replaceable human machine equipment. In Driver's pages, their worries and fears, their pain and their care, their love and laughter and their determination to find justice remind us that no matter how much capitalism tries to reduce us to robots, humans will always find a way to resist. An essential read."
—SARAH JAFFE, author of Work Won't Love You Back
“As much an act of attention and care as it is a work of rigorous investigation, Alice Driver has given us a radicalizing, clear-eyed portrait of workers and their circumstances.”
—ALEJANDRA OLIVA, author of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration
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