A new book from Oark-native Alice Driver exposes the struggles and working conditions for Tyson chicken-plant workers in Arkansas over a four-year period. Driver, an investigative reporter who spent much of her early career working at the U.S.-Mexico border, says she started this project in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The book Life and Death of the American Worker is out today from Simon & Schuster. Driver spoke with Ozarks at Large's Daniel Caruth last week.
The following is an edited version of that conversation.
Daniel Caruth: So you started working on the reports and the interviews that this book is based around in 2020. Is that right, during COVID?
Alice Driver: Yeah, so I was living in Mexico City and all of my work is really at the intersection of issues related to immigration, labor rights, and human rights. And I had been thinking about doing a story about the meatpacking industry for a long time, because Arkansas is the home, and the Ozarks, the home of the largest meatpacking company in the United States.
And so I grew up around Tyson Foods and Tyson workers, who are largely immigrants and refugees, but also include children working in different areas of the meatpacking supply chain. And so I really was thinking I wanted to know more about the lives of workers, because you see so little. And I got funding to do one article.
So at no point did I think I was writing a book never entered my mind, especially once I realized how difficult it was to actually interview workers because they're afraid of retaliation.
DC: Can you talk a little bit about that process of just, you know, gaining the trust of these workers and their families to to speak with you? And not just, you know, for one off, but over long periods of time, allowing you into their homes and telling you these stories, really intimate stories about their lives?
AD: Well, I first, you know, I started this project in the early pandemic. And I was trying, I called organizations that work with immigrants.
And because I know the situation, Arkansas is, I think, probably one of the difficult, most difficult places to do this kind of work, because Arkansas is a state that has strong ag gag laws, which are laws that prevent, prevent me from ever setting foot on, you know, I'm never going to enter a Tyson plant. On that same note, workers know that if they speak to a journalist and use their real name, you know, there will be fired, or there will be some sort of retaliation. A lot of them talk about being blacklisted.
So not just that they lose their job at Tyson, but that they cannot get another job in the state of Arkansas. And to understand this, you have to understand the population. As I said, it's people who are in vulnerable groups, many people who are undocumented, some people who are minors. So we're talking about children, imprisoned people. And so you know, the job options for this, these communities aren't great. And, and so they do worry about not being able to support not only themselves, but their extended families, both in the US and, and in their home countries.
DC: So while you were doing this work, I mean, was there anything unsuspected, maybe that you found that you maybe weren't able to uncover or dig as far into from that earlier reporting? Anything that jumped out at you?
AD: You know, when workers would talk about their medical issues, because the range of injuries is, you know, one injury that shocked me was, you know, worker who is decapitated, because we're talking about these really large machines that have to be cleaned. And so worker was inside a machine and it didn't, it lacked the safety. And it turned on while that worker was inside the machine and the worker was decapitated.
So we're talking about a range of injuries. And when I was talking to workers, like they would talk about the Tyson nurses and the Tyson doctors. And I'm like, oh, so Tyson, you know, Tyson has an onsite medical clinic.
And so workers have to go through, if they want their medical issues to be covered by the company, they have to go through the company system. And so I was trying to figure out how to interview a nurse, which was probably the hardest thing I did, because I've never seen an interview with anybody that's a part of that system. And it was something that took me a long time to secure.
And that individual, the nurse was very, you know, very scared. But I think one of the things that she said was, look, there is pressure. Our job is to keep, you know, for the company to be able to say on any given day, we had no recordable injuries. She said, you have managers, and you have supervisors coming in to the room, you know, with the nurses and giving their opinion on medical care. And they're not trained, you know, they're not nurses, they're not doctors, and they have no background in taking care of injuries. And so she said that it is a situation where you experience a lot of pressure to basically say, you know, these workers are fine.
DC: So much of this book is about the specific struggles and these labor and rights violations. But it's also about the weight of this large corporation, this company, the outsized influence that Tyson has in shaping policy, maintaining a status quo. What should people understand about Tyson, and maybe our role in perpetuating this?
AD: It's definitely important to talk about the consumer role. But also, I mean, the more important thing to me is structurally, what are we doing in the United States? And part of the problem in the US, and this is a problem for consumers, because there's so few companies that control the market, that they, you know, they have been accused of colluding to inflate prices for consumers. And they have also, you know, they work collectively to inflate prices and keep wages down for workers.
If I'm from a state where there are, you know, meatpacking is such a huge part of this state, and I don't know anything about the lives of workers, I thought this, this is something that I think we should all be talking about. Because at basic level, we should be providing a safe workplace for these workers who are doing the most dangerous job in the United States.
DC: In lot of your work, it's about illustrating that the fear of retaliation of speaking out that, you know, like you were saying, the nurse who you spoke with, can you talk about illustrating that fear and explaining that for an audience and for a reader?
AD: Yeah, I mean, this is the hardest work that I've ever done, because it was so complicated to gain and maintain trust.
Because, you know, I knew just as the workers knew the real repercussions of, you know, of speaking not to me, but to any journalist. And so that was a, you know, that was something that definitely kept me up at night, because obviously, I don't want anybody who spoke to me to suffer because they told the truth. And the other thing is that, you know, some workers are undocumented, or they're minors.
And so that there's a whole chain of, you know, if they get fired, or if they can't get another job, you know, that affects a huge extended family. Usually multiple people in the same family are working at Tyson. And so, yeah, it was it was just very hard to follow people over a period of time. And so that's why, you know, the groups in my book are people I could follow over four years.
DC: And have you faced any pushback or intimidation from Tyson or from other corporations since you've been doing this work?
AD: Well, here's, here's what, here's how Tyson operated with me. You know, when I was working on this book, I had to communicate regularly with the director of public relations at Tyson.
And over four years, that was three different directors. But they would do things like, you know, sometimes I would share anonymous quotes from workers on Twitter, because workers can't share, you know, when people were dying of COVID, or workers were saying, you know, we're being pressured to work while we're COVID positive, which is spreading COVID, you know, among our colleagues. And so I would share things on Twitter.
And sometimes the director of public relations would email me and say, you know, that's not true. So that was kind of interesting. And then they would email my editors, because I was working on articles.
And whenever I would have an article coming out, Tyson would have a chance to respond, you know, these are the points being made, what, you know, what's the official response from Tyson, the PR men would email my editors, for example, they emailed my editor at the New York Review of Books and said, you know, essentially, we believe that Alice is lying, how can you, how can you prove that she's telling the truth? So you know, then the editor has to explain how journalism works, you know, how there's an independent fact checker, how all of my interviews are recorded, you know, that the process for, you know, confirming the fact that all the information is true. So yeah, they did things like that regularly.
DC: When that happens, what keeps you going back to writing? You face so much, I guess, of an uphill struggle and trying to report this and do it well, and make sure that all of those I's are dotted, T's are crossed, what keeps you coming back to the writing and coming back to the story?
AD: The thing that kept me going was the workers who shared their lives with me, because many of the people in my book are dead, you know, the other large, a large number of them are disabled, they're on disability, either due to chemical accidents, or, you know, other accidents at work.
So I really wanted to show, what does it look like when you're working for a company that really has not, you know, is not ensuring safe labor conditions? And over the long term, you know, how does that affect? How does that affect the workers?
DC: And also, I guess, on a larger scale, what is it about labor, and this sort of work that you're interested in writing about? What what makes that tick to you as far as a narrative?
AD: Well, I mean, I really like working at the intersection of immigration and food systems. I mean, I think I, you know, one, one important point for me is that the people who are upholding our food system are immigrants and refugees, undocumented people, and children. And I mean, Arkansas has a real issue with child labor.
And so at a time when, you know, in terms of our politicians and our politics, and all this talk about, you know, the border, and how using language that describes, you know, us being invaded, and things like that, when the reality is, these people are coming here to work, and we should provide them legal ways to do that work. And so that's one important thing. And the other thing is looking at our food system.
I mean, meat is also a political issue, you know, you know, in terms of discussing climate change and the environment. And I really wanted to look at what is it that we're doing when we're saying, you know, everyone should have unlimited, extremely cheap meat? How does that affect the workers, our environment, politicians, you know, because the meatpacking lobby is a very powerful lobby.
DC: And has doing this book, has it changed your relationship to Arkansas?
AD: It has, because truthfully, I mean, going into this, I really didn't know that much about, you know, about the lives, you know, the industry in terms of Tyson and, you know, chicken processing, which the state has many different companies working in the state, it gave me a chance to explore, you know, what is the, what is the impact of this industry on the state? And also, what has the impact been, you know, on the national stage, thinking of Bill Clinton and his very close relationship with the Tyson family.
DC: And I did want to go back a little bit to, you know, when you were talking about translation and language, so you speak Spanish, you studied Spanish, you lived in Mexico and worked, and have worked in Spanish. And a lot of these interviews were done in Spanish. What role did that play in the book? And does it have a part in how you tell the stories?
AD: Yeah, there would be no book if I wasn't fluent in Spanish.
I mean, the workers that I followed, and the reason I was able to follow them, because there's so many different groups of workers here, you know, there's workers, Karen workers who are from Myanmar, and they speak Karen, you know, in order to follow an interview people over a period of four years, imagine if I was paying for a Karen translator for four years, you know, I don't have that budget. I also, you know, I was driving all over the state. And so it's like, if I had to hire a translator, who would be driving across Arkansas, you know, to Green Forest or to Rogers, or, you know, who would, how would I even pay someone to translate for four years.
So I just realized really quickly that I needed to work with, you know, in Spanish, because I wasn't, you know, I did start to interview the, you know, Karen workers. And I also started to interview Marshallese workers. But in workers, generally, most of them speak their native language, and they don't speak very much English.
So translation, you know, became central to my work in terms of me interviewing workers who spoke Spanish, and then I translated everything for the book. And that's the process that I love.
DC: And what is it that you like about working in Spanish and working with that translation part, specifically?
AD: I mean, for me, it's, it's the most literary activity, as someone who always wanted to be a writer.
And, you know, I grew up in Arkansas, I was in rural Arkansas, definitely, I never had any exposure to languages. And so when I got to college, and I took Spanish, I just thought, I'm going to be fluent in Spanish, like, that is, that is my goal. And it was never given, it's not like I was a natural languages or anything like that.
And so once I became fluent, once I began, you know, I never thought of myself as a translator, but, you know, working, you know, I'm working with US media, so I'm always translating things into English. And, and I think it's a really powerful and very literary process.
DC: What are you hoping that people will get out of this book?
AD: Yeah, I mean, I want it to start a conversation, first of all, about labor, about labor rights, about, you know, about how we're taking care of workers.
And on a greater level, I want to start a conversation about meatpacking, which is it's an industry that is consolidated to the point where, you know, where it is not serving, it's not serving workers, it's not serving consumers. And so what are we going to do about that? And what are politicians going to do about that? Because historically, politicians, you know, Democrats and Republicans have just kind of given the meatpacking industry a pass when it comes to improving labor conditions, or paying workers fairly. But most of all, I want people to be thinking about the lives of these workers who are feeding our nation.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. The authoritative record of KUAF programming is the audio record.
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