In March of 2023, 34 former employees of Tyson Foods and their families filed a lawsuit against the company, arguing that its failure to take sufficient precautions to protect them from exposure to Covid-19 in 2020 had led to illness, emotional distress, and at least 269 worker deaths. “Tyson lied,” the suit alleged, “about the number of Tyson employees that were contracting COVID-19 in an effort to maintain its rate of production.” 

The meatpacking workers at the company’s plants were largely immigrants, the United States’ most exploited workforce. The game was rigged to prevent them from fighting back: The state of Arkansas passed a limited-liability immunity statute to protect employers from being held accountable for Covid cases, while the state Workers Compensation Commission preempts the courts from handling workplace-injury claims. Even so, the workers had decided to take on a Goliath through class action.

The meatpacking industry came to the South some four decades earlier, starting in the 1980s. After the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, the Southern states, one by one, adopted right-to-work laws—encouraging firms to abandon union cities like Chicago for rural plants in these comparatively unregulated states. Wages decreased sharply, while the work became more harrowing through ever-faster packing-line speeds. 

Nevertheless, a labor force followed. The new plants offered plentiful jobs at the same time that the labor markets in California and Chicago—traditional destinations for immigrants from Latin America—had become saturated. So, over the course of the 1990s, the Southeast became the “Nuevo South.” In Arkansas between 1990 and 2010, the Latino population increased more than ninefold.

Alice Driver’s Life and Death of the American Worker follows the lives of roughly a dozen of these workers, chronicling the injustices they faced while toiling for Tyson and telling the story of how they gathered the courage and resources necessary to try to wage a legal battle against the company. 

Driver, who holds a PhD in Hispanic studies from the University of Kentucky, spent a decade as a freelance journalist based in Mexico City, covering migration and the US-Mexico border. Her previous book, More or Less Dead: Feminicide, Haunting, and the Ethics of Representation in Mexico, examined literary and artistic depictions of the wave of murders of women in Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez in the early 2000s, during which time the city became the most dangerous in the world. In Life and Death of the American Worker, she takes leave of the borderlands to write from the landscape she considers home: Arkansas. 

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From the lush descriptions in the very first pages, it feels clear that Driver has longed to write about the state for some time. She recalls of her childhood: “People canned vegetables from their garden, hunted deer and ducks, and spent summers swimming in the mineral blue lakes and rivers that dot the landscape.” Yet she also understands that, in many ways, the place was no idyll. “People drove the forty-five miles to the chicken processing plant, where they worked and killed twelve thousand chickens per day, their hands in perpetual motion, completing a ritual both delicate and forceful—for one false movement could get them maimed or killed.” Meanwhile, Arkansas’s poverty rate of over 16 percent remains one of the country’s most recalcitrant.

It’s this side of life in the state that is the subject of Life and Death of the American Worker. While the meatpacking of cattle and hogs moved into the South from elsewhere, Tyson’s Arkansas-based poultry-packing empire is autochthonous: It was founded in 1935 in the small city of Springdale, where the company is still headquartered. Back then, poultry was largely home-raised and home-slaughtered. Now, the industry is so consolidated that Tyson produces one-fifth of the country’s chicken, beef, and pork. As the world’s second-largest meatpacking company, Tyson operates 241 plants in the US and reaps some $53 billion in annual sales. 

That kind of scale casts an imposing shadow over Arkansas and its towns.  “A Tyson facility is like a black hole, and nothing in town escapes the pull of the billion-dollar company,” Driver writes. Tyson’s economy of scale depends precisely on that mixture of entrenched poverty and the fear that power can instill. The company depends on a low-wage workforce that is estimated to be up to 50 percent undocumented. Many of these workers are from Mexico and Central America; another sizable portion come from the Marshall Islands, climate refugees fleeing rising sea levels.

These immigrant workers are at the center of Driver’s book. It is a work of journalism that seeks at once to draw attention to injustice and to philosophize, insisting on material equity and a specific notion of the good life. In the prefatory note, Driver frames the book in terms of “moral beauty”: an ethic of looking outside oneself, to the Other, in which she locates the good and the just. The work ethic and steadfast organizing of the people she chronicles transcends political activism and approaches something conceptual and timeless.

The first half of Life and Death of the American Worker provides a panoramic look at the circumstances of these workers: their immigration stories, their relationships and families, their homes and gardens, and their accounts of how they came to work at Tyson. “In Arkansas, there is always work,” one man recalls a relative telling him to encourage him to move to the state.

When the book’s lens shifts to the meatpacking floor, the depiction is a gory one, filled with injury and mistreatment. Yet it is a slow violence—violence that “occurs gradually and out of sight,” in the words of the theorist Rob Nixon. When the plant workers suit up in the morning, they wear aprons and hairnets woven out of chicken feathers—the material is, after all, free to the company—that smell horrible. Though the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration requires meatpacking companies to provide workers with helmets, steel-mesh gloves, forearm guards, and other protective equipment, it does not obligate the companies to ensure that the individual workers have it in their size, leaving them to compete daily for the best-fitting PPE. Because they spend their shifts performing repetitive motions—“cutting, eviscerating, washing, trimming, and deboning”—many of the workers have developed carpal tunnel syndrome. Yet they only have access to in-house medical care designed to diminish and obscure the total injury statistics and, in turn, to evade the oversight of OSHA. Even in the rare case that a worker receives surgery, they’re expected to be back at work days later. (Tyson denies many of the claims made in the book.)

These scenes from the shop floor provoke a sense of horrific awe; no one should have to labor under the conditions these people recount. At times, it can feel like a catalog of abjection that doesn’t so much build a story as aggregate information and sometimes double back, repeating itself. But this panoramic look is important: Driver’s chapters have the task of building a world that is both a part of and alien to the more comfortable America in which many of us live; we can’t follow the story until we can imagine the setting.

The second section chronicles the workers’ experiences with Covid-19, Tyson’s response—or lack thereof—and, finally, the workers’ efforts to organize the lawsuit against the company. One of the workers, Víctor, uses a recording device disguised as a pen to capture conversations in which plant supervisors make every effort to quash concerns about the virus. One of the supervisors tells Víctor, through a translator, that he shouldn’t worry because Covid doesn’t exist in Northwest Arkansas. “The illness is going to kill some, perhaps a million and a half people,” he adds, “but if Tyson stops producing chicken, hundreds of millions will die.”

It’s tempting to think of the Covid-19 pandemic as the beginning of the neglect for workers’ lives that has since been naturalized as commonplace. The shelter-in-place orders of 2020 cast into relief the sometimes life-and-death disparities between the risks to which the professional class was exposed and those that service workers, healthcare workers, delivery workers, and agricultural workers faced. But for Driver, it was not a rupture; she situates these inequalities in a longer, ongoing story of deregulation and worker exploitation. By following the workers into their lives outside of Tyson, she shows how these workplace issues impact the intimate space of the home and family, as well as the various ways of coping and care that they’ve developed in response.

Life and Death of the American Worker is at its strongest when Driver writes from the first person. Far from displacing the workers as protagonists, it’s when she calls on her experience as a reporter and an Arkansan that her doggedness and closeness to the story—and, in turn, her book’s emotional importance—best shine through. She writes of reporting during the early pandemic:

I rented a house down the road from my parents that had been built by my dad’s twin brother. I knew that conducting interviews during COVID would be complicated, and I wanted to ensure that if I became infected, I would not put my parents at risk. There was no cell phone service and poor internet in the area, so I interviewed meatpacking workers via landline on a black rotary phone, sitting in a chair covered in orange velvet. 

Later, in one memorable and tender moment, Driver texts Víctor from Querétaro, Mexico, asking if she can stop by the home of his grandfather Jesús there. In response, “I received a photo of Víctor drinking tequila with Jesús at his house in Arkansas,” she writes. “At ninety-nine, Jesús had decided, on the spur of the moment, to take the bus from the small town of Hacienda la Caja to Springdale.” The warmth that Driver must have developed with the people she was chronicling is evident.

This rapport puts into practice Driver’s conceptual approach of “moral beauty.” The combination of the two is perhaps the book’s most important contribution. Because the South is built on deeply entrenched inequality and racialization, some of its best literature is that which speaks truth to power. The book that Life and Death of the American Worker most reminded me of is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by the writer James Agee and the photographer Walker Evans, a work of poetic journalism about the lives of 1930s sharecroppers—poor white families who grew cotton as tenant farmers, sleeping in spare, one-room pine houses and devoting their days to the “simple and terrible work” of cotton growing. 

Driver is a worthy inheritor of this tradition. Her book most certainly describes terrible work—physically, emotionally, and legally.  Indeed, we find out by the end that, 13 months after being filed, the workers’ lawsuit was dismissed. Paradoxically, multiple regulatory layers—the state Workers Compensation Commission, the state Covid immunity statute, and a federal law that prevents states from regulating conduct at poultry plants—made it impossible for the workers to seek justice through class action. The plaintiffs went back to work.

But where Agee implored about his book, “Above all else: in God’s name don’t think of it as Art,” Driver finds a middle ground. Her lens of “moral beauty” enables her to create art without aestheticizing the workers’ suffering. In part, it’s her training as a literary scholar—and specifically as a scholar of the literature of death in Mexico—that enables her to ground and humanize the exploitation she observes. Her first book, More or Less Dead, theorized efforts to artistically render contexts of generalized violence and deep inequality. In the combination of despair and optimism on which Life and Death of the American Worker ends, I thought of an interview quoted in More or Less Dead’s final chapter: One of the painters whom Driver spoke with states that he wants his work to portray “the death of humanity and the human.” 

Widespread violence reduces people’s lives, sucking out the things that make them human. Life and Death of the American Worker argues that Tyson Foods seeks no less than the death of humanity in its workers, such that it cannot be recovered. But the workers resist; they insist on staying human. No matter how foreclosed the legal possibilities for holding Tyson accountable, Driver demands that the company answer on a higher plane—to see that it has done wrong in the courts of what is human, ethical, and morally beautiful.