The unseen costs of
dirty work
Work confers dignity. But some jobs
are also a source of stigma
Feb 26th 2022
THE TERM “dirty work” was coined by Everett Hughes, an
American sociologist, to capture the attitudes of ordinary
Germans to the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Hughes
used it to convey the idea of something immoral but
conveniently distant, activities that were tacitly endorsed
by the public but that could also be disavowed by them.
The term has since come to embrace a wide array of jobs,
in particular those that are essential but stigmatised, both
crucial to society and kept at arm’s length from it.
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In an insightful new book of the same name, Eyal Press, a
journalist, reports unflinchingly on occupations in America
that carry the taint of stigma. Among others, he interviews
prison guards in Florida and slaughterhouse workers in
Texas. The pandemic has changed people’s awareness of
some essential work: meat-processing plants were
designated as critical infrastructure by the Trump
administration in 2020, for example. But these jobs remain
largely hidden from view; many are in physically isolated
locations. People do not know what these workplaces are
like and do not care to.
Dirty jobs often pay better than other openings. But they
impose unseen costs. They usually involve inflicting harm
on others (or on the environment), and they ask
emotionally and morally compromising questions of the
people who perform them. What is it like to work day in
and day out as a “knocker” or a “live hanger” on a
slaughterhouse kill floor? Should a prison guard risk her
livelihood to speak up about the violence routinely meted
out to inmates by her colleagues? Mr Press does not
exculpate individuals who behave badly in these jobs. But
by forcing readers to confront the context in which they
operate, he makes it harder to condemn them as bad
apples.
The boundaries of dirty work can be drawn too loosely.
Some sociologists include firefighting, on the ground that
it exposes
people to danger on behalf of others, yet it is difficult to
think of jobs that are less morally compromised. Indeed,
exposure to danger can be the thing that cleanses work.
Mr Press also meets operators of military drones at an
air-force base in Nevada. Although drone warfare is a
more precise form of combat than many others, operators
often struggle with the idea of taking life without taking
risk. The personal danger that soldiers on the ground face
is what separates an unfair video-game from an exercise
in valour.
The definition of dirty work can also be too rigid. Although
the dirtiest work often lies at a remove and is
concentrated among the low-paid, white-collar
organisations have their own types of grubby jobs. Think
of the difference between engineers who build
social-media platforms in the name of connectedness and
the content moderators who monitor the effluvia that
result. The very language of decarbonisation points to
emerging fractures within energy-firm workforces,
between employees developing the clean energies of the
future and those pumping the dirty fossil fuels of the past.
Individual roles can also break into dirtier and cleaner
tasks. A piece of research in 2012 found that
animal-shelter workers who were involved in putting
animals to sleep were less likely to talk to outsiders about
their work. “All The News That’s Fit To Click”, a new book
by Caitlin Petre, a professor of journalism at Rutgers
University, examines the effect that performance metrics
are having on newsrooms. As she interviewed people for
the book, Ms Petre noticed the frequency with which
journalists used metaphors of pollution
and contamination to describe the risk that chasing
eyeballs might compromise the integrity of their editorial
judgments.
Journalists tend to be good at telling stories, however. Ms
Petre describes how many of them have drawn symbolic
mental boundaries as a way of mitigating this risk.
Analysing audience data to work out how to present their
work is a “clean” use of metrics; using data to make
decisions on content is impure and to be avoided.
Criminal lawyers use a different but deep-rooted narrative
to make sense of their own unpleasant tasks. They often
defend people who have committed appalling crimes, for
example, but because they do so in service of a noble
ideal— everyone’s right to a fair trial—they are far less
likely to feel morally compromised.
The idea of dirty work should not obscure the fact that
having a job is a source of dignity. But some roles exact a
hidden toll. To draw the sting of stigma, employers have
to persuade their
workers and the public that such jobs are not just
essential, but also worthy of respect.
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Read more from Bartleby, our columnist on
management and work:
A guide for wannabe leadership gurus (Feb 19th)
Rio Tinto and the problem of toxic culture (Feb
12th) Body language in the post-pandemic
workplace (Feb 5th)
