Daily-Dose

Contents

From New Yorker

From Vox

The conflict between DeSantis and Disney arose after Disney denounced Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, an unconstitutional law which allows parents to sue their local school district if topics such as sexual orientation or gender identity are mentioned in the classroom. The law is unconstitutional because it is so vaguely drafted that teachers cannot determine what kinds of instruction are permitted and what kinds are forbidden — although it remains to be seen whether a federal judiciary dominated by Republican appointees will strike the law down.

Florida plans to strip Disney of an extraordinarily unusual benefit it receives from the state. Walt Disney World is located in a nearly 40-square-mile area that Florida has designated the “Reedy Creek Improvement District.” Within this district, Disney essentially functions as the primary landowner and the local government.

This provides Disney with several advantages — among other things, if it wants to build a road or a new hotel, it can approve that project itself rather than going through the ordinary permitting process run by local Florida governments, though Disney still must comply with state building codes. This Reedy Creek arrangement also allows Disney to tax itself at a higher rate to pay for governmental services like sewage and a fire department — according to one analysis, property taxes on non-Disney landowners in Florida’s Orange County could go up by as much as 25 percent if Disney loses its ability to tax itself.

Few Floridians, and, indeed, few major companies, receive this kind of benefit from their state. But the fact that Florida only plans to strip a special benefit from Disney — rather than, say, tossing its executives in prison — does not mean that it can punish Disney for its protected speech.

Think of it this way: Imagine that José owns a bar in Orlando. One day, José tells the local paper that he dislikes Ron DeSantis and plans to vote for DeSantis’s opponent in the upcoming election. The next day, the state sends him a letter informing him that “because you disparaged our great governor, we are stripping your business of its liquor license.”

José does not have a constitutional right to sell liquor for profit. And the overwhelming majority of Florida businesses do not have a license permitting them to do so. But if Florida strips José of his liquor license because the government disapproves of José’s First Amendment-protected speech, it violates the Constitution.

Disney’s ability to govern the Reedy Creek Improvement District is no different from Florida’s hypothetical decision to take away José’s liquor license. If Florida has a legitimate reason to strip away this benefit from Disney, the Constitution most likely would permit it to do so.

But no one can be punished because they express a political opinion.

Florida’s best defense is to pretend they are punishing Disney for legitimate reasons

While existing law is crystal clear that the government may not sanction someone because it disagrees with their political views, First Amendment retaliation cases are often difficult to win because the plaintiff must prove that they were targeted because of their speech. As the Court explained in Hartman, such a plaintiff “must show a causal connection between a defendant’s retaliatory animus and subsequent injury in any sort of retaliation action.”

But in this case, the evidence that Florida targeted Disney because of its protected speech is overwhelming. DeSantis called upon Florida lawmakers to consider “termination” of Reedy Creek on Tuesday. On Wednesday, he sent a fundraising email to supporters where he denounced Disney for being “woke” and for criticizing him personally.

The email was explicit that DeSantis wants to punish Disney for its political views and because the governor believes that Disney is too close to the opposition party. “Disney and other woke corporations won’t get away with peddling their unchecked pressure campaigns any longer,” DeSantis said in his email. “If we want to keep the Democrat machine and their corporate lapdogs accountable, we have to stand together now.”

By Thursday, both houses of the Florida legislature had passed legislation retaliating against Disney. That’s also the same day that DeSantis’s lieutenant governor, Jeanette Nunez, told Newsmax’s Eric Bolling that the state could reverse course if Disney stopped producing art that the Florida government finds objectionable.

Newsmax host Eric Bolling: “Is there an opportunity for Disney to change their mind and say we will disregard this whole ‘woke’ agenda…and would the governor then say, ‘fine, you can keep your status but we’re gonna keep an eye on you now’?”

Florida Lt. Gov: “Sure!” pic.twitter.com/5E8UKGDVjF

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) April 21, 2022

Disney, Florida’s second-highest-ranking government official informed Bolling, is being targeted because it has “changed what they really espouse.” Nunez complained that Disney used to support “family values” but that it now produces art that emphasizes topics that Nunez deems “very inappropriate.’

And yet, despite this and other evidence indicating that the Florida government is retaliating against Disney because it criticized the governor’s policies and produced works of art that high-ranking government officials find objectionable, there is a possibility that the Republican-controlled federal judiciary will give DeSantis a pass — much as it did when former President Donald Trump committed a similar violation of the First Amendment.

As a presidential candidate, Trump bragged about his plans to bring about a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Such a proposal violates the First Amendment’s safeguards against religious discrimination.

After Trump was criticized for this unconstitutional proposal, he changed his rhetoric slightly. Instead of calling for an explicit ban on Muslim migration to the United States, Trump said he would disguise the ban by targeting countries with large Islamic populations. “People were so upset when I used the word Muslim,” Trump told NBC’s Meet the Press in 2016, “and I’m okay with that, because I’m talking territory instead of Muslim.”

And yet, in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), the Court’s Republican majority permitted Trump to ban travel from several majority-Muslim nations — even after Trump confessed his plans to give his Muslim ban a patina of legitimacy by presenting it as a ban on travel from certain foreign nations. The majority opinion in Hawaii leaned heavily into the fact that the Trump administration offered a national security justification for the policy that “says nothing about religion.”

The Trump administration’s proclamation announcing this travel ban, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the Court’s Republicans, “is expressly premised on legitimate purposes: preventing entry of nationals who cannot be adequately vetted and inducing other nations to improve their practices.” And the Court accepted this national security justification for the policy, despite considerable evidence that the Trump administration came up with this justification as a pretext to justify religious discrimination.

In the likely event that Disney raises a First Amendment challenge against Florida, Florida’s lawyers will undoubtedly spin a similar narrative to the one that the Trump administration came up with in Hawaii. Though those lawyers won’t be able to claim that abolishing Reedy Creek is justified by national security concerns, their brief will undoubtedly offer legitimate-sounding policy justifications for punishing Disney — some of which may actually be persuasive. There are, after all, plenty of legitimate reasons why a for-profit corporation shouldn’t be allowed to exercise governmental authority.

A Republican judiciary may uphold DeSantis’s attacks on Disney by claiming that Florida’s government was motivated by legitimate concerns about giving Disney so much control over the Reedy Creek Improvement District, much as the Supreme Court thumbed its nose at the evidence in Hawaii that Trump was motivated by anti-Muslim animus.

But, again, if the courts follow what the law says, it doesn’t matter if there are legitimate reasons why Florida could have chosen to strip Disney of a valuable government benefit. What matters is whether Florida targeted Disney because it disapproves of the company’s First Amendment-protected speech.

Russian military vehicles on a highway in an area controlled by Russian-backed separatist forces near Mariupol, Ukraine, on April 18, 2022. Mariupol, a strategic port on the Sea of Azov, has been besieged by Russian troops and forces from self-proclaimed separatist areas in eastern Ukraine for more than six weeks.

But the sources I spoke with all agreed on one thing: In the big picture, the outcome in the Donbas might be less important than it may seem. That’s because Russia’s ultimate aim — regime change in Kyiv, or at least forcing Ukraine to submit to a Russian-dominated political future — has been out of reach for weeks. Russia can continue to launch missiles at Ukrainian cities in other regions, terrorizing civilians, but it cannot currently threaten to actually seize those population centers or topple President Volodymyr Zelenksyy’s government.

“Politically, Russia [already] lost the war,” says Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military. “When it withdrew from the north, around Kyiv, it eliminated any impetus Ukraine might have for settlement.”

Russia’s offensive in the Donbas, then, is best understood as an effort at limiting the costs of its blunder: a campaign to string together significant enough gains — like the seizure of Mariupol — to soften the blow from its overall strategic defeat.

Russia is shifting to the Donbas because its initial attack failed

There are good reasons for Russia to focus on the Donbas.

Ukraine’s easternmost region, stretching from Luhansk down to around Mariupol in the south, the Donbas directly borders Russia and Russian-held territory in southern Ukraine. Seizing the region’s south would create a Russian-controlled corridor connecting occupied Crimea to Russia proper, a so-called “land bridge” that would make supplying Crimea somewhat easier.

The Donbas’s population has long been more pro-Russian than the rest of Ukraine, though this can be overstated and may well have changed since the war began. The region has been at the center of Russia’s war propaganda, inventing claims of a “genocide” against ethnic Russians in the region to justify the invasion. It is rich in natural gas.

And yet, not a single one of these reasons was sufficient to make the Donbas the center of Russia’s initial invasion. That’s because the goal at first was regime change in Kyiv — Putin’s now-infamous announcement to seek the “de-Nazification” and “de- militarization” of Ukraine.

The new focus dates back to March 25, when the Russian general staff announced their intention to shift offensive combat operations to the Donbas region. At the time, Russian forces were engaged in fighting across Ukraine’s north, east, and south, as you can see on the following map from the Institute for the Study of War (a Washington-based think tank).

Institute for the Study of War
In late March, Russian forces were fighting on several fronts in Ukraine.

Over the course of the next month, Russia conducted a strategic withdrawal from much of the battlefront, especially around Kyiv and Chernihiv. By April 20, the ISW map shows a shrunken Russian presence focused primarily on fighting in and around the Donbas.

Institute for the Study of War
By late April, Russia’s troops had shifted almost entirely to the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.

This shift, first and foremost, reflects the inability of Russian troops to seize Ukraine’s capital and overthrow its government in one fell swoop. “Putin has really started to rethink the strategic aims in Ukraine after the massive strategic failure in Kyiv,” says Rachel Rizzo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center.

Understanding the nature of this failure is vital to understanding what’s happening in the Donbas.

In the Kyiv theater, Russia attempted to plunge troops and armor forward rapidly to seize and/or encircle the capital. These pushes assumed light Ukrainian resistance, which did not end up being the case, and they were undercut by poor logistics and a decision to travel on open roads that created easy opportunities for ambushes.

The Ukrainians took advantage, raiding Russia’s weak supply lines and stymieing the Russians in brutal block-to-block fighting in Kyiv suburbs like Irpin. Russia’s air force, vastly superior to Ukraine’s on paper, was unable to control the skies, allowing Ukrainian drones to wreak havoc on Russian armor.

Sergei Chuzavkov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
A Ukrainian flag flies near a destroyed building in a residential area of Borodyanka, northwest of Kyiv and Irpin, on April 17.

The war in the Donbas is different. Russia’s main military objective is cutting off Ukraine’s army in the region, known as the Joint Forces, from the rest of Ukraine by seizing territory to the west of its positions. If the Russian effort is successful, the Joint Forces will lose their ability to resupply and ability to keep fighting — which would allow Russia to consolidate control over a vast swath of the Donbas.

This plan avoids many of the pitfalls that beset Russian forces in the Kyiv region. It mostly requires seizing open terrain from the Ukrainians rather than engaging in urban environments that favor defenders. It entails fighting in a concentrated area, rather than a series of dispersed fronts, which in theory should create fewer vulnerable supply lines. And Russia currently enjoys a measure of air superiority in the Donbas that it didn’t elsewhere.

“If they mass forces, which they’re trying to do now, and they mass them in the right place and they use of a lot artillery and air strikes, they can still have tactical success,” says Rob Lee, a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program. “That’s why the Donbas plays into the Russian military’s strength and mitigates some of their weaknesses.”

This is why we should expect a different kind of fighting in the Donbas: fewer raids, more large-scale conflicts between armies. This should favor a Russian force that has always outclassed the Ukrainians in armor, artillery, and aircraft.

Ultimately, the Russian objective here, per some analysts, is to take enough territory to be able to sell its own population — and the world — on the idea that their campaign was a success despite the failures around Kyiv. 

    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-
cdn.com/thumbor/1-Ib6FJcdG0f2pK41goqNxEVG3Y=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23408571/GettyImages_1239919441.jpg" /> Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images
Ukrainian soldiers keep their position in a trench on the front line with Russian troops in Luhansk on April 11.

If Russia can secure its control over the breakaway republics in the area controlled by pro-Russian separatists — the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics — they can claim to have achieved a pre-war aim of stopping “genocide.”

“They have now put their stake on this being the ‘defense’ of the Donbas,” says Olga Oliker, the International Crisis Group’s program director for Europe and Central Asia.

Ukraine can still win despite Russia’s advantages

If we’ve learned anything in this conflict so far, it’s that theoretical Russian advantages don’t always translate to battlefield success. And there are reasons to think that Ukraine may once again repulse the Russian attack.

The nature of Russia’s plan pits its army against the Ukrainian military elite. The Joint Forces have been fighting in the Donbas since 2014, when Russian-backed separatists rebelled against the government in Kyiv and Russia annexed Crimea. Eight years of war means that they have significant battlefield experience and an understanding of how Russian- trained fighters operate. Given that Russia has made extensive use of untested fighters in this conflict, including poorly trained and equipped conscripts, the Ukrainian advantage in experience could prove decisive.

We also don’t know if Russia has fixed some of the major problems that plagued their campaigns elsewhere in the country. Incompetent logistics and maintenance led to Russian tanks breaking down on Ukrainian roads, out of gas or stuck in the mud. Russian commanders repeatedly employed baffling tactics, failing to concentrate their forces and creating vulnerabilities Ukraine could exploit.

“The biggest question of this upcoming set of battles … is whether or not they have sufficiently learned from the failures of the first month of the war, and are going to put together a coherent, properly resourced effort,” says Kofman.

Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Ukrainian troops walk through rubble after a shopping center and surrounding buildings in Kharkiv were hit by a Russian missile strike on April 16.

The Ukrainians seem to have two significant and connected advantages: numbers and morale.

On paper, Russia’s military is significantly larger than Ukraine’s. But analysts believe that Ukraine may well be able to field a larger force than Russia in the battle for the Donbas. This is primarily a matter of policy choices: While Ukraine has called up its reserves and recruited civilians in ad hoc militias, Russia has steadfastly refused to adopt a total war footing (its conscription has, so far, been limited).

In military theory, a rule of thumb is that attackers should enjoy a three-to-one advantage over defenders; Russia won’t even approach that, and may suffer numerical disadvantages in some battles. Experts say it would take time for Russia to mobilize substantial reserves from its larger population — time that they simply don’t have, given that the offensive is starting now.

“Because they’ve been so stuck in trying to fight a large conventional war as a ‘special military operation,’ they don’t have access to any large manpower reserves,” Kofman explains. “[By contrast], the Ukrainian military has a tremendous amount of manpower — they have a mobilized reserve.”

Part of the reason for this discrepancy is significant Russian losses in the first phase of the war. But another part is that the Ukrainian population is profoundly committed to the war, creating a large pool of willing fighters who perform more effectively than Russian conscripts. “The Ukrainians can get away with putting accountants who used to shoot at beer bottles out at the dacha because they’re defending their territory,” Oliker says.

While Russian civilians seem to support the war from afar, evidence from the battlefield shows a Russian force suffering from consistently low morale, for reasons ranging from poor training to confusion as to why they’re fighting in the first place.

This gulf in morale has shaped the two sides’ battlefield performance, and will likely continue to do so. Demoralized Russian soldiers are more likely to withdraw when they meet Ukrainian resistance, while the highly motivated Ukrainians are more willing to take risks and lay down their lives to protect their homeland.

How much does the outcome in the Donbas matter?

Both sides have pretty good reasons to believe that they could emerge triumphant.

It’s possible Russia successfully pulls Ukraine into a series of pitched battles in which their aircraft and artillery advantages prove decisive, allowing them to encircle the Joint Forces and seize the entire Donbas. It’s possible that the Ukrainians successfully blunt the Russian attack and mount a counteroffensive, leveraging their manpower reserves and more motivated fighting force to retake parts of the region Russia currently controls. It’s possible they end up in a bloody stalemate, a long war of attrition where the two armies wear each other out over the course of months or years.

Right now, as the fighting is just ramping up, it’s impossible to say which of these scenarios, if any, is the most likely outcome. Too much depends on unpredictable battlefield developments.

Andriy Andriyenko/AP

Andrey and wife Anastasia crouch behind a building with daughters Anna, 2, Nadezhda, 5, and Sofia, 6, after hearing shelling during an evacuation of civilians at a bus station in Kramatorsk on April 17. Russian forces have been advancing to the eastern Ukrainian city from the Donbas.

But at the same time, it’s not clear how much the outcome of the battle will actually end up mattering. In my conversations with experts, each and every one of them said that, in the big picture, Russia has suffered an irreversible defeat in this war.

“The Russian special military operation in Ukraine is already a strategic failure,” Oliker says. “What they wanted out of this was a compliant Ukraine run by people friendly to Russia. This does not seem like a plausible outcome — and, aside from that, their forces have proven to be much less capable than almost everyone thought.”

The initial Russian war aim, as evidenced by its early statements and troop deployments, was to inflict a decisive blow on Ukraine that would transform the country’s political institutions: either imposing a Russian puppet regime or forcing the current Ukrainian leadership to surrender on Russian terms. When Russia withdrew from Kyiv — and not just Kyiv, but most of the northern Ukrainian theater — it de facto conceded that its fundamental war aim was outside of its power.

Even if they do manage to take significant new territory in the Donbas, or impose full control over a bombed-out Mariupol, it’s difficult to imagine these gains outweighing the war’s costs.

The Russian economy has been damaged by sanctions, which could well escalate in the coming weeks. Europe has united against Russia, with historically neutral Switzerland joining the sanctions and both Sweden and Finland moving toward joining NATO. The war has embarrassed Russia’s military and depleted it materially; any territory they occupy in the Donbas will be home to many citizens who hate them, creating the very real prospect of an insurgency backed by Ukraine and the West.

“Win, lose, or draw — the Russian military is likely to be exhausted for some period of time after this coming set of battles,” Kofman says. “The Russian military is very short on manpower, and that’s been evident since the outset of the war. The more territory they capture, the greater the pull on manpower they have, to occupy the territory they seized.”

Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images
People walk down a debris-laden Mariupol avenue on April 12.

In this sense, the fight for the Donbas is less important than it might seem. The highest-stakes issue in the war seems to have been decided, with Russia on the losing end.

But at the same time, there are real stakes — both in human terms, for the soldiers and civilians who will perish, and also in broader political terms.

The more successful the Russian war in the Donbas is, the easier of a time Putin will have selling his war as a victory to Russia’s citizens. The more territory he controls there, the more leverage he will have at the negotiating table — meaning that he’ll be able to extract more significant concessions on issues like NATO membership from Zelenskyy in exchange for giving back territory taken in the Donbas. (In theory, Russia could benefit economically from controlling the Donbas and its gas reserves; in practice, sanctions, the war’s devastation, and a likely insurgency will probably make it more of a burden than a boon.)

By contrast, another humiliating Russian collapse could do serious damage to Russia’s strategic position. Not only would it make Russian threats of force less credible in other places — who could take their military seriously after such a resounding defeat? — but it could also raise the odds of a political challenge to Putin at home. Zelenskyy would have a dominant hand in peace negotiations, and could achieve terms that would allow for more significant Ukrainian security and political integration with the West.

So while this round of fighting may be less important than the previous one, the stakes are still high.

Author Eyal Press on the nation’s most morally troubling labor — and why many refuse to acknowledge it.

Part of the Future of Work issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

Harriet Krzykowski was a mental health aide in a South Florida correctional facility, making $12 per hour, when she learned of the death of Darren Rainey. Rainey was a mentally ill man who had been incarcerated at the prison where she worked, and prison guards had killed him.

The details were particularly horrifying. The guards responsible had trapped Rainey in a shower and tortured him with scalding water until he collapsed. The temperature had reached as high as 180 degrees. By the time of Rainey’s autopsy, he had burns on 90 percent of his body. Rainey’s skin, reportedly, would fall off if touched.

Krzykowski wanted to quit her job upon hearing of the 2012 incident. She couldn’t afford to. She was one of the many American workers whose stories journalist Eyal Press tells in his book, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, published late last summer. Press, whose feature reporting appears in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Guardian, shines light upon the lives of undocumented immigrants working on the kill floors of poultry slaughterhouses, Americans deputized to carry out drone warfare in their country’s name, and others, such as Krzykowski, who have been toiling in jobs that the most powerful castes pass on to the poorly educated and compensated. Those jobs often serve to empower the very system that maintains and exacerbates social and economic inequity — and robs workers of their dignity along the way.

I spoke with Press about the people who American society demands do the “dirty work” for others, and the complicity of us all in their plight. I also wanted to know his views on the recent labor victories won by Amazon and Starbucks employees, and how the state of work has been broken in the United States. Can we put it back together? Do we really want to?

A lightly edited transcript of our discussion follows; a more in-depth audio version will air in May as an episode of the Vox Conversations podcast.

Tell me just plain and simple: What is “dirty work”?

Well, “dirty work” in my book is a little different from the colloquial expression most people know. I think when most people hear that phrase, they think of an unpleasant job that is physically dirtying, like hauling the garbage off the streets. But here, “dirty work” refers to something different: unethical or morally troubling activities that society tacitly condones and depends upon, but generally doesn’t want to hear too much about.

You start off the book with a quotation from James Baldwin: “The powerless must do their own dirty work. The powerful have it done for them.” So, are we speaking here strictly in terms of what benefits the powerful, or are we talking also about folks who don’t necessarily want to do a particular thing that keeps society running?

Even though I don’t think [Baldwin] is referring to “dirty work” as I’m referring to it, he’s capturing there something that’s very basic. When you have to dirty your hands and you have a lot of power, you get someone else to do it for you, right? You have the luxury to kind of disassociate yourself from this kind of unpleasant activity.

And if you don’t have power, you often find yourself being the person who’s on the receiving end of that order to do the “dirty work.” When we think about America’s prison system, who runs that system? Who works in that system? I don’t just mean the guards. I also mean the mental health aides.

A lot of my book takes place in the mental health ward of a prison [and] America’s industrial slaughterhouses — the kill floors of those slaughterhouses.

That Baldwin quote sets us up for thinking about “dirty work” through the prism of power. It really is through that prism that my own exploration of it takes place.

You’ve spent years researching the lives and the work of these people who cannot afford to quit their jobs, despite the indignities that they’re suffering and witnessing. Tell me a little bit about who these people are.

Who they are is generally folks who take what I call jobs of last resort. They’re not society’s elites. They don’t have advanced degrees from places like Stanford and Harvard. They end up doing a job that is concentrated and geographically located in less advantaged parts of the country.

During the prison boom in this country, it’s no accident that so many prisons were built in more depressed rural areas of the country that had kind of seen their mills and factories go, and saw building a prison as a way to create jobs for the economy. But what ends up happening is the people who fill those jobs are the least advantaged.

And it’s not that they can’t leave the jobs. They often have very bad choices in front of them, so they feel compelled to stay for one reason or another.

You mentioned in your epilogue that inequality also shapes the geography of “dirty work” and who is held responsible for it. In terms of the jobs that you cover in this book, you’re talking not just about folks who work in slaughterhouses or in prisons, but also folks who are operating drone strikes. How does the inequity we experience in this country shape the geography? How does it determine where that “dirty work” is done?

Dirty Work opens with the story of a mentally ill incarcerated man in Florida named Darren Rainey, who is literally tortured to death. He’s locked in a scalding shower by a group of prison guards in a prison called the Dade Correctional Institution. It’s a horrible crime. Certainly the guards who were involved in that crime should be held accountable, but it’s notable that, as in the Abu Ghraib story, no one of higher rank was held accountable for Darren Rainey’s death.

In fact, a lot of people who were in high-ranking positions at that time got promoted or ended up benefiting. In fact, the governor of Florida at the time was Rick Scott. And as we know, Rick Scott is now a US senator from Florida.

One of the ways that inequality plays out in the story of dirty work in this country is that on the rare occasions when the curtain is pulled back and we see this dirty work going on, the blame goes to the lowest-ranking people at the bottom, and that’s very convenient for society, right? It’s like, “Oh yeah, there were these awful guards. Wow. They did this horrible thing.”

But why did this happen? Well, it happened because Florida, like so many states, has turned its prisons into its largest mental health institutions, right? Florida spends just about less than any other state. At the time of Rainey’s death, they had the third-largest prison system in the country. So where are the resources going? And what kind of institutional and structural arrangements have been made to, in effect, create the conditions so that abuses like the ones I describe — both with Darren Rainey as the victim and many other people as the victim — these abuses are not surprising. These abuses are predictable. And it’s the folks at the bottom who we can conveniently blame, but who are part of a much larger system of dirty work that I think all of us are to some extent accountable for.

It’s easy, I think, for some people to disengage, saying, “Well, there’s no changing the system.” And also they’ve been shown only “the good things” that the system can do for them. And thus, we’re not worried as a society about the people who you describe as these cogs in the suppressive system. And folks who, as you note, could be considered enablers or accomplices — but are actually more like captives. Could you describe what you’re trying to get at?

To go back to the prison example, I talked about the Dade Correctional Institution and the mental health ward there. I look at and I interview the mental health aides who worked there and someone could certainly say they were complicit in what happened to Darren Rainey. Why?

Because they knew what was going on. They knew that the guards at Dade were having fun, some of them were deliberately abusing mentally ill incarcerated men in this facility and getting away with it. You have a Hippocratic oath, right? You have a duty to report.

On the other hand, as I say in the book, these were mostly women who were working, who I interviewed. Working in the mental health ward, and their own security, just going to work every day and running group sessions and getting from one wing of the prison into another wing, they were beholden to the security guards at this institution to make them feel they could do their jobs safely without being threatened, without being left alone in the rec yard as one of the mental health aides was, and she was nearly assaulted.

What they quickly learned, these mental health aides, is that if you challenge the guards in any way, they would retaliate. Harriet Krzykowski raises some questions about what the guards are doing because they’re not letting the guys out into the yard on Sundays. The response to that is that she’s suddenly left alone in the yard.

I’m particularly haunted by a conversation I had with a woman named Lovita Richardson who worked at Dade, the same prison where guards killed Rainey. When she took the job that day, she really was idealistic about it. She thought she could help people who society had kind of considered beyond the pale, thrown away, stand up for these folks’ rights. She really believed in what she was doing, and she gets the job and not long after she starts working there, she sees a group of guards pummel an incarcerated man who is tied to a chair, and she is in terrible shock and distress.

When she told me the story years later, tears filled her eyes as she’s talking about this. She wanted to report it and she wanted to get the story out, but another woman who worked there told her, “Listen, Lovita. You can’t. You can’t say anything about this. You’re just going to be retaliated against,” and so she didn’t say anything. It’s those kinds of dilemmas that the folks who do the dirty work in our society face, and it’s the rest of society that should think about those dilemmas, because we are not disconnected from this work.

What you describe happening to Lovita is a reminder of what you call “moral injuries” throughout the book. How would you define those, and what are some other examples of that being, I guess you could say, injury to insult within this context?

That’s a central idea in my book: that inequality isn’t just about who earns a huge paycheck and grotesquely large bonuses that go out to folks on Wall Street. That’s the material side of inequality, but there’s also a moral dimension to inequality.

It’s these hidden wounds that folks like Lovita sustain doing society’s dirty work, doing jobs that are not only demeaning, but that puts you in ethical situations where if you stand by what you believe and you say something, you may lose your job. If you’re not in a position where you can find an easy replacement for that job, what are you going to do?

How exactly do you think that the drive toward unionization at places like Amazon and Starbucks will help those who are stuck in these “dirty” jobs? Will labor bargain some of that dirtiness away, or just make sure that people are paid more for compromising their dignity or morals?

The most important basic fact that’s implicit in your question is that these things can be altered. I can’t say whether the poultry industry that I wrote about will experience a wave of unionization that really empowers the folks like the ones I wrote about who felt so exploited and abused. I don’t know. What I can say is that it would certainly make a difference if that happened. In fact, in the section of the book on the industrial slaughterhouses, I talk about how we’ve kind of come full circle, because back 100 years ago was the days of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. And there, again, it was an immigrant workforce that was brutally exploited and the conditions shocked and appalled those who witnessed them and read about them.

Things changed in the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s in meat packing. Why did they change? Well, there were powerful unions; in particular, a union that actually was progressive not just in empowering workers, but in integrating the union membership and making sure that Black and white workers in the plants saw each other as fighting for a common cause. That raised wages, it improved conditions. But then it reverted back when the industry responded by relocating plants outside of cities like Chicago, going, again, far afield to these rural areas and recruiting an immigrant workforce that they could exploit more easily. And going with what some of the scholars of this industry call a low-wage strategy: Bring the wages down, bust up the unions, and bring it back, in a sense, to Upton Sinclair’s Jungle.

That actually makes me think of a different book. There’s a quote at the end of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The title character and narrator says, “Who knows, but that on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” How do we restore the vision of those who just refuse to see other people, many of whom are maintaining the institutions that those powerful people rely upon?

Dirty work is intentionally placed behind the scenes of social life. That’s a phrase that I take from a social theorist named Norbert Elias. He wrote this big book called The Civilizing Process. And it sounds really nice, “the civilizing process.” It’s this thing where it’s actually a book about morals and manners and how, over time, things that we consider unpleasant, like blowing your nose at the table, you don’t do that. You do that in private. He talks about carving an animal, that’s done in the kitchen. It’s not done at the table. You’re reading this book and thinking, “Oh, this is a story of progress.” But it’s not a story of progress because what Elias is arguing in that book is that the civilizing process is about pushing these, what he calls disturbing events, behind the scenes of social life. We push them out of sight, in a sense.

To get back to your question, I think that that is very fundamental to dirty work in our society. It’s there, but we don’t actually see it. How often do you actually see what goes on on the kill floor of a slaughterhouse? How often do we see the footage of a drone strike? How often do we see inside the mental health ward of a prison? We don’t very often. We know it’s there, it’s not that it’s a mystery to us, but it’s abstract. There’s such a big difference between the abstract and the particular and the concrete.

I’ve been reading Clint Smith’s book [How the Word Is Passed], a tour of the American landscape and slave plantations. He starts with Jefferson and at one point he meets these two women. They kind of know Monticello was a plantation, and they know that Jefferson owned slaves, but it’s abstract and it’s not particular. That difference between the abstract and the particular is enormous.

What is the opposite of dirty work? When I saw the title, I’m thinking, there’s any number of ways you can describe this, and I’m not just talking about the Steely Dan song. I’m talking about how white-collar workers do what we might regard to be dirty work, just in a different sense.

It’s funny, because when I was telling some friends that I was writing this book, and they didn’t know anything about it, they were like, “You mean corporate lobbyists? You mean Wall Street? People who sell those shady Wall Street products that destroyed the whole global economy?” I had to laugh, because I was thinking —

Big Oil, keep going.

Exactly. I don’t, in any way, deny that some of the highest paying, most powerful jobs in American life, in American society, are deeply unethical and extremely profitable. We can think of the Sackler family, described in Patrick Radden Keefe’s great book. This is the real “dirty work,” you could argue, but there is a big difference. I’m interested in work that feels dirtying and stigmatizing and sullying and demeaning for the people who do it.

If we think about bankers, even after the great financial meltdown in 2008 that caused so much suffering, and so many people lost their livelihoods and there was so much pain in so many communities. Yet when Obama dares to criticize Wall Street, there’s immediate pushback. There’s indignation and outrage that he dares to do this. To me, that indignation reflects the power that these industries have. Not just the financial power, but the social and cultural power.

That is not something that the folks I write about in this book have. Generally speaking, they don’t have platforms. They don’t get to tell the New York Times the president should not be talking about our industry that way. How dare he? They don’t get to spend all this money influencing how they are seen and perceived by society. Fundamentally, when we think about things like stigma, moral injury, and shame, we have to think about them as a function of power, and who has it and who doesn’t in our society.

I’m trying to think about how we fix this. Part of the solution will probably have to be political. I’m thinking about what President Biden did just this past January, issuing an executive order declaring that 70,000 federal workers were going to immediately start earning $15 per hour, and that 300,000 employees of federal contractors were going to see a raise to $15 per hour reflected in their paychecks over the course of the year. One of the things he brought up was dignity. It’s not just about a paycheck. I’m wondering how you think embracing dignity in the workplace might help get us further toward labor equity, or will it have that much of an effect at all?

Biden has made a point of talking about labor as something more than just a paycheck. It is about you, your place in the community, it is about dignity. It is about your pride, or it should be, in a society that values work. In terms of fixing, there’s not a lot in my book on solutions; partly, that’s because I’m not a policy expert. I can’t claim to deliver a set of proposals that could be translated into policy that will change this. And also because, I actually think that dirty work doesn’t just grow out of policy. It grows out of culture.

That’s another reason I didn’t go into the solution side of it too much, because I feel like the real solution is a transformation of who we are. If we think about mass incarceration, to really change this immense system of cruelty and punishment, we have to change who we are. We have to change what we’re willing to be. Are we there? I don’t know.

I don’t think we’re even close. I look at what you’re saying, and to me, accountability is the death of American exceptionalism. If we actually take account of all of these various horrors that, through this country’s gestational period, it sought to hide from itself, and we got used to that, like an infant getting used to a particular environment. We got used to being this type of America, and no matter the technological advances or the cultural evolutions, it’s maintained that same character, where we can view ourselves as great as long as we hide the bad stuff.

That may feel good in the short term, but it doesn’t stop work from becoming broken in this country, as it has been. Specifically with regard to dirty work, though, is this a fixable problem if we don’t get that cultural revolution? And if not wholly, are there any particular parts that we should be targeting?

The little bit of hope that I took from the examples I chose is, on the one hand, I felt they’re incredibly entrenched, like mass incarceration. These are incredibly entrenched parts of American life. On the other hand, there are also aspects of our social world where there has been a critical mass of people who have risen in the last decade or two to say, “We cannot continue this.” To me, it’s not that dirty work is immutable, that you can’t change it. But change is hard, and change is slow.

Jamil Smith is a senior correspondent for Vox.

From The Hindu: Sports

From The Hindu: National News

From BBC: Europe

From Ars Technica

From Jokes Subreddit

submitted by /u/AnimePrimeMinister
[link] [comments]