Dirty, but Essential Work: A Conversation with Eyal Press

Workers left their jobs at a record pace in the past few months. They left because of health concerns, child care issues and because, post pandemic, they did not want to return to what they saw as rotten jobs. Jobs that were ethically and morally challenging.

The pandemic has brought new light to these workers. Often, in what has been called essential work. It has highlighted and personified the work we often don’t see, but that we all rely on for keeping the wheels of society working.

 
Studs Terkel said that “work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than lethargy; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying." And yet for millions of workers this dying that Terkel talked about, is what they face, day in and day out.

We can't imagine what it does to them, but also what it does to our society. This is what Eyal Press examine in Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America.

 

My conversation with Eyal Press: