 Thanks for joining us for our conversation on essential jobs and hidden toll of inequality in America. My name is Chris Geary and I'm a senior policy analyst at the Center on Education and Labor at New America, and I'm thrilled to moderate our conversation today with Al Press, Dr. David Michaels, and Kathy Reckleshaus. We're here today to discuss Al Press's recent book, Dirty Work, Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, and to see how the themes of this incredibly important work connect to our current policy moment. Over the past two years, there's been a deep appreciation of and an outpouring of public support for essential workers. Despite this support, we've failed to pass policies that can fairly compensate and protect these workers for their vital work, and this needs to change. Given the risks these workers face throughout and even before the pandemic, the necessity of their work for the functioning of the American economy, and the fact that women, black, Latinx, and immigrant workers are disproportionately represented in the essential workforce, it's of vital importance to ensure these workers are adequately protected and fairly compensated. Al Press's book, Dirty Work, for which he was just awarded the prestigious Helman Prize, shines a spotlight on the grim realities facing many workers and essential jobs. By profiling different workers in incredibly important jobs that are underpaid and unprotected, Al highlights how these workers are so often exploited for their labor and how too often we shy away from even thinking about, let alone work to improve these jobs. Today we're joined by the author of this book, Al Press, and two experts that have worked in this space throughout their careers. In addition to writing Dirty Work, Al is a decorated writer, journalist, and contributor to the New Yorker and New York Times. And as a former New America fellow, Al were excited to welcome you back to New America today. Dr. David Michaels is the former Assistant Secretary of Labor for the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, or OSHA, and is currently a professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health and we're delighted to hear his perspective on the need to advance worker protections and workplace health and safety. Kathy Ruckelshaus is the Legal Director and General Counsel of the National Employment Law Project, where she's helped advance the organization's commitment to fight for policies that create good jobs, expand access to work, and strengthen protections and supports for low-wage workers and the unemployed. I'll note that we will have time for questions and answers at the end, so please put your questions in the chat as they arise. And with that, I will turn this over for our first question towards Al. So, Al, can you tell us why you wrote this book? Sure, and thank you, Chris, for that really generous, lovely introduction. It's great to be back at New America. I had great fellowship, great time as a fellow there supporting other work I've done. I'm really honored. I'm also really honored to share this space with David and Kathy, both of whom I admire and have actually consulted for their expertise on journalism that I've done. And so, you know, it's really a treat to be able to be in conversation with such informed analysts about my book. So I thought I'd begin by just explaining to those out there who may not know what I mean by dirty work. This book is titled what is, in fact, a colloquial expression and the colloquial expression dirty work refers to an unpleasant task that is more often not physically dirty, like holding the garbage off the streets, say. In my book, dirty work refers to something different. It refers to morally troubling activity that society depends on and tacitly condones, but doesn't want to hear too much about. So, for example, the dirty work of running America's prison system, the largest prison system in the world, where more than two million of our fellow citizens are confined, often in brutal conditions that I contend in the book dehumanize not just those who are incarcerated, but also the people who work in carceral institutions, the dirty work of carrying out targeted assassinations in America's never ending wars, or the dirty work of manning the kill floors in industrial slaughterhouses, where so much of the food we consume, the meat poultry, beef poultry and chicken we consume, is processed, but which very few of us who eat meat ever go near or see. And that's a kind of key point in this book. One of the common characteristics of dirty work, of all the different forms of dirty work that I look at in this book, is that it is relatively out of sight, it is hidden behind barriers of different kinds. Sometimes those are physical barriers, the walls, the prisons that hide what happens in jails and prisons from the public. Of course, those walls are also there for security reasons, but I think they perform a dual function in also keeping reporters and citizens from scrutinizing what is going on inside. Laws, secrecy laws that prevent us from knowing much about the drone program and what is actually being done in our name as this kind of geographically limitless war has gone on now for more than two decades. And so as a journalist, as a reporter, exposing what is out of sight and what is maybe deliberately obscured from view, that's a very important task. And it's a challenging one, but it certainly is part of the reason I wrote this book to try to simply shed light on the inner workings of these institutions and on the lives of the people on the front lines who are working in them. The second sort of common theme and also a reason that compelled me to write this book is that as I thought about this kind of work and these jobs, the kind of dirty work I just mentioned, it struck me again and again that this work is not randomly distributed. It is not assigned as often to the sons and daughters of senators and CEOs and society's most privileged, educated members and those at the margins of society, but rather disproportionately delegated to those with the fewest choices and opportunities. And part of that is a matter of location. If we think about where, say, prisons or industrial slaughterhouses are located, it tends to be in more depressed rural areas. And that is where these institutions recruit workers from. But beyond that, I think that there is, there's a quote from my book, actually at the start of the book from James Baldwin and Baldwin. The quote is, the powerless must do their own dirty work. The powerful have it done for them. And he was not, I should hasten to add describing dirty work in the sense that I'm describing it, but that very much applies to the worlds and the work worlds and the activities that I look at in this book. And the reason this is important is that I think through dirty work, through a kind of analysis of this whole world of work that is hidden and obscured, we can think about and hopefully start talking about a dimension of inequality that has gone unnoticed. And that is moral inequality, because the work that I describe in this book puts the people who do it under enormous emotional and psychological duress that comes across in story after story. Sometimes it results in, you know, shattered dignity. Sometimes it results in, you know, lower self-esteem. Sometimes it results in substance abuse or symptoms of trauma and moral injury. An idea we'll be discussing at greater length later. But these are, I contend, what the sociologist Richard sent it once called, hidden injuries of class. That is, they are burdens that people bear as they go about their lives, as they do their jobs, that are very hard, I would say impossible to capture in graphs and charts and statistics, but that can be extremely powerful and pernicious in shaping people's lived experiences and shaping how they feel about themselves, the level of their status, their place in the community, all of these sort of aspects of who we are that are really, I think, fundamental. And so I'm not going to read much from the book, but I just wanted to, you know, flesh out a little bit this idea of moral inequality and what I mean by it. And I say early in the book that moral inequality mirrors and reinforces the more familiar economic kind, just as the rich and the poor have come to inhabit starkly different worlds, an equally stark gap separates the people who perform the most thankless, ethically troubling jobs in America, and those who are exempt from these activities, like so much else in a society that has grown more and more unequal, the burden of dirty in one's hands, and the benefit of having a clean conscience are increasingly functions of privilege, of the capacity to distance one's self from the isolated places where dirty work is performed, while leaving the sorted details to others. And I won't go on too long, but I will say that, you know, implicit in what I've just described is that the dirty work that I that I write about is implicates and involves all of us, even those who are distant from it. You know, it lurks behind the consumption choices we make behind the cars we drive and the fossil fuels we burn. It is present in state and government institutions like prisons and military bases, which after all are, you know, under our collective, our extensions of our public policies. So in that sense, you know, the the importance of this work goes beyond just the people who do it, it extends to the rest of us. Thank you, Al. I very much appreciate that response. And just to follow up with a with another question, Al. So there's been a lot of attention during the pandemic about meatpackers and people that work in the meat processing industry. And your book wonderfully lifts up the importance of people working these jobs, as well as the abuses and exploitation they regularly experience. And so Al, what did you learn in reporting on these workers? Yeah, one one section of my book is indeed focuses on workers in poultry slaughterhouses, particularly one particular plant in Texas. And, you know, to echo what I just said about this work, not being randomly distributed, but disproportionately performed by folks who are more marginal and have fewer choices and opportunities, you know, the poultry industry is a stark illustration of this. The workers that I interviewed, most of them were undocumented immigrants. They were people who had very few choices for other things to do, and who took the job, even when people warned them, including people within their own community, you know, don't do this, you'll you'll suffer repetitive strain injuries. It's hard work. It's demeaning work. And in terms of what I took away, I think that what stays with me, and really is a kind of metaphor for for the whole book. When I spoke to these workers about their experiences, they were mostly women, Mexican women. What they talked about was not the low wages, or the material grievances they might have had, you know, wanting better health benefits or more sick days or slightly higher pay, I'm sure they would have wanted those things. And in some cases, we did touch upon them. But that was not what came out sort of initially and really dominated the conversations. What really came out were these hidden injuries, these moral and psychological and emotional burdens that they bore in this particular plant. There, as in so many poultry plants, there was an emphasis on speed, and on the lines being run as fast as possible, so that so as to maximize production. And as a consequence of this, the workers that I interviewed were often denied bathroom breaks, they were unable, there was a break for lunch where they could go to the bathroom. But because everybody wanted to go then, not everybody got to go. And when someone wanted to stop working, because they had to go to the bathroom, at another point during the day, they would get yelled at and reprimanded. And this was literally both described to me and enacted in a kind of skit that some of the workers performed that I described. And when these workers described what it felt like to be yelled at for asking for a bathroom break. They cried. I mean, they literally, they were so bothered. And this this experience so stayed with them. That just recalling it and trying to share it and describe it, led them to break down in tears. And I think that tells you something about the weight of these hidden injuries. You know, I think it was President Biden who in his speech at the Democratic Convention said that a job he was told by his father, a job is not just a paycheck. It's about a person's dignity. It's about their place in the community. It's about a lot of other things that that I think escape the notice of economists and policymakers. But those other things matter enormously. And they bear on the kind of country we have, and the kind of really moral lines we cross when we subject workers to exploitation of this of this kind. Thank you, Al. And turning now to David. So David, as the former Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA, what did you think of this book? Chris, you know, I was riveted reading it. It's an important powerful book. You know, employers every year report more than 3 million workers are injured on the job. You know, the true number of course is far higher. What Al does is he puts human faces on those injured workers demanding the reader care about these workers. You have to remind my students every year that statistics are people with the tears wiped away. Al does that very well. He does it a deep dive into the root causes of those injuries beyond, you know, the superficial, the outrageously hazardous conditions that you read about in typical media exposés of worker injuries. What Al does is he shows why he shows why those hazards are present. He explains the responsible for those injuries is the system itself, the decisions made by people at the top, not just the immediate supervisors, but you really have to look at the system and you have to look at the CEOs and the boards. And finally he shows as you just heard that working injuries are not just physical, but the workers suffer psychological injuries and as he so well calls them moral injuries. And these injuries can be just as devastating to workers as the physical injuries. And they also have incredible repercussions on workers families and on their communities. Thanks, David. And David, I'm hoping you could take us inside the Department of Labor. Could you help us understand why it's so hard to protect workers, particularly those in essential jobs? Oh, boy. You know, there are so many structural reasons. First, OSHA is a tiny agency with enough inspectors to visit every workplace once every 160 years. And that was before COVID. And now inspections are that much harder to do. OSHA's penalties are small, really trivial to large employers. I often compare the size of fines levied against corporations for environmental crimes to those levied by OSHA for killing workers. And those environmental laws carry much heavier penalties. So corporations take them much more seriously. We have a situation where four workers were killed at a DuPont plant in Texas. They were overcome by a chemical leak. OSHA went in there, our initial penalty against DuPont was $99,000. $99,000 after four workers were killed, essentially petty cash for DuPont. For that same event, DuPont agreed to pay $3.1 million for EPA violations. Obviously, those workers didn't cost as much to DuPont. Another reason our standard setting system is broken. It takes many years, sometimes decades for OSHA to issue a standard. The staff is so small can only work on a small number of standards at any one time. So there are many hazards like heat or airborne infections like COVID, or line speed and ergonomic hazards like those crippling the chicken factory workers AL just described for which OSHA either has no standard or one that's hopelessly out of date. And OSHA has never tried to take on those moral injuries they all writes about. And it will be slapped down by a court immediately if it tried. Then stepping back a little bit, you think about the OSHA law that was passed in 1970, when most workers were employed by the firms whose names were on the factory gates or on the door. Now those workplaces are filled with temp workers, contractors, subcontractors, independent contractors, so called independent contractors, which Europe they're called bogus self employment. And so OSHA requiring those employers to actually protect their workers is far more difficult. And then you've got the gig economy, which is essentially an OSHA free zone. And finally, stepping back even further worker injuries, even worker deaths are just not important issues to the public. During my 20 years running OSHA, I often ended my talks talking about the large and growing consumer demand for free range chickens and cage free eggs. That described how a teenager worker in an Ohio chicken plant has leg amputated at the plant which amputations were occurring on a regular basis. In fact, OSHA was in there with these amputations were occurring. And so I plead with the audience to change public opinion. So we care as much about workers as we do about those chickens. You know, we have a long way to go. And as a follow up to that, what do you think about the Biden administration's approach to protecting workers thus far? That's an interesting question. I mean, President Biden has appointed some very good people to run OSHA and they've ramped up enforcement compared to the Trump administration that often didn't do that much enforcement. But the structural problems I just laid out there, they're still there. I've also been disappointed in the failure to use OSHA to better protect workers exposed to COVID on the job. And this is true both of the Trump administration and the Biden administration. And to me, this, this is symptomatic of the failure of the nation's elite, our national leadership to protect those previously invisible low wage workers in essential industries. We've called them heroes. We know that there's focus of a lot of media, but they're still not taken care of. So let me propose a thought experiment. Imagine there were no zoom. All of us who have worked at home either completely or partially for these more than two years, we've been forced to go into our workplaces daily. All the attorneys, all the professors like me, all the bankers, all the CEOs, you know, they all have to go in and risk exposure. I mean, I'm talking to the audience here, what do you think? What would the demand be for safe workplaces? I think it would have been far greater. And the response of the federal government would have been far stronger because these powerful white color, color white workers, you know, would demand better protection. Instead, we had workers in essential industries, especially workers of color. They suffered a workplace environmental justice catastrophe. Too many of them gave their lives, taking care of our sick or long term care patients, making sure food was harvested, processed, delivered so we had food on our table. This didn't have to happen. And it's it's still going on today. Thank you, David. Appreciate that insight. And now turning to Kathy. So Kathy, NELP does a lot of work fighting for labor laws that can protect workers. What does AOL's book bring up to you? And how do the themes of the issues raised in this book relate to your work at NELP? Yeah, thank you, Chris. And thanks for the invitation and for the prompt to read AOL's book. I agree with David. It's very compelling. And the stories that AOL describes are really retain the dignity of the workers and bring their facts to the public, which is what's needed. They are hidden. And what we have seen at NELP, the jobs and the workers profiled in this book touch on most of the issues that NELP works on than that I have as a lawyer for the past 30 years. The book describes jobs that are subcontracted. David Weil also called them fissured, where the workers are often working at the bottom of a multi tiered and complex outsourced labor supply chain. And the companies and individuals that are calling the shots and setting up these arrangements have removed themselves from responsibility. It also profiles and shows that workers who are recruited by these temp and staffing outfits that the companies engage to bring in a steady stream of new recruits because the jobs are so challenging. Sometimes these companies use immigration visa programs and sometimes not. But again, the companies are setting up these recruiting systems that distance themselves from the workers and their responsibility. It's the book describes Jane dangerous and mostly low paying jobs that are invisible to many unless you look for them. The workers profiled in this book joined the ranks of home care workers, janitors, agricultural workers, delivery, including many of the so called gig workers that we that we all rely many of us rely on today and rideshare. And they're working in the labor intensive pieces of businesses and part in part our government, if you count the drone workers that I L has profiled, that again, the businesses have set this up, the government set this up and they describe it to the public. But oftentimes courts and adjudicators and agencies just listen to the business and don't end up applying the accountability and the responsibility to the companies that are setting up and perpetuating the problems. And I just wanted to mention to that adjacent to and sometimes in these jobs that are profiled, there are a host of unpaid workers, mostly workers of color like the ones profiled here that represent a legacy of slavery in our modern economy. And I'm including incarcerated workers who were sent out to do work for private for for profit companies, including some of the poultry and meat packing companies, some prison workers are sent out to fight fires. Immigrant detainees who work in for profit government contractors who work for a dollar a day and who are basically running the federal contracted immigrant detention centers. Some workers in rehab facilities are sent out to clean stadiums for for profit contractors. And then this is not to mention the whole host of so called volunteers and trainees who are disproportionately impacting lower income workers and boxing out and displacing those who can't work for free. So there's a whole other piece of the economy that is worrisome to us and that we're paying attention to. And as I all mentioned, the workers in these jobs are mostly black and brown workers with little bargaining power. They fear retaliation. They too often don't have unions or other worker centers to protect and to problem solve the problems and there's a high turnover. So just a word about NELP. We are working on structural solutions that take on this legacy of slavery, occupational segregation. But we also want to raise standards and help workers retain their dignity and quality of life for everybody. And Kathy, as you think back over the past two years, I'm wondering has the conversation on worker protection shifted? And are you seeing anything or something different, either on the Hill or in the current administration on the need to protect workers? Yeah, several things have happened in the last few years to bring workers jobs and what we want our society to be in the forefront. First, as David and I all have mentioned, covid has elevated the workers that may have been invisible to many of us. That we call them essential, but they've been right in front of us all along service workers, janitors, delivery, ride share, grocery store and retail and poultry and meat packing. These are covid has elevated the importance of the jobs and the workers and that can help us when we're trying to bring light to the problems of the jobs. The other thing that's happened in the last couple years is the Black Lives Matter movement, which has generated more energy and illuminated the legacy of slavery in our country, including the carceral system and criminal acts of that disproportionately impact black and brown communities and its intended unpaid work and society's violence against black and brown people. The experiences of blacks in our country and the structural racism that enables power and capital to be concentrated and has carved out too many of these jobs as not covered by our laws. The other thing that we're seeing and this is a this is a bright spot is that unions and independent worker organizing groups, including worker centers that are led by black and brown organizers have led strikes and walkouts and are taking their organizing campaigns to the streets. During the pandemic, the so called essential workers walked out of hospitals, hotels and retail stores, creating striketober last fall as one example, where John Deere, Nabisco Hospital, home care, McDonald's workers stepped out and demanded better conditions. Biden is the first president in generation to uplift the importance of unions and collective bargaining, and that is really important. Unions created the middle class and they solve problems on the floor or in the workplace, making them, you know, nipping them in the bud before they become a serious problem. And then unionizing at Amazon, despite the vote that we just heard about at the second plant, Amazon's first warehouse was unionized Starbucks, lots of media companies. And this is despite aggressive corporate pushback. So this is important. Workers are stepping up. There's dignity at work and agency and power for workers when they come together. And then I just want to say two more things. First is that the agencies like the Department of Labor where David worked and their state and local counterparts know exactly what's going on. They've been hamstrung by insufficient enforcement resources that David mentions. Sometimes weak laws. OSHA is a good example of that. And now forced arbitration that companies impose on workers that prohibit them from coming forward and being able to air their grievances in public and this lack of transparency keeps the bad conditions under wraps. But I do think we don't want to give up on the agencies. I see incredibly devoted and expert people in the Department of Labor and the state and local counterparts. And if they were able to do they want to do their job. And when they're able to do it, it can have a sea change effect on how we see these jobs and what's occurring in the jobs. And then finally, I won't dwell on this too much, but the Supreme Court and other circuits have been lobbied hard. They either corporate America has either put their people in these courts or the courts have been lobbied and legislators. So they're increasingly permitting companies to carve themselves out and exempt and contract away with private contracts, the long standing protections that we take for granted. So I just think for for policy reasons, we need to lift things up that are happening like Al has done in this book. And then we need to support the states and and the localities that are taking aim at some of these practices and then support the ability of agencies like the Department of Labor to enforce because some of the laws are just fine. We just need to get beyond these phishing contracted structures that companies are erecting to distance themselves from responsibility and and take the agencies and let them do their jobs. Thanks. Thanks, Kathy and Kathy, just one final follow up there. Looking forward, what else do we need to see to make make sure we protect all workers and make all jobs high quality? Yeah, I mean, how much time do I have? I think I think one thing is is we need to see that the economic recovery and economic as we're emerging out of the COVID pandemic, it's a once in a generation opening to reset the promise of work as a force for economic stability and equity for all of us. What we are fighting for and what we need to see is that what a workers race, gender, immigration or justice involves status doesn't determine the fate of the workers. We want all jobs to pay a living wage, have robust benefits. Anyone out of work can sustain themselves while they're finding a job. And that means social safety and that's unemployment insurance and that workers aren't commodities to be traded by employers, but are actually calling the shots and have a voice at work. We now has a long list of policy proposals and prescriptions, but but I think we can leave that for the questions to get into more of the nitty gritty of some of those technical fixes that we want to see. Great, thanks, Kathy. And also circling back and we said at the beginning, we'd get into this question, but your work also raises a lot of moral questions and you refer to this concept of moral injury to workers. And I'll be honest, there are times when reading this book and even thinking about the terms dirty work and moral injury, where it's uncomfortable and upsetting and also eye opening. And for one, it made me think about how workers in higher paid jobs that we don't view as dangerous like jobs in the tech sector can also bring about some form of moral injury. Can you can you speak to why you use these terms? Sure. So moral injury is a concept that is pretty central to my book. And it's one of those hidden injuries of class that I kind of thread throughout the different stories. And it has two meanings, both of which come from conversations and work around military veterans. The first meaning is moral injury as a feeling that a feeling of betrayal that soldiers coming back from Vietnam felt that their leaders had their commanders had betrayed them and that this betrayal violated as Jonathan Shea put it in his book about Vietnam veterans violated their sense of what's right kind of created this moral disorientation, this moral wound that he contends is every bit as central to veterans you know, injuries as PTSD even though we're much more familiar with the latter term. In more recent years, the term moral injury has been refined and a number of military psychologists and VA psychologists have described it as what happens to a person when they witness or participate in acts that violate their own core values in the course of fulfilling their duties. So it's not hard to imagine why someone in what served in Iraq or Afghanistan might have been in a situation where such an injury might have been incurred. But in my book, I try to take this concept and apply it to other things. For example, in America's prisons, there's the book opens with the story of a mental health aide at a prison in Florida who witnesses the mistreatment of the patients in her care in the mental health ward of this prison. I won't go into all the details. Folks can read about it in the book. But but essentially this woman Harriet, who works as this mental health aide, she's horrified by what she's learning and seeing abuses that cross from just degradation into actual torture. And and one of the prisoners at this facility dies as a consequence of this. But she doesn't say anything because she feels she can't say anything. She's a low ranking worker at this facility. She needs the job to support her family. Again, this notion of kind of being trapped in this situation, which is common to the workers I write about. And furthermore, she's beholden to the security guards at this prison for her own protection, to do her own work. And she's a woman working at an all male prison. So how much does she really want to press this? And she said to me, you know, I felt like someone had to report what was happening. But it couldn't be me. And as a consequence of this, her hair fell out. She fell into a depression. She lost her appetite. These are really extreme symptoms that most people don't get to. But but I think it's an example of of how moral injury can manifest. And it can also manifest and I think does manifest in the lives of the security officers, the guards who work in in the same Florida prison system, one of whom told me, you know, when a good man or a good woman works in a prison, some of that goodness wears off. They become jaded. They become callous. I'm sort of paraphrasing what this very powerful statement was. But that more subtle kind of transformation is another form of moral injury. And I think that, you know, the fact that there's this sort of growing interest in this concept and in this term is a really good thing. I think it's I hope my book is part of that conversation and contributes to it because I think it enables us to ask questions about the moral dimensions of work and the moral dimensions of experiences of workers on the margins. But I think that we also have to be careful in the conversation around moral injury that it doesn't become much the way that the conversation around PTSD has become a conversation about individuals who suffer these injuries and therefore they need therapy or they need some form of individual treatment. My book tries to show that moral injury is related to class. It's related to race. It's related to immigration. It's related to power. Who has power? Who doesn't? Who gets blamed and held responsible when abuses inside prisons are revealed and who doesn't? Who walks away and is able to sleep very well at night because they have more power. They're distant from it and so forth. And I think that so my hope is that this conversation around moral injury continues but is also broadened and deepened and that, you know, policymakers, social scientists, you know, advocates who take an interest in this concept think about it in relationship to the disparities and the inequities in our society because it like dirty work, it is not randomly distributed. It is, I think, concentrated. The people most exposed, most susceptible to moral injury are the same people most susceptible to, you know, having their wages stolen and being yelled at by their supervisor because they want to go to the bathroom, being humiliated, being exposed and to sexual harassment or to, you know, racist comments. So if we can have this conversation in relationship to power and class and race and all these other things, I think, you know, a lot can be learned. Thank you for expanding on that. And now I'm going to turn to our first question from the audience and this is for anyone and everyone on the panel who'd like to respond. So the question is, how do you see climate change exacerbating these already precarious working conditions and subsequent moral injury? So if I can take a stab at it, one chapter of my book is called Dirty Energy and actually when David was speaking, I was reminded of it because he mentioned this Dupont accident that killed four workers and the penalties that the EPA needed out were more severe than the penalties for the deaths of these workers. Well, in the chapter that I look at roused abouts on oil rigs and the particular worker I write about was on the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded and of course caused numerous deaths to the workers there. And this worker who survived went to the hearing in Washington after the explosion. And at that hearing, many of the widows and the family members of the workers who had died were present. And they were there as members of Congress held up pictures of birds to kind of dramatize the awfulness of what had happened. And that was perfectly appropriate because there was enormous ecological damage done by this explosion, but no one held up pictures of the workers. And so it sort of dramatized, I think, the disparity that David talked about. But getting to the question that the audience member asked, I think that climate change in order to be addressed, we need to think about the drilling and fracking that is done in this country. Who does it? Who is able to just ignore the lives and the communities and states that depend on those industries economically and yet pump oil into their SUVs rely on these fossil fuels without at all thinking about the relationship to this kind of industry that is imperiling the planet. And so I think that climate change is hopefully something that will heighten awareness that we are in fact connected to those rigors and to those frackers. And the people who are distant cannot separate themselves from the moral questions that are involved. That it's very easy to look down on and blame people who work in the fossil fuel industry. It's much harder, I think, to take the next step and ask how do our own lives benefit from and sort of depend on the work these folks do and how do we change that? And if I can pile on here and talk about a different aspect of climate change, which is heat and every year dozens of workers are killed by heat and many, many more are made sick. OSHA does not have a heat standard. The Biden administration has actually announced a new initiative to try to move that more quickly that will take years to issue a heat standard with a real requirement that workers are protected. In these initial activities, the Chamber of Commerce and some of the crowd that always says, these are job killing regulations have already said these are job killing regulations and you can't really tell employers to protect workers from heat. Of course, we know from all the studies that OSHA regulations don't kill jobs. They actually stop jobs from killing workers. And we know how to protect workers from heat and actually the deep water horizon is a great example of that. After the explosion, which occurred 40 miles offshore and the oil started coming toward the shores of the five Gulf States, Gulf of Mexico States, we saw what the problem was gonna be. The oil was gonna arrive in May and June. This was 2010. And workers would have to be hired to clean those beaches. And those workers would have to wear tieback suits and card hats and impermeable gloves and boots. And the Labor Department actually told BP that they needed to hire local people because their jobs were being displaced, the Fisher people, the people in the hospitality industry were losing their jobs. And I was down there even before the oil hit the shore explaining this to BP. And actually BP was not cooperative. They understood that they had to do what the Labor Department said because they already were sort of in the public crosshairs. And we saw from the ocean point of view that there would be a huge hazard from heat. If you had thousands of workers and there literally were thousands of workers on the beach wearing these tieback suits and card hats in June and July in Louisiana cleaning up, the heat would be a tremendous risk. And so we said, the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan to protect young physically fit soldiers have worked rest matrices where it says if a certain relative temperature and humidity, you can work 50 minutes, take a 10 minute break, you can work 40 minutes, take a 20 minute break. And during that break, you're in shade and are rehydrating. And we said to BP, you should just follow this US military matrix. And they said, yes, we will. And they built big tents and they provide water and Gatorade, et cetera. And workers would work half an hour on, half an hour off. I took phone calls from congressman, from a governor of one of those states who said to me, I was down at the cleanup site, why aren't you making those workers work hard? What the leadership of those southern states, they were appalled, the workers were getting to rest. And I said, governor, we're trying to make sure none of them are killed by the heat. And no one was killed by the heat among those workers. So we know how to do it, but it's expensive. You have to give workers rest and you have to make sure they have enough liquids and they have to have shade. And that's going to be very tough in the agriculture industry, the construction industry. But if we don't do that, we're going to see workers getting sick and getting killed by heat. Yeah, and I'll just add briefly, NELC has been having sort of many internal town halls about climate justice and how NELC can get involved. And in addition to the heat standard, which is really important for setting a minimal set of requirements, we know just from interviewing and polling that we've done and surveys of workers that it is agricultural workers. And the agricultural unions have problem solved. A lot of the issues that ag workers face in the fields because they got water, they got toilets, they have problem solved as much as they can. Some of the exacerbations that are going to start happening with climate change, like the tornado that blew off the roof of the warehouse, Amazon wasn't charged with that, even though it told the workers they had to show up for work. Amazon workers have been fighting and complaining about excessive heat in the warehouses for a decade or so. So I think we know what to do. It's whether or not there's a political wills. Some states are starting to pass standards where they can. Flooding is going to be a big problem in a lot of sectors. And David mentioned the so-called gig economy, which is, those workers are called independent contractors. So they're technically not covered by workers' compensation. What if you're a rideshare driver who works for Uber and your car gets flooded, or you drive into a flooded area in San Francisco, you're going to be out of luck. You could be at serious risk, but you're not covered by workers' comp unless you happen to carry your own insurance. So there's going to be a lot of work in addition to what we know of, like David mentioned, construction on roofs, agriculture, warehouse, where excessive heat has been a problem. It's going to get worse. And this flooding and the firefighting that I mentioned earlier, there's going to be more forest fires. There already are. When you send incarcerated workers into fight fires without training, without personal protective equipment, we can't talk about a moral hazard. That's a moral question that we're all going to need to address. So I think it's a great question. And again, it's elevating up these jobs that traditionally may have been invisible to too many of us and showing us where we need to pay attention. Thank you for that. And hearing those responses, another question kind of entered my mind here. So coming back to the broader labor movement and relating this to the meatpacking workers that we talked about at the beginning of this event. So meatpacking used to be a heavily unionized industry in the 80s and 90s until those unions got busted, the quality of those jobs declined. And so I'm curious as what you all see as the relationship between being able to secure the health and safety of workers and the labor movement. I mean, I'll just say both David and Kathy can offer far more expertise on this, but in the poultry industry, it was striking to me that there was actually a union at the plant that I described where I heard workers, shedding tears over just how powerless and humiliated they felt and yet there was a union there. But none of the workers I interviewed had joined it or belonged to it or saw it for that matter as a vehicle of empowerment. And why is that? I think it's because there was a decades long transformation within meatpacking that weakened the once very powerful unions that had made that job, I believe, a better paying job than the average factory job for several decades in the 20th century. And the industry adopted a new strategy, a low wage strategy where they relied on often on immigrants, on refugees to take jobs in more remote areas. And where there were unions, they weren't as powerful as they had been in the past. And so, I think that it's a great example of how we can't really understand or talk about dirty work without talking about power and without talking about whose voices matter and whose voices end up being silenced and marginalized. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with everything that Al just said and I'll just note that, again, this outsourcing that the companies have done to temp and staffing agencies, partly it's through immigrant visa programs. Sometimes it's just recruiting undocumented workers in the so-called red states that are right to work states and I'll mention this in his book that the unionization numbers have plummeted in those states and so the poultry industry has fissured and outsourced itself almost to where there aren't any admitted employees on a floor and then they use, they recruit and hire undocumented or immigrant workers who are afraid to come forward, who fear retaliation, not just about losing their job but from immigration because the employers use the threat of calling in ICE to keep the workers from complaining. And then I think even though there are worker centers and unions who are continuing and they're the ones who are bringing these lawsuits to protect the meatpacking workers in the Midwest and in North Carolina, they have established some really important health and safety protections and they fought against the increased line speeds that again, I mentioned in his book, during the Trump administration, the line speed requests from poultry and meatpacking went up and they were almost all granted. And again, that just wreaks havoc on workers' bodies, on amputations and other injuries. So I think the structural issues that companies and some state governments have permitted to happen have made this a very difficult place for unions and worker centers to come back in, but it is happening. And again, COVID is a moment that has elevated these industries because people want their chicken breasts and during the Trump administration, he invoked the Defense Appropriations Act to permit more of the poultry plants to stay open so that people could have their chicken during COVID. And again, these plants were riddled with COVID infections, workers were dying, they were taking in some cases, taking COVID infections home with them into the communities and Trump invoked the Defense Act to require Tyson and Purdue and other companies to keep their slaughterhouses open so that Americans could eat their chicken. Great, well, thank you for sharing that. And we just have a few minutes left before I wanna close this out, but there was just one final thing if anyone has a quick answer to this, a few people from the audience asked about further reading and in particular, if there are academics of color who are also researching these topics. So if anyone has any great ideas, I'd love for that to be shared. And then after that, we'll just close out. You know, it's striking that nothing comes to mind and there have been a number of good books that focused on individual workers and telling their stories, but this general question of what's going on work today, I mean, I think it's not a book particularly about worker safety, but Kathy mentioned David Wilde's book, The Fisher Workplace. I think it's really fundamental to understand what's going on in workplaces today and why workers have so little power and why work has gotten so much worse. So that's my- And I'll just lift up quickly. Michelle Alexander writes on this incredibly deeply with the historical connection to both her book, The New Jim Crow but also her more recent books on tracing the legacy of slavery and free labor and how our country relies on black and brown workers. And then I'll just mention Heather McGee's book called The Sum of Us, which again is a historical look and she's making more of an economic argument about how our policies and structures keep black and brown workers and communities at the bottom of our economic society. And I would highly recommend both of those authors. I'll just throw one other title out there, our work in the section of my book on prisons. I found this fascinating, I think, wonderful book by a sociologist, John Eason, who looks at where the prison boom happened and it happened in what he calls rural ghettos. These areas of the country that had lost their mills and factories that maybe decades earlier would have been resistant to having a jail or prison built locally. And lo and behold, they welcome the idea once those jobs left. It's this really fascinating and stereotype defying study because you think of those rural ghettos and naturally you're thinking, okay, so white people by and large will actually, the communities he's looking at are more people of color in those communities than in other areas joining them. And so there's this way in which, and I think there's similar work on industrial slaughterhouses and where they're located and where not just the jobs are recruited and who's recruited to do them, but the ecological impact of the production, the runoff and all of the dirtiness associated with these industries that ends up being conveniently concentrated in these geographic areas. Well, thanks all for sharing those recommendations and thank you to our panelists for speaking today and for everyone for joining. Hey, all, thank you for writing this book. I found it just so important for our current policy moment and beyond. So thank you all for joining us and hope everyone has a great day.