Life and Death of the American Worker

Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company is a 2024 book by journalist Alice Driver about a group of Hispanic employees of Tyson Foods in Springdale (Washington and Benton Counties) and the dangerous, sometimes deadly, conditions in which they work. The book includes images by Arkansas photographer Liz Sanders.

Among other incidents, Driver reports on the June 27, 2011, deadly chlorine gas leak at the Springdale processing plant that left 173 workers hospitalized. She also recounts the devastating cumulative physical effects on workers who have spent years deboning thousands of chicken carcasses a day, spotlighting the ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit filed by employees against Tyson. The COVID-19 pandemic struck during Driver’s reporting, and she exposes Tyson’s push to continue production as workers fell sick and many died, including a man named Placido, who Driver had interviewed extensively. A brief review of the book in the September 23, 2024, edition of the New Yorker noted that “Tyson representatives denied many of the claims in the book.”

Driver, who is fluent in Spanish, gained access to workers through Venceremos, a group founded to support poultry workers and improve labor conditions. She interviewed workers in their homes and visited with some of their families in Mexico.

Driver grew up in Oark (Johnson County), the daughter of artists Steven Driver and Louise Halsey. She attended Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, and obtained a master’s degree and a doctorate in Hispanic studies from the University of Kentucky. She moved to Mexico City—where she did her postdoctoral work—in 2012. She worked from there as a freelance journalist for eight years covering migration issues.

Her first book, More or Less Dead: Feminicide, Haunting, and the Ethics of Representation, was published in 2015 by the University of Arizona Press. She won the 2024 J. Anthony Lukas Prize of $25,000, which is given annually to aid in the completion of “significant works of nonfiction on topics of American political or social concern.”

Driver has said that her mother’s experience as a volunteer with the Karen refugee community in Clarksville (Johnson County) inspired her to investigate working conditions for immigrant poultry workers in Arkansas. She published her first article on the subject in May 2020 in the Arkansas Times. A later piece for the New York Review of Books caught the attention of editors at Atria/One Signal Publishers, a division of Simon & Schuster, which published Life and Death of the American Worker on September 3, 2024.

In a review for the Washington Informer, Terri Schlichenmeyer wrote that “it’s hard to ignore what author Alice Driver learned in years spent gaining the trust of immigrants who worked at Tyson while she investigated their working conditions. It’s equally hard to overlook what Driver says about the valid American need for these workers and the jobs they do.”

Speaking with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Driver said: “We need to be listening to these workers who are upholding our food system about what they want and what labor conditions would make them safe. Beyond that, we need to respect the way immigrants have come to the U.S. and done an incredible amount of work—from construction, to the milk industry, to meatpacking—and we are not recognizing that.”

For additional information:
Clancy, Sean. “Book Follows Immigrants in the Meatpacking Industry.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, September 3, 2024, pp. 1D, 6D. Online at https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2024/sep/02/arkansas-authors-book-by-little-rock-journalist/ (accessed January 24, 2025).

Driver, Alice. Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company. New York: Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2024.

Powell, Phillip. “‘A Good Southern Story’: A Q&A with Alice Driver.” Arkansas Times, October 2024, p. 13. Online at https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024/10/04/a-good-southern-story-a-qa-with-alice-driver (accessed January 24, 2025).

Sean Clancy
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

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