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LIVES ON THE LINE: AN INTERVIEW WITH ALICE DRIVER  
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Alice Driver, Olivia Paschal
September 2, 2024
Facing South
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_ Reporter Alice Driver’s new book “The Life and Death of the
American Worker” is an accounting of the lives and working
conditions faced by poultry and meatpacking workers in Arkansas, where
Tyson Foods is headquartered. _

, Photo by Luis Garvan; cover courtesy of Simon & Schuster

 

Alice Driver’s book _Life and Death of the American Worker _comes
out on September 3. Click here to purchase it on Bookshop.org.
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_Reporter Alice Driver’s new book “The Life and Death of the
American Worker” is an accounting of the lives and working
conditions faced by poultry and meatpacking workers in Arkansas, where
Tyson Foods is headquartered. Facing South editor and former
investigative reporter Olivia Paschal, who also reported on working
conditions for processing workers in Arkansas and around the South
during the pandemic, spoke with Driver about the process of reporting
the book, conditions for poultry workers, and what’s next for the
poultry workers organizing for better working conditions in Arkansas._

YOU AND I WERE BOTH IN ARKANSAS, REPORTING ON POULTRY PROCESSING
WORKERS AND THE ACTIONS OF POULTRY PROCESSING COMPANIES DURING THE
PANDEMIC. BUT YOUR BOOK, _LIFE AND DEATH OF THE AMERICAN WORKER_, HAS
A MUCH MORE EXPANSIVE TIMELINE. WHAT'S THE BACKSTORY OF THE BOOK AND
HOW DID YOU COME TO THE FINAL STRUCTURE?

I was living in Mexico City when the pandemic hit. I was working as a
freelance journalist there for years, and I would come back and forth
depending on what stories I was working on. But I had been thinking
about doing a meatpacking story for a long time. In my book, I talk
about my mom. My mom was volunteering with the Karen from Myanmar in
Clarksville, Arkansas where there's a Tyson plant. Most of them work
at Tyson. I thought, wow, this is very interesting. What is it like to
be from Myanmar, to not speak any English, and to suddenly be dropped
into rural Arkansas? We know how meatpacking plants run on the line.
You have to be close together to maintain production. So how is there
going to be social distancing?

The first article I worked on in Arkansas was published
[[link removed]] by
the _Arkansas Times_. In Arkansas, Tyson is a very powerful force,
and I got a lot of pushback from everybody, including editors, saying
why are you doing this? No one cares. This is not a story. Anyone
could do this. Okay, it's true. Anyone could do this. And why aren't
they doing it? The _Arkansas Times_ or the _Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette_ here in the state, neither of them were
investigating Tyson, in my opinion. After that article came out, I
started working on a second article, and that's when workers started
dying of COVID. I ended up placing that article
[[link removed]] with
the _New York Review of Books_. It took about a year to publish it.
It came out in April 2021, and within a week, I had book editors
writing me and saying, this should be a book.

THE BOOK OPENS WITH A COUPLE, ANGELINA AND PLACIDO, WHO WORKED FOR
TYSON FOR ABOUT TWO DECADES. PLACIDO DIED OF COVID. YOU FOLLOW THEIR
STORY AND MANY OTHERS OVER THE COURSE OF THE BOOK. COULD YOU TALK A
LITTLE BIT ABOUT THEM?

They’re from El Salvador, and their story is really central.
Angelina was one of the few, because she no longer works at Tyson, who
said, “You can use my name, because the thing that I care most about
is getting justice for my dead husband.” And her husband had a
story. When I went into this, it was the pandemic, and I was asking,
what are work conditions like? What are you doing every day at work?
And when workers started dying, the interesting thing for me was that
several of the workers who died had also been in a 2011 chemical
accident which destroyed part of their lungs. Placido predicted his
own death. He said, “If I get COVID, I will die.”

And so I wanted to look at not only conditions during COVID, but labor
conditions at Tyson, which is the largest meatpacking company in the
US. What has created this environment in which there's really very
little oversight of safety? Of health?

YOU TALK IN THE BOOK ABOUT “TYSON DOCTORS” AND THE COMPANY'S
HEALTHCARE APPARATUS, WHICH THE WORKERS YOU TALK TO SEE AS ESSENTIALLY
RUNNING COVER FOR THE COMPANY. WHY IS THAT SUCH AN IMPORTANT PIECE OF
THE WORKING ENVIRONMENT AT TYSON?

Coming into this, I did not know that Tyson has these on-site clinics.
A lot of the [workplace-related] things that are complicated, the
company distances themselves from because they're third-party hires.
For child labor, it's usually a third-party hire through a sanitation
company. With the medical on-site, it's nurses that are on-site, and
if workers want to go to a different nurse or doctor, they have to pay
for it themselves. Many of them can't, so they're going to the on-site
nurses.

I did interview one nurse. That was probably the hardest interview to
get for me. I didn't think anyone was going to speak to me who said,
“Yeah, there's a lot of pressure.” The pressure is to say, we have
no injuries on a daily basis — so how can we achieve that? And we
have supervisors and managers who are coming to the clinic and in the
room, they're not medical personnel, they have no training, and
they're giving their opinion of what should be done to help injured
workers.

It was interesting to me, too, that the workers themselves say
“Tyson nurses” and “Tyson doctors.” I communicate regularly
with the PR directors at Tyson — there have been three during the
years that I've done this — and they say, oh, we don't have doctors,
which is true. Tyson does not hire doctors. But from the workers’
perspective, which is what I'm interested in, they're saying, “These
are the Tyson doctors, and we don't trust them, because they're
telling us consistently that we're not ill, that we're not injured,”
when, in fact, often they are.

I WAS THINKING ABOUT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REPORTING PIECES LIKE THE
NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS FEATURE, AND REPORTING A BOOK. OBVIOUSLY THE
AMOUNT OF WORK IS VERY DIFFERENT, BUT I'M CURIOUS TOO ABOUT WHAT
CHANGED IN YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE SITUATION FOR POULTRY WORKERS.

When I started working on this, I was following a lot of workers who
were part of the organization Venceremos
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which was founded primarily by meatpacking workers, all women. So what
was beautiful for me about this — because obviously this was a hard
book to write, and it was hard to witness a lot of what went on —
was the workers organizing. That's something that I would not have
seen if I hadn't followed this over four years. The difficulty of
organizing, but also the really moving parts of it. For example, when
all of the Venceremos workers went to Florida to meet with the
Coalition of Immokalee Workers and to see another organization that's
worker-led agricultural workers that has been extremely successful
[[link removed]].
Of course, they have 20 years of organizing behind them, whereas
Venceremos has only a few years. So that was one of the really
important things to me. I know this is a hard book, but I also wanted
to highlight what workers are doing to organize themselves and to
speak about labor conditions.

YOU WENT ON THIS TRIP WITH VENCEREMOS TO FLORIDA. WHAT DO VENCEREMOS
ORGANIZERS SEE IN THE COALITION OF IMMOKALEE WORKERS MODEL, WHICH IS
DIFFERENT FROM A TRADITIONAL LABOR UNION? WHAT ARE THEY EXCITED ABOUT
IN THAT MODEL  FOR ORGANIZING A PLACE LIKE ARKANSAS, WHERE IT'S HARD
TO ORGANIZE, AND WHERE TYSON HAS A VERY ACTIVE PRESENCE?

I think Florida and Arkansas have a lot in common. They were the
first two states
[[link removed]] to
ever pass right-to-work legislation in 1944. They’re both states
that are traditionally conservative, anti-union, anti-labor, and so
organizing is a feat. Workers in agriculture and in meatpacking are
often workers who are illiterate. Angelina, the former Tyson worker
from El Salvador, has never been to school. So when you're teaching
people their rights, CIW has this whole model of going to where the
workers are — go to the fields, or wherever. And they teach about
labor rights with photos and pictures and plays — which is something
that the director of Venceremos, Magaly Licolli
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who has a background in theater, is really interested in.

When we were in Florida, the Immokalee Workers put on a play that they
had created. At that time, they were organizing around an issue where
Wendy's was buying tomatoes from farms that are known for employing
modern slavery, and they wanted to force Wendy and the head of Wendy's
— who also lives in Palm Beach and is around a lot of conservative
figures — to recognize what he was doing, and change the sourcing of
tomatoes to farms that had labor conditions in place to keep workers
safe.

THE CHALLENGES OF REPORTING ON AND ORGANIZING WORKERS AT TYSON OR ANY
OF THESE POULTRY COMPANIES IN ARKANSAS IS ANOTHER THREAD THROUGHOUT
YOUR BOOK. WHAT KIND OF RESPONSE DID YOU GET FROM THE COMPANY?

The process for investigative journalism is that you communicate with
the public relations director, you summarize the main points of the
article, and you give them time to respond. And so I was in regular
communication with Tyson, because I wrote several articles.

They did a couple things that made me feel a little bit nervous and
scared. For example, they would email the editor of the publication.
They emailed the editor of the _New York Review of Books_ and said,
we don't think Alice is telling the truth, and how can you prove that
she is? Then the editor had to explain to them investigative
journalism, independent fact checking, that all my interviews are
recorded and all of that. The second thing they did was that I would
give them the main points of the article, ask them to respond within,
let's say, a week, and they would not respond. But after the article
was published, they would email my editor and say, we weren't allowed
to respond to this. You have to make a correction. So what,
thankfully, my editors did was add a note saying, “Tyson had this
amount of time to respond. They didn't respond until after the article
was published.”

Then, when Tyson didn't like things I posted on Twitter, they would
email me. That was weird. I would share anonymous quotes from workers
— because workers cannot publicly share videos and things like that
— and they would email me things like, “Your tweet is a lie.”
Then one public relations director called me, and I thought he was
going to respond to some of my questions, but he said, “Look, we
know you're not telling the truth.”

WHAT ABOUT WORKERS?

The hardest thing with workers was that they know that if they speak
to a journalist and it is found out that there will be retaliation.
Whether they'll be fired or there's a ripple of implications — some
of them are undocumented, some of them are supporting extended family,
and many of them, their entire family works at Tyson. They’re not
only worried about themselves, they're worried about their family
members. And people did wonder, were they being followed? Was I being
followed? And the director of Venceremos told me she put a camera on
the back of her car because she worried that she was being followed. I
went through a lot of insomnia over that, because it's just something
you don't know.

WHERE DOES THE CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT
[[link removed]] WORKERS
FILED AGAINST TYSON STAND?

The lawsuit was closed. Venceremos and the workers that organized to
be a part of the lawsuit lost the lawsuit. I wanted to be hopeful, but
knowing Arkansas, I had my doubts about what would happen. My book was
already turned in, but the end of the book was the lawsuit, which
hadn't concluded. And so then when the lawsuit ended not in favor of
the workers, I had to add that into the ending of the book.

WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE IN THE STATE, THE SOUTH, THE NATION, THE WORLD,
TO ADDRESS SOME OF THE PROBLEMS, NOT ONLY THAT WORKERS ARE FACING IN
THESE JOBS BUT THESE SYSTEMIC FORCES THAT ARE PUSHING THEM INTO JOBS
LIKE THIS?

 There’s two things that I would hope readers would get from my
book. One is that labor organizing and unions and worker-led
organizations are so important to keep people safe, which I would
think everybody would be in agreement with. Unfortunately, the South
has always been a testing ground for anti-labor legislation, and right
now, Arkansas is basically at the forefront
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you know, the pro-child labor movement. Fourteen-year-olds can work,
and you don't need parental permission. So I'm thinking, who is the
target child here? The target child is an unaccompanied immigrant, a
minor who doesn't have parents here. That’s the target worker, and
that's who you will find if we could get into the chicken houses and
Tyson plants at night working sanitation. The South has really become
a testing ground for all kinds of anti-labor legislation, which leads
to injury, disability and death for workers.

And I hope readers take away from this book the power of worker-led
organizations like Venceremos [[link removed]] in
Arkansas and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers
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Florida. We should listen to the immigrant and refugee workers,
including undocumented people and children, who form the backbone of
our food system in the U.S.

Read more in Facing South's investigative series Poultry & Pandemic:
Meat Industry Workers & Covid-19 
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_OLIVIA PASCHAL is the archives editor with Facing South and a
doctoral student in history at the University of Virginia. She was a
staff reporter with Facing South for two years and
spearheaded Poultry and Pandemic
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Facing South's year-long investigation into conditions for Southern
poultry workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her reporting has
appeared in The Atlantic, the Huffington Post, Southerly, Scalawag,
the Arkansas Times, and Civil Eats, among other publications._

_FACING SOUTH is the online magazine and every-other-weekly email
newsletter
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Institute for Southern Studies, featuring investigative reporting and
in-depth analysis of trends across the South. Facing South has earned
a national reputation for exposing abuses of power, holding powerful
interests accountable, and elevating the voices of everyday people
working for change in the South._

_Facing South was launched as an email newsletter in 2000 by
the Institute for Southern Studies
[[link removed]], a research, media, and education
center based in Durham, North Carolina. From 1973 to 2010, the
Institute published the award-winning print journal Southern
Exposure._

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* poultry workers
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* coronavirus pandemic
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* Tyson Foods
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* Arkansas
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