Interview with Alice Driver

Alice Driver, author of "Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America's Largest Meatpacking Company"

Alice Driver's Website

Alice Driver is a James Beard Award-winning writer from the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. In 2024, she won the Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard for The Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company (One Signal Publishers). Driver is the author of More or Less Dead (University of Arizona, 2015) and the translator of Abecedario de Juárez (University of Texas, 2022).

A New Yorker Best Book of 2024 “A startling glimpse into the meatpacking industry’s abuse of undocumented and incarcerated workers.” —The New York Times Book Review Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, an explosive exposé of the toxic labor practices at the largest meatpacking company in America and the immigrant workers who had the courage to fight back.

“Life and Death of The American Worker is not only a horror story of corporate negligence, but a deeply humane work about what we owe each other. How chilling it is to think that no one else but Driver could have written such a vital book.”

It brings to mind another social advocate for change, Upton Sinclair and his 1904 book, ‘ The Jungle’ It’s a novel by one of America’s most famous muckrakers, known for his efforts to expose corruption in government and business in the early 20th century. In 1904, Sinclair spent seven weeks gathering information while working incognito in the meatpacking plants of the Chicago stockyards for the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, which published the novel in serial form in 1905. The novel was later published in book format by Doubleday in 1906 On June 27, 2011, a deadly chemical accident took place inside the Tyson Foods chicken processing plant in Springdale, Arkansas, where the company is headquartered. The company quickly covered it up although the spill left their employees injured, sick, and terrified. Over the years, Arkansas-based reporter Alice Driver was able to gain the trust of the immigrant workers who survived the accident. They rewarded her persistence by giving her total access to their lives. Having spent hours in their kitchens and accompanying them to doctor’s appointments, Driver has memorialized in these pages the dramatic lives of husband and wife Plácido and Angelina, who liked to spend weekends planting seeds from their native El Salvador in their garden; father and son Martín and Gabriel, who migrated from Mexico at different times and were trying to patch up their relationship; and many other immigrants who survived the chemical accident in Springdale that day. During the course of Alice’s reporting, the COVID-19 pandemic struck the community, and the workers were forced to continue production in unsafe conditions, watching their colleagues get sick and die one by one. These essential workers, many of whom only speak Spanish and some of whom are illiterate—all of whom suffer the health consequences of Tyson’s negligence—somehow found the strength and courage to organize and fight back, culminating in a lawsuit against Tyson Foods, the largest meatpacking company in America. Richly detailed, fiercely honest, and deeply reported, Life and Death of the American Worker will forever change the way we think about the people who prepare our food.

Michael Carter, Co-Host

Michael Carter's Website