Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

  The issue of child labor is graphic enough to generate headlines on occasion. A less graphic issue is corruption, which is more difficult to track but arguably even more pernicious, helping to ensure that little of the Congo’s mineral wealth trickles down to its own citizens. Instead, the money ends up in the pockets of shady officials and businessmen like Dan Gertler, an Israeli billionaire whose role in the Congo was highlighted in another report I came across, by a Brussels-based NGO called Resource Matters. As the report noted, the United States sanctioned Gertler in 2017 for arranging a series of “opaque and corrupt mining and oil deals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo” (Gertler denied any involvement in corruption). These deals cost the Congo $1.3 billion, one study estimated, money that could have been used to invest in education or alternative sources of employment. Yet few technology companies had taken steps to ensure that their suppliers did not have links to Gertler. The focus of the Resource Matters report was Glencore, a Swiss company that was the world’s largest producer of cobalt. According to the report, Glencore had continued paying royalties to a Gertler-affiliated entity even after he was sanctioned. The report identified fourteen companies that were “probable Glencore customers,” including Apple, Samsung, BMW, and Renault. “Virtually all the companies studied in this report prohibit and condemn corruption,” Resource Matters noted. But “of the 14 companies contacted, fewer than a third are prepared to recognize the corruption risk arising from the links between Gertler and Glencore,” stated the report, which was titled “See No Evil, Speak No Evil: Poorly Managed Corruption Risks in the Cobalt Supply Chain.” Only one company, Samsung, said it would conduct an audit to address the issue.

  Since the report appeared, some initiatives have been launched to promote responsible mining practices and improve living conditions in the Congo, including one financed by BMW, Samsung, and several other companies. But holding the tech industry accountable for troubling practices remains difficult. One reason for this is the diffusion of responsibility, this time at a corporate level, which enables so-called upstream companies selling brand-name products to distance themselves from the exploitation and corruption that takes place further downstream. The cobalt that ends up in laptops and electric cars passes through multiple hands—smelters, refiners, battery component manufacturers, battery producers—all spread across an array of countries and continents. According to one analyst I interviewed, Apple is at least four steps removed from Glencore, the company featured in the Resource Matters report. Renault is at least six steps removed, the analyst said. The jumble of intermediaries makes it easy for companies at one end of the chain to disavow responsibility for what happens at the other end.

  Do the people further downstream—mid-level managerial workers whose jobs involve procuring the raw materials and components that go into laptops and smartphones, for example—think about issues such as child labor and corruption? Do they ever feel dirtied? A researcher at Global Witness, an NGO that researches the links between natural resource extraction and corruption, told me she knew of someone who worked for a mineral company based in Europe that was involved in the cobalt trade and might be willing to speak frankly about the ethical dilemmas involved. The employee was thoughtful and well-meaning, I was informed. A week or so later, I received word that the employee would indeed welcome hearing from me. The following day, I wrote an email to set up an interview.

  A few days later, the employee wrote back to call the interview off, explaining that we could discuss only the business environment in the Congo, not the ethical questions that interested me. “As you are probably looking for personal stories and impressions, I fear that my contribution will be limited,” the email stated. “I will therefore have to decline your invitation.”

  This was disappointing but not surprising. About a year earlier, I’d been put in touch with someone else who worked in the global tech supply chain and who, I was told, had wrestled thoughtfully with the ethical tensions involved. This employee worked in China, where laptops and smartphones were churned out at a high volume in factories rife with labor abuses. The further down the supply chain one went, the worse the conditions got, as manufacturers under intense pressure to supply brand-name companies with products pushed seasonal workers to the breaking point, violating overtime and child labor standards in the process. After obtaining the employee’s email, I wrote to request an interview. I received no reply. When I reached out to the person who’d connected us—a professor who had studied the tech supply chain closely and knew the source personally—he attributed the silence to confidentiality agreements that the source’s employer had likely pressed him to sign. “He may be (rightly) concerned about NDAs,” he informed me.

  NDAs—nondisclosure agreements—were ubiquitous in the high-tech world, obligating employees not to share “sensitive information” about their jobs with anyone. The agreements protected companies from the risk of having competitors steal their trade secrets. They also protected companies from embarrassment—both the companies and the other key link in the global supply chain, their customers, who might have preferred not to know about the unsavory practices that went into the wondrous gadgets they purchased. A few weeks after we met, Catherine Mutindi sent me a short video that captured these practices in real time. In the video, a Congolese soldier was standing on a muddy, rain-sodden field. Behind him were some mining trucks. At his feet was a creuseur—his chest bare, his hands tied behind his back, his work pants drenched from the mud and rainwater on the ground. The soldier standing over him was wearing rubber boots and had a gun strapped over his shoulder. In his right hand, he held another weapon, a coiled rope that he periodically lifted to flog the creuseur. As the blows fell, the creuseur rolled around on his stomach, trying to avoid the lash while sopping himself in mud. A blow grazed his head; then another landed more squarely on the back of his thigh. In the background, the voice of another man could be heard, ordering the soldier to continue whipping the creuseur in a mixture of Swahili and Chinese. Near the end of the video, a bespectacled man in khakis appeared. He was carrying a notebook and seemed to be a low-level mining official of some sort. He also seemed strikingly unperturbed, strolling by in a slow, even gait without making any effort to stop the soldier or help the creuseur.

  “Difficult to believe that is in this century!” Mutindi wrote of the video. The scene indeed called to mind something out of the colonial era, when the Congo was a “Free State” run with savage cruelty by King Leopold II, who subjected African workers to extreme brutality and violence in order to extract its rubber and ivory. Yet the video was also very much of a piece with our times, capturing a “disturbing event” that remained hidden “behind the scenes of social life,” invisible to the vast majority of people who filled their homes and offices with devices powered by rechargeable ion batteries. The soldier brandishing the whip and the mining official nonchalantly watching him go about his business were not the emissaries of a colonial regime. They were agents of global capitalism, doing some dirty work for the rest of us.

  Epilogue

  Not long after COVID-19 started spreading in the United States, stories began to appear about the anguish unfolding in the nation’s hospitals, not only among the tens of thousands of patients arriving in emergency rooms short of breath, but also among beleaguered caregivers. Some of these accounts focused on problems that have long plagued the medical profession: burnout, stress, anxiety. But others examined more novel challenges, such as the ethical dilemmas facing nurses and physicians forced to decide how to apportion scarce medical resources to critically ill patients. Should the last ventilator in the ICU go to an elderly person at greater risk of dying or to a mother with two young children? Which patients should be admitted to a hospital that was already overwhelmed? Making these freighted decisions in harried, compromising circumstances could cause lasting psychological trauma, warned a June 2020 article in Scientific American. It could also result in moral injury. Doctors were trained “in treating one
patient at a time,” not in doing triage, a bioethicist quoted in the article observed. “I think the real reckoning is going to come when this is over,” said a psychiatrist named Wendy Dean, who had cofounded a nonprofit to study the effects of moral injury in the health-care profession.

  The moral and emotional wounds that dirty workers sustain are, like the workers themselves, unseen—“hidden injuries” that go unnoticed. Not so with medical professionals on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, whose travails made national news. Prominent publications not only reported on the ethical predicaments these caregivers were forced to navigate. They also invited them to tell their stories in their own words. “The collective soul of front-line health care workers is slowly and silently decaying with no rescue in sight,” a physician of internal medicine wrote in USA Today. “We need help carrying this massive weight because we are weary.”

  The fact that medical professionals were given such platforms was surely not unrelated to their social prominence. It was also a product of the fact that what they did was seen as indispensable to society, even heroic. This was never more the case than during the pandemic, when physicians and first responders were hailed for putting their own health at risk to provide urgent care for others. Like home health aides and other so-called essential workers, they were performing a function that other people depended on and that was necessary to keep society running.

  The idea that dirty work might also be necessary to society is more unsettling. A defining feature of such work is, after all, that it causes substantial harm, either to other people or to nonhuman animals and the environment. To a person like Toby Blomé, the Code Pink activist I visited in El Cerrito, it seems obvious enough that inflicting such harm is profoundly unnecessary. The high-tech killing conducted by drone operators happened not because targeted assassinations were essential to national security, Blomé told me, but because of the outsize influence of the military-industrial complex, a cabal of for-profit contractors and special interests that distorted America’s priorities and profited from its endless wars.

  But the truth is that the drone program doesn’t just serve the interests of military contractors. It also serves the interests of a disengaged public that doesn’t want to think too much about the endless wars being fought in its name and, thanks to the drone campaign, doesn’t have to. The dirty work of conducting targeted assassinations can be left to people like Christopher Aaron and Heather Linebaugh, with few questions asked. Likewise with the dirty work of warehousing the mentally ill in jails and prisons in a society that has failed to fund mental health services. This arrangement benefits not only for-profit companies like Wexford and Corizon but also many citizens who are content to have the mentally ill disappear behind bars without dwelling on the consequences. This, too, is work essential to society, solving various “problems” that many of us would like to have taken care of, provided someone else can handle them.

  Most of us don’t want to hear too much about such work. We also don’t want to hear too much from the people who do it on our behalf, not least because what they tell us might stir discomfort, maybe even a trace of culpability. I felt this discomfort frequently in the course of interviewing the subjects of this book. When Stephen Stone talked about people who cast judgment on the “country bumpkins” from backwoods towns who got jobs on oil rigs while giving little thought to how dependent their own lifestyles were on burning fossil fuels, I nodded in agreement. Then I drove my rental car back to the Airbnb where I was staying and felt implicated. When Harriet Krzykowski lamented the fact that many Americans saw individuals with severe mental illnesses as “throwaway people,” particularly if they were poor and lacked access to treatment, I shook my head disapprovingly, but later wondered if this was, subconsciously, how I viewed them. I passed such people on the streets of New York City fairly frequently. More often than not, I felt for them, but not so deeply as to keep them in my thoughts for very long.

  One reason that even people who are momentarily bothered by such thoughts avoid dwelling on them is that they feel powerless to change them. And, individually, we are powerless to change them. The decision of one person to buy a more fuel-efficient car (or, for that matter, an electric vehicle) will not end America’s dependence on fossil fuels. Handing a couple of dollars to a mentally ill homeless person talking to himself on a street corner will not alter the fact that jails and prisons have become de facto mental health asylums. But collectively, we are not powerless to alter these things. As I noted at the outset, a core feature of dirty work is that it has a tacit mandate from “good people” who refrain from asking too many questions about it because its results do not ultimately displease them. This mandate is important. But it is not set in stone. The attitudes and assumptions that it rests upon can change, and indeed have changed. In the past decade, the punitive sentencing laws that fueled America’s prison boom have fallen out of favor. Although warehousing mentally ill people in jails and prisons is still tolerated, this, too, may change as the backlash against mass incarceration leads us to ask questions about the social and moral costs of the status quo. Attitudes toward industrial animal agriculture have also shifted, even if, for now, this has led more often to a fixation on buying meat that is “organic” than to addressing the deplorable conditions to which workers in slaughterhouses are subjected. So, too, with our reliance on the fossil fuel industry, which more and more people are coming to realize must be phased out quickly for the planet to survive.

  The belief that the troubling circumstances we have come to tolerate are impervious to change can itself become an excuse for resignation. It can fuel the kind of apathy that prevailed among the “passive democrats” that Everett Hughes described in his Frankfurt diary. The resignation is unwarranted, because, like most aspects of the social order, dirty work is not immutable. It is a function of laws and policies, of funding decisions, and of other collective choices we have made that reflect our values and priorities. Among these choices is whether to recognize the immense harm it causes, not only to innocent people and the environment but also to the people who carry it out.

  The anguish such workers experience may elicit little sympathy from those who feel that anyone who participates in a cruel or violent system must be held accountable for the suffering they cause, even if, afterward, they harbor shame or regret about what they have done. As Primo Levi affirmed in “The Gray Zone,” doubts and discomfort expressed after the fact by oppressors are “not enough to enroll them among the victims.” But Levi also called for judgment of the low-ranking functionaries in oppressive systems to be tempered by awareness of how susceptible we all are to collaborating with power, and by an appreciation of the circumstances that lead relatively powerless people to be pushed into such roles. In contemporary America, the chief circumstance to consider, I have suggested, is inequality, which has shaped the delegation of dirty work no less than the distribution of wealth and income. More privileged Americans are spared from any involvement in such work, knowing it can be outsourced and allotted to people with fewer choices and opportunities. The result of this moral inequality is to ensure that an array of hidden injuries—stigma, shame, trauma, moral injury—are concentrated among those who are comparatively disadvantaged. These moral and emotional burdens have barely factored into the debate about inequality, perhaps because economists cannot measure and quantify them. But their effects can be equally pernicious and debilitating, shaping people’s sense of self-worth, their place in the social order, and their capacity to hold on to their dignity and pride.

  Inequality also shapes the geography of dirty work and who is held responsible for it. As we’ve seen, the blame is rarely directed at the companies that profit from it or the public officials who have passed laws and policies that perpetuate it. More typically, it falls on the least powerful people in the system, “bad apples” who are singled out after the periodic “scandals” that shock the public—the same public that spent the preceding months or years ignorin
g what was being done.

  In fairness, one can hardly expect the public to register concern about conditions it rarely sees. Dirty work is obscured by structural invisibility: the walls and barriers that keep what happens inside prisons and industrial slaughterhouses hidden; the secrecy that envelops the drone program; the nondisclosure agreements that the middlemen overseeing the cobalt supply chain are required to sign. These arrangements have had a “civilizing” effect, pushing disturbing events “behind the scenes of social life.” Yet there are limits to what even the most elaborate mechanisms of concealment can hide. In spite of the isolation and impenetrability of institutions like prisons and industrial slaughterhouses, plenty of information about what transpires within them leaks out. The secrecy cloaking the drone campaign has not stopped writers and documentary filmmakers from producing illuminating work about it, nor have nondisclosure agreements prevented NGOs from issuing detailed reports about the cobalt supply chain. The problem is not a dearth of information but the fact that many choose to avert their eyes, not only from dirty work but also from those who get stuck doing it, people with whom they almost never interact and find easy to judge.

  What do we owe these workers? At minimum, it seems to me, we owe them the willingness to see them as our agents, doing work that is not disconnected from our own daily lives, and to listen to their stories, however unsettling what they tell us may be. The discomfort may run both ways, of course. The first time I met Harriet Krzykowski, she read me some excerpts from the narrative she’d written about her experience at Dade. The material was wrenching, so much so that her voice trailed off several times. Afterward, I wondered if it might turn out to be the last time we’d speak. Over the next few days, Harriet cried repeatedly during our conversations. But she also thanked me for taking the time to listen. It was intense, she said, but also “healing.” The comment stayed with me, not because I felt I deserved any gratitude, but because it suggested how isolated she felt and how therapeutic the simple act of telling one’s story can be.