Dirty Work
Thinking Allowed
BBC
4.4 • 997 Ratings
🗓️ 11 January 2023
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dirty work - Laurie Taylor explores the invisible labour we choose not to see.
The writer and sociologist, Eyal Press, considers the morally dubious, even dangerous jobs, which sustain modern society but which are concealed from view, from the prison guards who patrol the wards of America's most violent and abusive prisons to the migrants who work in industrial slaughterhouses. What are the ethical, as well as physical costs of doing this kind of labour? Why do those individuals carry the stigma and shame of doing 'dirty work', rather than the society which condones it?
Ellie Johnson, Research Fellow in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol, discusses the treatment of older people in two English residential care homes, sketching out the workers' attitudes and practices concerning hygiene and bodily waste and the ways in which they do, or don't, offer dignity and respect to those receiving care. Is the mistreatment of older people simply an outcome of a deeply inequitable market for care provision or can it also tell us something about the way in which marginalised groups, such as elderly and disabled people, can be dehumanised?
Producer: Jayne Egerton
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of |
| 0:07.0 | Happiness Podcast. |
| 0:08.0 | For the last 20 years I've dedicated my career to exploring the science of living a happier more meaningful life and I want |
| 0:14.4 | to share that science with you. |
| 0:16.1 | And just one thing, deep calm with Michael Mosley. |
| 0:19.4 | I want to help you tap in to your hidden relaxation response system and open the door to that |
| 0:25.4 | calmer place within. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:30.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:36.5 | This is a Thinking Loud Podcasts from the BBC and for more details and much, much more about |
| 0:42.3 | thinking aloud, go to our website at BBC.co. |
| 0:47.0 | UK. Hello, some years ago I had the great good fortune to spend some time with one of my long-standing heroes the American writer, historian |
| 0:55.8 | and broadcaster Studs Turkle. Now although Studs never announced himself as |
| 1:00.2 | a sociologist his capacity for capturing ordinary people's accounts of their lives |
| 1:06.0 | made him one of the most telling commentators on an aspect of America so rarely documented |
| 1:11.8 | in other sociological work. |
| 1:14.0 | His greatest book in my opinion had the simple title, |
| 1:16.7 | Working, and the telling subtitle, |
| 1:19.2 | People talk about what they do all day |
| 1:21.9 | and how they feel about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do. |
| 1:24.7 | Well those words came back to me as I was reading a new publication which in terms of its |
| 1:29.1 | admirable literary style and commitment to capturing the nature of ordinary work deserves a place alongside |
| 1:36.6 | Turkle's social masterpiece. That book is entitled Dirty Work, Essential Jobs, and the hidden toll of inequality in America, and its author is |
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