Alice Driver Award Winning Author and Journalist

Not since The Jungle has a book punched me quite literally in the stomach like this one has. Alice Driver’s invitation to sit at the table with the workers who package our dinners, who create the nuggets we hand our children in the backseats of our cars, is an unforgettable experience. Life and Death of the American Worker is a masterpiece that will be referenced for generations.”
—Stephanie Land, bestselling author of Maid and Class

The workers who feed us are some of America’s poorest and most exploited workers.  Alice Driver tells their stories with enormous compassion and grace.  This is a fearless, wonderful book.”
—Eric Schlosser, bestselling author of Fast Food Nation 

Alice Driver is such a vivid and exacting reporter. 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.”
—Sloane Crosley, author of Grief Is for People

With an investigative reporter’s relentless eye, Alice Driver exposes the cruelty of the meatpacking industry, a world in which immigrant workers risk life and limb to process poultry for consumers’ convenience. In heartbreaking detail, Life and Death of the American Worker focuses on the very human consequences of our choices and the appalling ways that people in power dodge our nation’s labor and environmental laws in the pursuit of profit.”
—Rachel Slade, author of Making It in America and Into the Raging Sea

This is an unforgettable piece of literary journalism that illuminates the way our world really works. Alice Driver is big-hearted and tireless as she plunges into the darkest reaches of the modern food system, and the story she reveals is shocking but also deeply humane and surprisingly inspiring. This is a landmark book about power in America today.”
—Christopher Leonard, New York Times bestselling author of The Meat Racket and Kochland

This devastatingly frank, brutally detailed peek into the meatpacking industry brilliantly exposes a damaging system that must be reformed…a vital work of journalism. An astonishing exposé of the American meatpacking industry’s exploitation of its incarcerated and immigrant workforce.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Alice Driver’s deep dive into the lives and losses of the workers who process our food will haunt you. Meatpacking work was brutal before the COVID-19 pandemic; when the virus came, these workers were expected to volunteer to sicken and die so that Americans could keep up our meat consumption. They were called “essential” but treated as expendable, as so much replaceable human machine equipment. In Driver’s pages, their worries and fears, their pain and their care, their love and laughter and their determination to find justice remind us that no matter how much capitalism tries to reduce us to robots, humans will always find a way to resist. An essential read.”
—Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back

As much an act of attention and care as it is a work of rigorous investigation, Alice Driver has given us a radicalizing, clear-eyed portrait of workers and their circumstances.”
—Alejandra Oliva, author of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration

This is one of the most vital books of our time. An antidote to the racist propaganda behind the rise of Trumpism, the Life and Death of the American Worker honors the invisibilized people who sacrifice blood and well-being to feed us, who are too often killed in the shadows by profit-hungry companies that escape accountability with the help of corrupt politicians from both political parties. Alice Driver is a rare type of journalist: one who can journey into the most bloodstained and deplorable corners of this world without getting lost in the dark. She carries the light of the victims. She’ll light a fire under you. May every American read this book.”
—Jean Guerrero, author of Crux and Hatemonger

With an investigative reporter’s relentless eye, Alice Driver exposes the cruelty of the meatpacking industry, a world in which immigrant workers risk life and limb to process poultry for consumers’ convenience. In heartbreaking detail, Life and Death of the American Worker focuses on the very human consequences of our choices and the appalling ways that people in power dodge our nation’s labor and environmental laws in the pursuit of profit.”
—Rachel Slade, author of Making It in America and Into the Raging Sea