“Life and Death of the American Worker” by Alice Driver

Author Alice Driver (Photo/Luis Garvan) c.2024, One Signal Publishers $28.99 272 pages Whatever pays the bills. That’s what you do, day in and day out, looking ahead for the weekend or even just your 15-minute break. Most days, you like your job. Most days, you don’t mind getting out of bed and going to work for that paycheck, the benefits and yes, the time off at days’ end. Though, as in the new book “Life and Death of the American Worker” by Alice Driver, you do expect to get it all safely. For many years, Angelina Pacheco cut chicken in her sleep. She and her husband, Plácido, worked at Tyson Foods, the country’s largest meatpacking company at Tyson’s facility in Springdale, Arkansas, where Angelina was assigned to remove wings from chicken carcasses. Because of the violence of her work and the repetitiveness of it, her hands “moved against her will, gnarled as they were.” Still, she was lucky. Angelina was working somewhere else when there was a chemical leak at the Tyson plant in 2011. Her husband, however, was a victim. Alice Driver knew of the accident, and it lingered in her mind. Over some years, Driver met many Tyson...