READING

Speaking Quiché in the Heart of Dixie

GABRIEL THOMPSON

This selection is from a book by Gabriel Thompson, Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do (2010). The book (and this excerpt from it) describes Thompson’s experiences working undercover at jobs staffed mostly by undocumented immigrants. Thompson has also published two other books — There’s No José Here (2006) and Calling All Radicals (2007) — as well as numerous articles in publications including New York magazine, The Nation, and The New York Times. As you read this excerpt, identify the dominant impression Thompson creates and the strategies he uses to reinforce it.

Superhero comics aren’t complete without an evil genius. Often he seeks to construct the ultimate weapon to hold the world hostage; if he’s really deranged he simply wants to use it to end human civilization. Since the construction of the weapon must be clandestine, work goes on belowground or behind hidden doors. Walk through the door and an immense world of nameless and undoubtedly evil scientists are at work, tinkering with mysterious equipment while wearing smocks and continuously checking devices.

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That’s the image that immediately comes to mind when I push through the double doors that separate the break room from the plant floor. This isn’t a workplace: This is an underground lair. In the first room, workers scurry around in plastic blue smocks akin to a surgeon’s, carrying buckets of chicken pieces. Others lean over a long conveyor belt that moves a continuous stream of meat, their feet planted as they arrange the pieces in a line. We weave our way around large metal machinery and step through a frothy puddle of foam that spews from a thick hose on the cement floor. The smell is a mixture of strong industrial cleaner and fresh meat. To my left is a chest-high cylinder filled to the brim with chicken bits; while it captures my attention, I step on what feels like a sponge and lift my foot to find a piece of pink meat, now flattened. Up ahead, I can see from the puffs of condensation coming from his mouth that Lonnie is saying something to our group — the temperature is frigid, probably in the low forties — but I can’t hear anything. I remove my earplugs and am greeted by the roar of machinery. It’s not a piercing noise, more of a loud, all-encompassing rumble: Think of the sound you hear when putting your ear to a seashell and multiply by a hundred. I put my earplugs back in.

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We walk beneath a doorway and the full scale of the processing floor is revealed. I see no walls in front of me, just open space filled with workers standing in various areas without moving their feet. Hundreds of dead and featherless chickens are hanging upside down from stainless steel hooks, moving rapidly across my field of vision. I hear a beeping sound and step aside from a man driving a scooter-like contraption, which is carrying a container of steaming chicken meat (the contraption turns out to be a pallet truck, and the steam is actually from dry ice). As we cross the plant floor we pass beneath a line of chickens, whirling along more steel hooks; liquid falls from their carcasses and lands with chilly plops on my scalp. Hopefully water. In front of us dozens of workers are slicing up chickens — the debone department — but we proceed further, until we’re standing aside a blond-haired woman in her forties who, like Lonnie, is wearing a hard hat.

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“This is your supervisor, Barbara,” Lonnie tells us, “but she won’t be needing you tonight.” He tells Ben and Diane to follow him and motions me to stay put. When he returns he leads me through another doorway. “You’re going to work in a different department today, but check in with DSI tomorrow,” he says. Lonnie deposits me at the end of a line where boxes are being stacked.

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The nearest person is a skinny white man with the hood of his Alabama football sweatshirt pulled tight over his head. I stay quiet, feeling slightly intimidated by my new coworker, who has deep lines cutting across his gaunt face and is missing a few front teeth. But when he turns to me he flashes a friendly smile. “How long you been here?” he asks.

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“About five minutes.”

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He lets loose a squeaking chuckle, his shoulders bouncing up and down. “I’ve only been here two weeks.” Kyle, it turns out, is my neighbor. He lives in a trailer with his wife and two kids about half a mile from where I’m staying. “Been right at that trailer for eighteen years, on land that was my granddaddy’s. I worked in the plant four years, then quit. Now I’m back … don’t know exactly why.”*

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Kyle normally works in DSI, but he says that today they’re short people in the IQF department, another mysterious trio of initials. In IQF, bags of chicken wings are stuffed into boxes, taped, and shoved down on rollers to us. Our task is to stack the forty-pound boxes onto pallets. Once a pallet is stacked with forty-nine boxes — seven boxes to a row, seven rows high — a pallet driver whisks it away and we start loading up another. This is almost identical to the stacking of lettuce boxes completed by loaders on the machine, except that the pace here is much slower. I help Kyle do this for twenty minutes, until the machine at the front of the line breaks. A black woman with short blond hair, who has been taping the boxes shut, lets out a good-natured curse. It takes several minutes for a group of men to fix the machine; several minutes later it breaks down again. Over the coming month, I’ll occasionally be asked to help out in IQF, and during almost every shift the machine breaks down — hourly. For this reason alone, it’s considered a good place to work (as one of the “good” jobs, it also doesn’t have a single immigrant working in the department).

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With nothing to do, Kyle and I take a seat on the rollers. “You ever work in debone?” I ask him.

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“Way back when I started, they tried to get me on there. Stayed a month. They told me I couldn’t work fast enough so they shifted me out. I made sure I wasn’t working fast enough too. Run you like slaves over there. I already knew how they did, though, ‘cause my old lady was on the debone line for years.” Now, he tells me, she’s working at Wal-Mart. …

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The machine is finally fixed and we return to stacking boxes. After thirty minutes the black woman who was cursing the contraption asks me to come up and tape boxes. I’m happy for the change in scenery, but this task soon becomes tedious. My job is to shake the box so that the bags lie flat, then pull the two top flaps together and shove it through a machine that tapes it shut. Cutting lettuce confirmed in my mind that much of what we call “low-skilled labor” is in fact quite difficult. But at the chicken plant, I’m already learning, many of the jobs are designed so that a person off the street, with minimal instruction, can do them correctly the very first time. I’m sure this is considered a “breakthrough” by the managerial class, but all it does is leave me bored within fifteen minutes.

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Sometime after 2:00 a.m., I’m told to take a break. I hang up my gloves and white smock on a hook and walk away from IQF. A minute later I’ve pushed through one swinging door and walked beneath two other doorways, and I’m watching an endless line of carved-up carcasses fall into a large container. I have no idea where I am. To my left, dozens of immigrant men and women are cutting up chickens with knives and scissors. I approach one woman who can’t be much taller than four feet, and ask her in Spanish if she can tell me how to get to the break room. She looks at me and shakes her head.

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“She doesn’t speak Spanish,” another woman says, in Spanish. “You go straight down that row and make a left.” I hear the two speak in what sounds like an Indian dialect, thank them both, and follow her directions.

13

The break room is mostly empty, but I notice Ben sitting alone in a corner booth. We’re both struck by how disorganized everything seems to be. Like me, Ben has been hired for one department (debone), transferred to another (DSI), and then relocated once more, with unclear instructions along they way. He doesn’t even know the name of the department that he’s in. “Whatever it is, they have me standing and watching chickens go by.”

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“That’s it?” I ask. “Are you supposed to do anything?”

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“Uh, I think like maybe they said to look for mold.”

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“Mold? The chickens have mold?”

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“Not yet anyway. I haven’t seen any. I’m looking for green stuff.”

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“And if they have mold, what do you do?”

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“I dunno.” Ben pushes his sliding glasses up, beginning to look concerned. “I hope that’s what I heard. I’m pretty sure somebody said something about mold.” He looks at his watch and stands up. “I gotto go.”

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By now there are perhaps fifty people sitting in nearby booths, with about an equal number of whites, blacks, and Latinos, who are mostly gathered in self-segregated groups. One wall is plastered with what are meant to be inspiring corporate messages in Spanish and English, illustrated with geometric shapes and arrows. The “Cornerstones of Continuous Improvement” are written at each point of a large triangle: “Quality, Process Improvement, Teamwork.” Next to this diagram is a more detailed “14 Points of Continuous Improvement,” which include quizzical tips like “Drive Out Fear.” Workers pass these grand pronouncements without pause, but they take note of a yellow flyer taped to the wall that reads “Taco Soup Wednesday Night.”

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I’m joined a few minutes later by a white man in a flannel coat who tells me that he’s been on the debone line for five months. He snorts when I tell him that I’m impressed he’s lasting so long.

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“It’s work release,” he says. “The only reason I’m here is ‘cause they locked my ass up.” I don’t ask what landed him in prison, but he does reveal that after the death of his father, he went on a number of epic alcohol binges. “Can’t do that anymore ‘cause I’m locked up and got myself a bleeding ulcer. But I’ll tell you one thing,” he says before I depart, “once I’m free you ain’t never gonna see me step foot inside a chicken plant again.”

23

I use the bathroom and manage to find my way back to Kyle and the boxes. He is seated on the rollers, hood pulled even lower on his head to ward off the cold, while a mechanic tries to get the machine back up and working.

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For reasons that aren’t explained, IQF is released earlier than other departments. As I walk toward the break room at 7:40 a.m., I meet a stream of men and women heading in the other direction, getting ready to begin the day shift. I swipe my ID card to sign out, am hit by the bright sunshine of another scorching day, hop on my bike, and pedal home. Kyle has agreed to pick me up tonight, so I don’t have to worry about getting run over by a chicken truck. Back in my trailer I eat a quick breakfast of cereal and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, type up my notes, and lay down. The sun is streaming through the window, my trailer shakes each time a truck loaded with live chickens passes, and my neighbor’s roosters are engaged with a dog in some sort of noise competition. I can’t be bothered; I fall asleep instantly.

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