"9 to Nowhere" - Tony Horwitz - Wall Street Journal

Tony Horwitz posing as a worker in a poultry processing plant for his article,"9 to Nowhere -- These Six Growth Jobs Are Dull, Dead-End, Sometimes Dangerous."

Description

As part of an extensive Wall Street Journal report on dead-end jobs, Tony Horwitz posed as a worker in two poultry processing plants, in many ways the epitome of the "often-unseen harshness of low-wage work." The other two pieces in the Journal series, both available on the Pulitzer Prize site, do not involve undercover poses. Horwitz, however, has used the technique in previous efforts, both to investigate what was happening in the massage parlors of Fort Wayne, as a cub reporter in Indiana, here included, and to get around military restrictions during the Gulf War. He also has dressed to fit in while cultivating sources as he reported on Confederate re-enactment for his later books).

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Horwitz won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for this work and also was a finalist for that year's Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism.

Media History

The reporting was intended for these media types: Newspaper

"9 to Nowhere -- These Six Growth Jobs Are Dull, Dead-End, Sometimes Dangerous" - Tony Horwitz - Wall Street Journal

"They Show How '90s Trends Can Make Work Grimmer for Unskilled Workers"

1994-12-01

Morton, MIss. -- They call it "the chain," a swift steel shackle that shuttles dead chickens down a disassembly line of hangers, skinners, gut-pullers and gizzard cutters. The chain has been rattling at 90 birds a minute for nine hours when the woman working feverishly beside me crumples onto a pile of drumsticks. "No more," she whimpers. A foreman with a stopwatch around his neck rushes up. "Come on now," he bellows. "Pump it up.!" Down the chain, a worker named Jose yells and waves wildly, like a drowning man. Bathroom trips are discouraged and require approval. But the foreman can't hear because of the din, and Jose is left grimacing and crossing his legs. Finally, half an hour later, a weary cheer ripples along the line. "The last bird's coming!" someone shouts. Jose sprints toward the bathroom -- and right into the path of a cleanup crew hosing offal into floor drains. Jose slips and then flops onto a sodden bank of fat and skin. "Gotta go," he says, struggling up from the mire. "Gotta go."

"The Jungle Revisited" - Tony Horwitz - Wall Street Journal

1994-12-01

". . .But not all of the changes in the industry have bettered workers' lives. With increased automation - including, in some plants, the use of robotics and lasers - many jobs have become 'deskilled,' according to Donald Stull, a meatpacking expert at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Workers who once followed individual cattles through the plant, performing many of the skills of a butcher, 'now stand in the same spot, making the same cut thousands of times a day,' he says. This also heightened the risk of cumulative trauma, which contributes to meatpackin'g ranking as the most dangerous industry in America. . ."