At the height of the Covid outbreak in 2020, Donald Trump hosted a group of key workers at the White House, praising the “great, great” folks who had kept America going during the pandemic. But while medics, police officers and postal workers all appeared in this televised roll call of honour, other sorts of essential workers were absent.

Unrepresented, for example, were poultry workers, who, like other slaughterhouse staff, soldiered on during Covid after being deemed part of the nation’s “critical infrastructure”. Their grisly tales of life in “chicken evisceration” were not deemed suitable for presidential prime time. They do, however, have a voice in Dirty Work, a new book by journalist Eyal Press about the jobs that society wants done, but would rather not know too much about.

Others he includes in this category are prison guards, US border patrol officers and “joystick warriors” – the computer operators who launch US military drone strikes from airbases in Nevada. “Unlike doctors… these workers are not lionised by their fellow citizens,” Press writes in his introduction. “To the contrary, they are stigmatised and shamed.”

What follows is a 21st-century version of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, rerouted round America’s rust belts and unemployment black spots, where a job is a job, even if it’s horrible. Press, who covers social justice issues for The New Yorker, doesn’t spare the grim details. Poultry workers such as Flor Martinez, for example, drag 65 live chickens from a crate per minute, shackling them to an assembly line that slits their throats. Staff toilet breaks, Martinez says, are so restricted that employees sometimes wet themselves on the production line. Anyone who complains is reminded that plenty of others would be glad of the work.

Cruel, battery-style conditions also exist in jails such as the Dade Correctional Institution near Miami, where Harriet Krzykowski counselled mentally disturbed inmates. Krzykowski was no idealistic “hug-a-thug”, she says. But she was still shocked by the brutality of the guards, who saw prisoners only in terms of the threats they posed. When one inmate died, allegedly after mistreatment in custody, other staff were scared to complain because they depend on the guards for their own safety.