In May of 2016, Oxfam released a bombshell of a report that garnered headlines nation-wide: “I had to wear Pampers,” “Poultry Workers forced to wear diapers,” “Adults wearing diapers may be processing your chicken.” The report revealed the dangerous, degrading, and dehumanizing conditions under which workers “on the line”—in this case, in poultry processing plants—are routinely forced to work. Vanesa Ribas’ On the Line: Slaughterhouse Lives and the Making of the New South further enriches our understanding of the working conditions—and, more specifically, the social organization of labor—within the food processing industries of the contemporary American South.

Ribas’ focus is a meatpacking plant in North Carolina pseudonymously referred to as “Swine’s,” where over a thousand pigs a day are disassembled and then reassembled into meat products for domestic and global consumption. In the longstanding tradition of workplace ethnography and as an exemplar of what Wacquant [2015] ^{Footnote 1} calls “enactive ethnography,” Ribas spent sixteen months working “on the line,” first in the plant’s Marination Department and later—although warned by her coworkers that the transfer would make her “regret life” [47]—in the Loin Boning and Packing Department. “Nothing prepared me,” she writes, “for the intense, oppressive exploitation I endured” [50]. As in the poultry plants featured in the Oxfam report, workers at Swine’s are forced to work upwards of 14 hour shifts with negligible breaks, “even to the point of wetting, shitting, or bleeding on themselves on the line” [49]. Ribas does an admirable job of trying to convey what it’s like to “wear away with work the very fibers of one’s being” [p. xviii]: she describes the difficulty of turning a doorknob, given the intense pain and tenderness in her hand muscles; she describes her fingers going numb for months at a time; she describes the searing back pain from standing for hours at end, executing the same repetitive movements. But so, too, does Ribas, in a particularly eloquent passage, acknowledge the limitation of words for adequately conveying this embodied and emotional experience:

Similar to McDermott [2006], ^{Footnote 2} who engaged in workplace ethnography in order to better understand race relations in Northern US cities, Ribas ventured into the literal and figurative “belly of the beast” in order to better understand changing ethnoracial relations in the South, a region of the United States that, as site to both new and maturing destinations for immigrants, has seen dramatic demographic changes over the last quarter of a century and ethnic succession in its low-wage, labor-intensive industries. This book, then, is framed as a contribution to the study of immigrant incorporation, the “ongoing and active social process of mutual adjustment by which groups both achieve and are assigned particular social locations in a stratified system of belonging” [9]. Ribas’ starting point is that the workplace is a crucially important—though far too often ignored—setting and structure for understanding the incorporation experience of working-class Latino/a migrants. Work, she argues, is the “key interactional arena for the mutual construction of group identities through boundary processes and the primary setting that molds immigrants emergent sense of group position within the American stratified system of belonging” [9]. Using Swine’s as her case study, Ribas thus explores how the “social organization of labor”—specifically the composition of the workforce and authority structure in the workplace, social perceptions about work, and labor discipline regimes—“shapes the social and economic incorporation experiences of Latinos/migrants in the contemporary American South” [8]. Though not its explicit intention, the book heeds the call for greater consideration of what Everett C. Hughes called the “knitting of racial groups” in industry [Vallas 2003]. ^{Footnote 3}

Of course, there is now a voluminous body of work that examines intergroup relations in “new destinations.” But, as Ribas points out, this work is limited for several reasons that go beyond its tendency to ignore the workplace. It is overwhelmingly based on interviews, as opposed to observational data capable of capturing actual relations and encounters between Blacks and Latino/a migrants. It also overwhelmingly focuses on Blacks’ supposed perspectives on Latino/a migrants, overlooking how “how Latino/a migrants themselves articulate boundaries vis-a-vis native-born groups” [13]. And finally, it tends to entirely ignore the overdetermining, if opaque, role of whiteness in the system of racialized stratification. For this reason, Ribas frames intergroup relations among subordinated groups as what she calls “prismatic engagement,” wherein emergent senses of group position are shaped through the “distorting optic of the prism” of white dominance [199].

Ribas finds very little evidence that Black workers at Swine’s feel competition with, or hostility towards, Latino/a migrant coworkers. She characterizes their views towards Latino/a migrants as varying from ambivalent to sympathetic (p.180), perhaps due to their heightened sense of “linked fate” with other subordinated groups. By contrast, she finds that the Latino/a migrant workers draw very sharp symbolic boundaries against, and express considerable negativity towards, their putatively “lazy” and “domineering” Black coworkers. One striking example of this was her coworker Christina’s declaration that, “tomorrow, I’m going to come in painted black, so I don’t have to work!” [93]. Ribas convincingly argues that this racialized resentment is not simply a reflection of the universal devaluation of blackness learned in their countries of origin, but is shaped and fueled by feelings of relative deprivation rooted in the social organization of labor in the workplace. The Latino/a workers at Swine’s are what Ribas calls “embittered subordinates” and perceive their Black coworkers as occupying a relatively advantaged position in the workplace in so far as they tend to occupy less grueling jobs, have more representation in the authority structure, and seem less harshly disciplined. “The conditions that inform employer preference for Latino/a migrants relative to native-born workers”—namely, their perceived capacity and suitability for exploitation—“yield an ‘advantage’ for them at the hiring interface that is simultaneously the basis for their ‘disadvantage’ within the social organization of labor” [62]. And thus, because of the scarcity of white faces on the line, the invisibility of the whites who run the plant, and the universal valorization of whiteness, the hispano workers at Swine’s tend to view Blacks as the source of their hardship and oppression.

This leads to what I found to be the most harrowing and deeply concerning finding of the book: that rather than try to address the atrocious conditions under which they are forced to labor, the Latino/a migrant workers mobilized as a group to demand that their Black coworkers be subjected to the same level of oppressive exploitation that they were subjected to. They thus became willing accomplices in Swine’s labor discipline regime, internalizing its logic of super-exploitation and engaging in lateral distancing and denigration, castigating Blacks for being lazy, for having it relatively easy. What they sought was not workplace justice or the improvement or humanization of working conditions. Rather, what they sought was “equality between workers—equality in being treated like animals” [145].

Ribas concludes by calling for improved working conditions and labor protections for all workers, irrespective of authorization status, as the necessary precondition for diminishing the bases for employers’ preferences and disparate treatment and therefore of diminishing racialized conflict between workers [201].

I would have liked to have learned more about the role of Swine’s human resources personnel in cultivating the patterns of ethnic succession highlighted in this book. I would have also liked to have heard more from the Black workers—who are central characters in the book, but whose voices are relatively muted. Though they largely evaded the most grueling positions in the plant, they nevertheless seemed to be concentrated in the most precarious jobs, with unstable and often insufficient hours. How did they view their jobs and their relative position in the plant?

These points notwithstanding, this is a tremendously well-written book and model of rich and rigorous ethnographic scholarship that makes important contributions to the literatures on work and immigrant incorporation in the contemporary US South.