Beautifying Struggle: Food Workers, Dehumanization, and Hope.

This paper considers the dehumanization of workers in the industrial food system and how their struggles could, from an ethical and aesthetic perspective, be made more beautiful. It begins with an overview of the literature on the nature of dehumanization, the nature of struggle in organizations, and aesthetic knowledge as ethics. It then considers the plight of one category of dehumanized food workers, meatpacking workers, and how they have suffered, particularly during the COVIC-19 pandemic of 2020. It presents a farmworker organization, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, that has succeeded in re-humanizing their struggle with growers and food retailers, improving pay and working conditions, and establishing a Fair Food certification process in the Southeastern U.S. The implications for how struggles in other dehumanizing contexts such as meatpacking might be beautified are explored as are the implications for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]