Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

by James Bloodworth

Cracking open the gig economy, journalist James Bloodworth spends six months undercover working the most grueling low-wage jobs. He lives on the meager proceeds and discovers the anxieties and hopes of those he encounters, including working-class men and women, young students striving to make ends meet, and Eastern European immigrants. From a harrowing Amazon warehouse to driving for Uber, Bloodworth uncovers horrifying employment practices and shows how traditional working-class communities have been decimated by the move to soulless service jobs with no security, advancement or satisfaction. But this is more than an exposé of unscrupulous employers; this is a gripping examination of a divided society which needs to understand the true reality of how other people live and work, before it can heal.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Economics, Sociology, Society, Journalism, Class

284 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2018

About the author

James Bloodworth is an English writer and the author of two books, The Myth of Meritocracy and Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. His work has appeared in the Guardian, the Times, New York Review of Books, New Statesman and elsewhere. He is on Twitter as @J_Bloodworth.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I pay my cleaner £10 an hour at the same time as I pay my lawyer £570 an hour. Is my lawyer worth 57 times what my cleaner is worth? It must be to me or I would not pay it. That is the free market in action. James Bloodworth is aware of these discrepancies. He does not like them, but he is not proposing a solution. In his well considered book, Bloodworth examines what it is like to be on the bottom rung of the job market by working undercover in such jobs to experience them himself, and also to meet others who carried out those jobs. £10 an hour? They should be so lucky. Many dream of getting a steady £7 an hour in a permanent safe job.

From a "picker" in an Amazon warehouse in Staffordshire, to a carer in Blackpool, a call centre operative in an old Welsh mining town, to an Uber driver in London, Bloodworth provides readers with a pair of binoculars with which to experience the life of increasing numbers of people in the so-called "gig economy." Not only do many workers in such jobs receive the minimum pay, they are lucky if they can work enough hours to pay the bills. A dreaded "zero hours" contract from Bloodworth's employer in Blackpool had the following clause: "There may be times when no work is available for you and [the company] has no duty to provide you with any work at such times or any payment in respect of such times." With no other jobs available, many sign on the dotted line and just hope to be able to pay the rent and bills of one room in a shared house with central heating that does not break down too often.

The pecuniary problems that arise from such work are simply not known to many in comfortable, middle-class jobs. Having to wait a month for a pay check can be terrifying for someone who has to pay their rent weekly. Such workers need to be paid weekly, not because as some would have it, that they cannot be trusted to budget for a month, but because they have to pay for rent, food and travel costs. Surely anyone working can pay £150 for a cheap television? Not necessarily. Hundreds of thousands of people use the rent-to-own sector and end up paying, including all interest and other charges, £400 for such a television by the time they can call it their own. They cannot buy the television with a more reasonable repayment schedule by putting it on a credit card if their credit applications are turned down.

Amazon are spending a massive amount of money on robotics. Their dream, I suspect, is that when Mrs Smyth clicks on her button to buy toothbrushes from Amazon for same day delivery with her Amazon Prime account, that a signal will automatically be sent to a robot in the warehouse which shunters over to the correct location picks up the toothbrushes and drops them with another robot that packages the goods. We have not yet reached such a level of automation, but Amazon have the next best thing: an army of contract workers who are given a hand held device that barks orders to them to walk around the warehouse and pick goods. When the dream level of automation arrives, the pickers will be laid off. At such a time, as they will no longer be using low paid labour for such work, I am not sure if Bloodworth will have a higher or lower opinion of Amazon than he currently has. I am not even sure he will give much thought to it: he will be thinking of the lives of those laid off and how they will be able to pay the rent.

"Hired" is an excellent book. It does not provide a series of answers but the reader is left understanding the problem. If the problem is not understood, a solution cannot be found. Bloodworth has done a great job in explaining the problem. I wholeheartedly recommend the book.

[Maru Kun · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Guardian is publishing a series of anonymous reports from a worker inside an Amazon fulfillment center: Our new column from inside Amazon: 'They treat us as disposable'

A podcast interview with the author about this work can be found here, at Intelligence Squared.

I read this book because I wanted to know what it was like to be an Uber driver and, thanks to this honest and well written account of working in low wage Britain, I got my answer: not great, but not so bad - and certainly far better than working at an Amazon Warehouse. A read of this article on how Amazon treats injured workers will help explain why.

The author worked at four jobs: Amazon warehouse worker, care worker, insurance call-center worker and Uber driver. The Amazon and care worker jobs seemed much worse than either Uber or the call-center. I took three reasons for this from the book.

Firstly, the use of zero hour contracts to coerce and intimidate staff. Amazon and Carewatch UK - the care worker agency - could simply take work away from staff who complained or wanted to join a union, starving them into submission.

Secondly, and more subtle than zero hour contracts, comes the calculated diffusion and avoidance of responsibility by the ultimate employer, Amazon and – appallingly if you think about it – UK Local Authorities who use agencies to find their staff.

These agencies seem truly exploitative. They constantly make mistakes which strangely always work in the agencies’ favor and which I would suspect are really disguised wage theft. The agencies also provide legal and reputational cover for Amazon and the like who can blame the agencies for anything that goes wrong, wash their hands of any accountability towards staff and keep their corporate image that little bit shinier.

Finally and most controversially is the issue of immigrant labor. Many of the locals living near the Amazon warehouse are not prepared to take jobs there, and good for them. The conditions are so bad that most of the jobs are taken by immigrants, which is surely how Amazon likes it – less chance to be taken to a labor tribunal if the injured person’s first home is a few thousand miles away and they don’t speak the language.

The simple but wrong lesson to take away from this situation is that immigrants are holding down wages for local people. It is closer to the truth to say that companies are providing jobs of such low quality and low pay that only people who are extremely poor and easily exploited would ever take them.

The call center job is relatively low paid and extremely boring but, compared with Amazon, the company’s heart at least seems in the right place. Uber driver seems to come out as the best, which is not to say that it is good but at least seems to genuinely allow the individual to retain some dignity and flexibility.

As the book explains, though, the trick with Uber is that the company encourages more and more drivers to enter the market which encourages competition to keep the market price down and also ensures a good service for Uber customers. These actions both go against the interests of the drivers, who as a result are forced to spend more time cruising around empty while at the same time earning less per trip.

A second key Uber trick is the blurring of the distinction between being employed and self-employment – a variation of the “avoidance of responsibility” concept so loved by large corporations these days. Uber gets a pass on employer costs such as paid vacation and it is difficult to hold Uber accountable for the actions of its drivers (“Uber doesn’t employ criminals because we don’t employ anyone, but we can’t guarantee that criminals won’t use our app”).

One weakness of the Uber model is the relative lack of network effect that companies like Facebook enjoy. Uber has to enter each market - each city – one by one; there aren’t many people taking a cab from London to Paris or even from London to Birmingham.

I wonder if this brings an opportunity for an “open source” disruption of Uber’s business model? (How satisfying it would be to disrupt the disrupters).

If some enterprising programmers could develop an open source alternative to the Uber App then perhaps drivers in a town could use it to start a taxi driver’s collective that shared the profits among themselves rather than giving Uber a cut? Although the Uber App is good it isn’t so advanced compared with other open source programs like Stockfish.

Experiments could be run on an Uber replacement open source app (“TOW-U” perhaps? “Taxi-drivers of the World, Unite”) in a localised area to test feasibility and limit the costs of roll-out. Existing taxi licensing authorities could still license drivers using it.

Does anyone else think this is a good idea, or is it only me?

[Alistair North · Rating 5 out of 5]

I work in the Employability Sector, and have done so for 15 years. Several employers ago, my Team had successfully placed ten of our customers as new employees with TK Maxx, a major clothing and housewares retailer in the UK. We were pretty surprised, not to mention confused when they came back to our office with news of their new job offers and that they had been employed under an agreement known as a 'Zero-Hour Contract'. None of us had known what such a thing might be, and were horrified to hear that a Zero hour contract means that our customers were now to be kept waiting on tenterhooks by their new Bosses and unsure of whether they would be working a shift or not, permanently at their beck and call. It's a system that has spread widely since then and which almost all retailers now seem to use to a greater or lesser extent.

James Bloodworth has written an excellent account of 'entry-level'/'gig economy' employment in modern Britain where low-hour contracts are only the beginning of the many slights and abuses inflicted upon workers in a wide selection of industries. And James has not been writing away in some Ivory Tower in Kings Cross while sipping on a Latte, he has certainly put the hours in by actually doing the work himself undercover at a variety of locations including a Cab-Company, an Elderly Care organisation, and perhaps most notoriously, the mighty Amazon.com. He writes fluently and with feeling about his co-workers, about the localities, and about the Management of course. Not all the Managers were bad - those in the Care Industry didn't come off too badly, in particular the Trainer who was highly praised. But there were the others of course...

By 'the others' I suppose I mean Amazon more than anyone else, as that multi-national Behemoth of Fulfilment really should know better, a lot better. Jeff Bezos poses as a 'Liberal' (in the American sense) and owns the Washington Post and yet he and his company treat employees like minimum wage robots imprisoned in a Jeremy Bentham-style Panopticon - where 'someone' (Manager, Team Leader) is always watching you. James's story of his time in the stupendously sized Amazon Warehouse in Rugely, Stafforshire describes perfectly the claustrophic and Kafka-esque organisational style there and which sounds more like a tale from Communist East Germany than modern Britain. I have heard plenty of other reports from former Amazon employees, so it doesn't entirely surprise me...

Some readers may be disappointed when they read to the end and find that there is no Grand Manifesto or Call to Arms at the end I am afraid. I didn't find that a problem, in my opinion James Bloodworth is providing Witness Testimony to what is going on and it works very well as such. A Solution to the 'Low-wage' revolution that has permeated Britain and other countries will probably need another book - perhaps from those Dreaming Spires in London N1

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hired will be praised as an unflinching look at modern Britain. That should give grave offence to modern Britain. Although the book is non-fiction it spreads out like an Hieronymus Bosch. Except Bloodworth’s figures are made of flesh and blood, and Hell is the bottom end of the British workforce. The book is his account of six months’ minimum wage work (often, in reality, lower) and what he did in the towns ‘that rarely interest governments or the media’.

We start in the Amazon warehouse in Rugeley, Staffordshire - also my home town. It stands ‘incongruous in the countryside’ - which seems an odd term for a building dwarfed by three cooling towers, flanked by two industrial estates and a few minutes’ walk from the town dump.

Working as an order picker, he walks the equivalent of ten miles daily inside a building the size of ten football pitches. Three supervisors are on hand to bellow at each worker who returns even thirty seconds late. Each worker carries a handheld device to track their every move, like lags in some high-tech prison. The devices spits out a torrent of instructions sent by a distant line manager. It is easy, he says, to imagine a future where human beings are wired up to similar machines twenty-four hours a day.

Set aside to the inhumanity of the machinery is the inhumanity of the human staff. All the pickers are placed via agencies; many are lured from Eastern Europe with promises of working in John Lewis’s in the city. All contracts are zero hours. Documents are proffered for signature before being whisked away with a swiftness to impress a cheetah. One agency member, thankfully sacked in 2013, repeatedly bragged about the joys of stopping the ‘suckers’ benefits for 13 weeks.

Before long he applies for work as a Carer in Blackpool. ‘Applies’ is the key word, since the job requires a DBS check before he can actually start working. Due to cuts in police staff, the processing speed can last months after an interview - long after the job has been filled by someone else. Care agencies do not recognise unions; staff turnover is high. Each carer is expected to spend a minimum of twenty minutes per person, a target frequently impossible with the infirm and the elderly.

With care farmed out to contractors, the number of clients packed into the working day trumps petty concerns like quality or dignity. Errors or outright omissions in medication records are rife, especially among staff with poor English skills. Accidental overdoses or poisoning is not unheard of. Many of the people needing care have no relatives or friends in driving distance. The warning embedded in these scenes cannot be ignored. Britain’s ageing population co-exists with a younger population that works some of the longest hours in Europe. Britain’s population is living longer than ever before - one person in three born after 2013 will live to be a hundred. Based on our present attitudes to care, it seems likely this will be the fate awaiting most Britons.

Bloodworth shares Orwell’s knack for discerning truth from the way other people lie. He notes how socialist realism has mutated into the fake cheeriness of corporate PR. You may slave for £29 a day, but your CEO with a net value of £60 billion is an ‘associate’. People are ‘released’ rather than sacked; a warehouse is a ‘fulfilment centre.’ Call centres abound with half-witted slogans and company-mandated ‘fun’ group activities (‘the songs had a definite whiff of the ode to the tyrant’). He notes how the contrived wackiness exposes low wages and apathy ruthlessly rather than disguise it.

Perhaps the worst abuser is the taxi firm Uber. On the surface, all seems well. At the tap of a button a driver is summoned, no matter the hour, and often cheaper than a traditional cab. Drivers work flexible hours, paid at a piece rate delivered by apps. The name for this burgeoning sector - the ‘gig’ economy - evokes images of rock stars rolling out of bed late, turning up for work whenever the whim takes you.

It seems effective. The number of self-employed Britons rose to a record high of 4.7 million in 2016, fuelled in no small part by the gig economy. Some cite this as the triumph of the entrepreneur. Bloodworth sees this as a mirage: by legally deeming its drivers, ‘independent contractors’, not employees, the company has no obligation to pay the minimum wage, basic sick pay, or pay any significant taxes on profits. Drivers who refuse even two requests from the Uber app in a row can be barred for life, and failure to maintain high ratings by customers - whether they’re drunk, difficult, psychopathic, or, worse, Londoners - results in less work. Work is allocated by an algorithm, with no warning of the journey’s length in advance.

Bloodworth is not nostalgic and demands that we reject received notions about work. Tedious though a call centre may be, no one perishes in an explosion or a collapse at an office. He finds it odd how, when decrying the trampling of English culture, small-towners target the solitary Polish aisle in the supermarket, not the identikit chain stores and fast food outlets. Ronald McDonald, he says, deserves more blame than foreign fruit pickers. He deplores how progressives romanticise East Europeans but damn the English working class as incorrigibly racist and idle. A sugar tax will not make the nation healthier; it will make the poorly paid poorer still because when your work and income is irregular, so is your diet. Foodies and pontificating celebrities like Jamie Oliver fill him with outrage.

Bloodworth lacks the finesse of a John McPhee and he has the bad habit of quoting people who spell out exactly what he has just been thinking. Sometimes his people are faintly drawn - mere springboards for factoids. Some readers may be frightened off by his truth-telling. But that is the sincerest compliment one pays this born writer and his restless, scorching intelligence.

[Brian Clegg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rather like a modern version of Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier, Bloodworth's book describes six months 'undercover in low-wage Britain.' Bloodworth takes on jobs in an Amazon warehouse in Rugeley, as a care worker (sort of) in Blackpool, in a call centre in the South Wales Valleys and as an Uber driver in London.

His experiences provide valuable insights into the life that goes with these low wage jobs. The workers face two huge problems - not being paid enough to live on and oppressive working conditions, including zero hours contracts. The low pay was potentially the case in all the examples (in principle, the Uber driving could have produced a better return), while the conditions varied from the extremely iffy at Rugeley to pleasant enough at the Admiral call centre, where Bloodworth had to struggle to find anything to complain about other than a boring job and the company culture being a little too jolly.

The tasks at Rugeley and in Blackpool were also like to leave the worker so worn out that they had very little other life. At least, in principle this applied in Blackpool, as Bloodworth was never able to actually do the job because his Disclosure and Barring Service clearance did not come through in time for him to undertake the task, though he was able to shadow another worker for part of his time there.

Bloodworth does a good job in uncovering the reality of these jobs and the lives of those who undertake them. He claims that he is only observing and doesn't offer solutions, but in an epilogue does give a little thought to this. Suggestions (from here and elsewhere) of a realistic living wage, the ability to be unionised and end to zero hours contracts are straightforward and sensible. However, Bloodworth's analysis does skip over one thing that comes across glaringly in his account. This low wage economy is propped up by freedom of movement. Reading the book made me significantly more sympathetic to Jeremy Corbyn's viewpoint that leaving the EU would be beneficial because companies would have to pay more without a ready supply of low paid EU nationals to fill these posts. Of course that means more cost to consumers and taxpayers, but surely that is worthwhile to avoid such poor working conditions?

Will reading this book make me stop using the companies and services Bloodworth mentions? No - that would inconvenience me and wouldn't help the workers. But the picture it gives of these low pay jobs does encourage me to look to future governments for a better living wage and improved worker's rights.

[O* · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was disappointed in this book unfortunately. Maybe I'm unfairly comparing it to Polly Toynbee's excellent book 'Hard Work: Life In Low Pay Britain' - she did the same thing as Bloodworth, just 15 years earlier.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9...

What I missed in Bloodworth's book was the wider political perspective: how did this happen, who made it happen, and what do current parties want to do about it, if anything? I also found some of his comments/analyses slightly too biased and would have liked a more 'objective' perspective at times, and/or some more statistics.

It was also slightly repetitive at times - there were a few times when I thought 'oops, must be on the wrong page now, I've read this before' only to see that no, he just said the same thing one more time.

He is an ok writer (could be more succinct though) so I wish he had spent some more time on research and putting his experience into context. I also did not get exactly how long he stayed in each place (in contrast, Toynbee's book gives full details on this, and also on how much money she spends on what. Toynbee's introduction consists of her detailing a meeting with a social worker who tells her how much money she would get if she were, for example, fleeing from domestic violence, and how she coped with 'setting up a new home').

Ok, I'll stop going on about Toynbee now. Read both - unless you know a lot about the issues in the UK labour market you'll learn some from this one, and loads from Toynbee's!

[Klaudia_p · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pisanie tej książki musiało być dla autora tak samo męczące jak dla mnie jej czytanie. Liczyłam, że skoro James Bloodworth podjął się pracy w Amaoznie, Uberze czy Carewatch to opisze swoje doświadczenia nieco szerzej, a nie sprowadzi je do stwierdzenia, że tam pracuje i jak niewspółmierne w tych firmach są zarobki w stosunku do wydatków... Generalnie, nic nowego. Równie dobrze ten reportaż mógłby się nie ukazać. Różnica byłaby żadna.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Bloodworth, an English sometime Trotskyite, has written a book which combines the television series "Undercover Boss" and George Orwell’s "Down and Out in Paris and London." He took jobs in a variety of low-wage, low-security occupations to get first-hand knowledge about what it is like today to be a member of the largely invisible British working class. Bloodworth’s resulting argument is that a pernicious marriage of portions of the political Left and Right has destroyed the dignity of the British working class, with fatal consequence for that class, and deleterious consequences for all of society. "Hired" is a powerful book that has key implications for possible political realignment.

This is not a typical disposable political book, where the author ends with a list of solutions he knows everyone will ignore. It is more a book of political philosophy, written from a worm’s eye view, because its frame is to ask in what manner, and to what ends, we should be governed. Bloodworth focuses on one overarching goal, which is the key theme of the book—how we can restore the lost dignity of the working man. Not “dignity” in the modern Left sense, meaning forced universal obeisance to whatever perversion is the flavor the day, but actual dignity, the dignity of men and women (but especially men) being able to find, and maintain, meaning in their lives, through their work.

In 2016, Bloodworth started his job-hopping in Rugeley, a small town in the English Midlands (very close to Stafford, where I have a cousin, and have spent some time). From a distance, Rugeley appears fortunate—after years of decline following closure of the local coal mines, exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis, in 2011 Amazon opened a giant “fulfillment center” on the edge of town. These are the backbone of Amazon’s business—huge warehouses where around a thousand people work, picking items from shelves, assembling them in bins, and shipping them to eager consumers. Such centers are embodiments of Taylorism, with every action monitored and measured, to the end of enriching Jeff Bezos and other shareholders of the company.

Amazon was supposed to be Rugeley’s savior, helping the town regain prosperity and, as a result, dignity, but it hasn’t worked out that way. This could have been predicted, given that as always with Amazon, the town had to beg Amazon to locate there, and offer financial incentives that collectively came out of the townspeople’s pockets. That bargain might make theoretical sense, perhaps, if the result was good jobs for townspeople. But again, as always with Amazon, for the most part, townspeople don’t work there, or don’t any longer, after trying it. Most of the Amazon workers are from Rumania and other Eastern European countries, many bussed in by Amazon from cities like Birmingham. The locals, in Bloodworth’s telling, feel that these migrants (mostly temporary residents of Britain) take their jobs, but it seems more that locals aren’t interested, for the most part, in working under the conditions Amazon offers, unless they are desperate. The standard neoliberal, and free market conservative, response is that if the townspeople won’t take the jobs, their poverty and lack of dignity is their fault and their problem. Bloodworth’s evisceration of Amazon (for which the book achieved a measure of fame) is meant to show why this is the wrong response.

This universal groveling by those in authority to obtain Amazon warehouses is a complex phenomenon that deserves further analysis. It has come to public attention recently in the shadow play of humiliation that Amazon enacted around the United States, when it made the leaders of scores of American cities sit, stay, and roll in order to have a chance at getting treats, in the form not of biscuits, but of having Amazon’s new second headquarters placed in their cities. Surprising nobody who is adequately cynical, it was all a lie, and the fifty thousand promised jobs were instead, as the plan probably was all along, split among America’s two major centers of business and political power, New York and Washington. This was ideal for Amazon; it further enmeshed the company with America’s real rulers, the lords of finance and the administrative state. Why would they have made any other choice?

However, that widely followed farce was actually different than, and not as offensive as, the events in Rugeley, which are smaller scale and less public, but have been played out thousands of times around the world. In short, poor localities, generally those with a work force with few options, are made to pay Amazon for the privilege of being offered Amazon jobs at warehouses. They do not realize, or refuse to see in their desperation, that Amazon is like Dame Gothel in the story of Rapunzel, extorting payment from city fathers desperate to help their people, all the while intending to destroy what they love. And what is the not-so-hidden knife? Unlike Amazon’s headquarters jobs, these jobs aren’t good jobs. They’re nothing like the old jobs of the English working class, and they do nothing to restore the social web into which the working class was woven, and on which it relied.

How the new jobs are inferior ranges from the most basic (no training or skills that improve the lot of the worker) to the spiritual (constant petty humiliation) to the complex (total insecurity of the jobs). With a deft writing touch, Bloodworth draws what seems an accurate picture of Amazon, which also has, like most big corporations today, a weird Stepford Wives vibe. “Socialist realism has mutated into rosy corporate uplift. Feel-good slogans were plastered across the interior walls of Amazon’s warehouse next to photographs of beaming workers whose radiant countenances proclaimed that everyone at work was having a wonderful time. We love coming to work and miss it when we’re not here! declared a life-sized cardboard cut-out of a woman named ‘Bez.’ ”

So, then, to what social end do these men and women slave at Amazon? In order that others in society can get cheap consumer goods quickly, served by an invisible army on the fringes. I’m as guilty as anyone, of course. Multiple times each day a van pulls up our long driveway, slowing for the speed bumps I installed to protect the children (and passing the “No Trespassing” sign showing riflescope crosshairs and “You Are Here”). Sometimes it’s a painted Amazon van; other times a U-Haul rented hourly by the driver. He or she, often an immigrant, Hispanic or African, hustles to the door of my large house and drops a cardboard box with a single book (most often) or some other consumer good, and then hustles back. I’m used to it, but, like the internet, we think it’s essential, when the reality is we got along fine without it, and maybe we were all better off.

Bloodworth draws a disheartening, yet sympathetic, picture of Rugeley, focusing on the breakdown in its social fabric, which, to be fair, began long before Amazon. Noting the ubiquity of advertisements for private detectives (probably the British equivalent of the disgusting amount of plaintiff’s lawyers’ billboards we have in America), he draws a line between commercialized suspicion and atomized consumerism. “Fidelity and faithfulness have been slowly chipped away by more ephemeral, market-driven principles promising instant gratification. . . . For working class communities this adds yet another layer of impermanence to an already insecure existence, especially for those men whose sense of masculine inadequacy is reinforced by the lack of any purposeful employment.”

Before we get back to Amazon, let’s unpack this, because it is important to understanding Bloodworth’s book, and where it fits into today’s political landscape. First, the backdrop, the key assumption that drives Bloodworth, is that what the working man needs most of all is real meaning, the creation of dignity through work, dignity both in himself and in his role and position in society, among his family and his peers. Second, Bloodworth believes that the recent past, a few decades ago, was not some hell of intersectionalist oppression, but a time when the English working class had acquired that dignity, now lost. Speaking of a typical worker fifty years ago, Bloodworth says: “[He] may have hated his dull job as a lathe worker in a Nottingham factory, but he could at least take a day off now and then when he was ill. There was a union rep on hand to listen to his grievances if the boss was in his ear. If he did get the sack he could usually walk into another job without too much fuss. There were local pubs and clubs at which to drink and socialise after work.” In other words, the working man had meaning, and was integrated into society. He had a place, and that place made him feel a man.

The need for meaning, which in practice for most men can only be derived from productive work, is one reason why Universal Basic Income, or trying to achieve a post-scarcity future, or any social policy that removes the need to work, is problematic. Men far prefer a dangerous job with camaraderie to lethargic, pampered anomie, and moreover, it was from such camaraderie, combined with strong families made possible by good jobs, that the tendrils of crucial social networks that built the societies of towns spread. All that is gone now, including, Bloodworth notes more than once, the working men’s social clubs, gone like the bowling leagues Robert Putnam wrote about in Bowling Alone, and like all the other intermediary institutions that once made towns strong. The focus here is very much men—women, of course, mostly derive meaning not from jobs, but from children, family, and social relationships, and to deny this is to beclown yourself, since it is self-evident and self-proving. But meaning for women is also destroyed when the social web of a town is destroyed.

So how did we get here? Bloodworth says the working class was demolished by the one-two punch of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. More precisely, Bloodworth ascribes the beginning of the end of this world as 1984, when Margaret Thatcher broke the coal miners’ unions. Now, for years I was told by conservatives, and I believed, that Thatcher was a heroine, but in retrospect that is at most half true. Zombie Thatcherism is no more desirable than zombie Reaganism. Certainly, Thatcher helped Ronald Reagan end the Cold War, and her actions in the Falklands War were also admirable (though her encouragement of the 1990 Gulf War looks less admirable now). But her economic program, efficient as it may have been and in keeping with Chicago School doctrine, may well have been responsible for the current miserable state of the British working class. The stock conservative, or neoconservative/neoliberal, response, is to say “But the coal miners were dinosaurs, holding the country hostage.” And maybe they were, but that does not explain why they, and their entire class, had to be given to the fire, except as a way to remake society, clay ground to build the atomized globalism of Cool Britannia. Of course, they were betrayed by Labour too; as Bloodworth notes, the “hollowed-out response of Blairism was not to tame capitalism but to offer a palliative of consumerism to those who sweated to make the wheels turn.” Neoliberals such as Blair and Theresa May would never actually champion the working class; they worship their globalist European masters, and rely on Chinese debt to keep the wolf from the door.

Thus, when the working class no longer had either economic or political power, and had no chance of getting it back, unemployment (or underemployment) rose as the good jobs disappeared. For those who still had jobs security disappeared and wages dropped. This destroyed the dignity of the working men directly affected, with resulting effects far beyond, to their families, to the tradesmen, and to entire towns and regions. Snap one thread and the whole web breaks.

The Tony Blair “solution” of consumerism is the very heart of the matter. Consumerism, not religion, is today the opiate of all the people, dulling them at the same time they are bombarded with propaganda about how free, how very free, they now are. Bloodworth astutely ties overt consumerism to other manifestations of the same belief system, such as the omnipresent “thought-terminating cocktail of uplift” found in tat with slogans like “Keep Calm and Drink Prosecco” or “Dream It, Live It, Love It,” identifying it “at root a call to stop thinking.” Another manifestation is, as Bloodworth talks about when driving for Uber in London, continual selling of, and celebration of, “freedom and autonomy” that is really neither, but enslavement to vice and dopamine hits derived from clicking “Buy.” This claim that we are all now free dovetails so tightly with the Zeitgeist that none think, or perhaps none dare to think, whether the philosophy being sold to them is a scam. And on those rare occasions they are criticized for offering consumerism to those without dignity, oily men like Blair offer bromides about increased “social mobility,” which means enabling those with talent to leave their towns and people behind, to become global citizens resident in Cool Britannia, riding metaphorical airships above the teeming masses. What is certain in all of this is that no restoration of working class dignity is on offer.

From the perspective of the identity politics harpies who dominate the American Left (I am not sure about the British Left), cawing about intersectionality and inclusion, Bloodworth must seem a great sinner for believing that dignity for everyone is important, that dignity does not derive from emancipation from supposed oppression, and for recognizing the differences between men and women. He repeatedly flies his sinner flag high, too, for example favorably quoting a Welshman’s complaint that a man cannot support his family on thirty pounds a day, and complaining that the “new masters were no longer wicked men in top hats,” but men “more likely to unbutton their shirt collars, roll up their sleeves, and wax lyrical about diversity.” Enough of this and it’s pretty clear Bloodworth has no use for the diversity and inclusion crowd.

This is not really surprising. One sees this inadvertent buttressing of reality, particularly of sex differences, quite frequently in books that focus on the working class, because the problems discussed are rooted in reality, and if you live in a pretend reality, as the identify politics people do, you can’t actually understand, much less improve, the lot of the working class. Bloodworth, however, struggles with the working class attitude to migrants, whether Eastern European or Asian. Being a realist, he recognizes that British culture is being, or has been, destroyed, and in part it is the result of migrants. (No doubt if he were being honest he would mean the Asians, since they stay, and have a lust for domination, while the Eastern Europeans leave, for the most part.) “[I]t is untrue to say that a distinct English culture does not exist. Those who engage in this kind of self-flagellating talk would be in your face if you ever suggested that, say, Jamaica or India did not have their own distinct cultures and ways of life.” But he accurately identifies that capitalism, in the form of neoliberalism, is equally to blame. He frequently criticizes the destruction of the high street (what we would call Main Street) in every English city and town, with local shops replaced by McDonald’s and ticky-tack discount stores, such as B&M (which seems to be the rough equivalent of Dollar General, or perhaps a hybrid of that and Walmart). Good jobs are now replaced by working for places like B&M, which has the same defects as working for Amazon. Compounding his sin, Bloodworth attacks the Arora brothers, Indian owners of B&M, as “one of the contemporary success stories of liberal politics,” by which he means their success allows liberals to feel good about multiculturalism, and ignore the destruction wrought, and that the new boss is, whatever his ethnicity, the same as the old boss. According to Bloodworth, the workers at B&M (at least in Blackpool) did improve their lot, through unionization (which apparently in England only requires getting a vote of ten percent of the workforce), after which conditions, anecdotally, improved. (Whether conservatives should support unions, other than of government workers, which should never be allowed, is an important question, but this review is long enough already.)

Back to Amazon. If one has to pick the most pernicious element of Amazon, it is that the company offers no job security to the vast majority of workers. You have what they in England call a “zero-hours contract,” meaning you may not be paid at all, since you are only paid for the hours the company chooses to employ you. Even if you are given work, the algorithm penalizes you for not picking enough items per hour, for being late, for being sick, for taking too long a bathroom break, even when the bathroom is hundreds of meters away. If you get six points, you are fired (what they call “released”). Implicit in the “zero-hours” contract, but distinct as a concept, is a job characteristic that is true of most American jobs, but much rarer in the rest of the developed world—“at-will” employment, meaning the employee can be fired at any time for any reason or no reason, with no recourse against the employer (and he can quit at any time, without any recourse against the employee).

Bloodworth paints zero-hours contracts as the tool of the devil. On the other hand, I employ hundreds of people, all on what amount to zero-hours contracts, and I have extremely low turnover, therefore presumably a happy work force. The difference is I offer work that is functionally guaranteed, forty hours, where new unskilled employees start at nearly double minimum wage, with much voluntary overtime available, paid at time-and-a-half. For me as an employer, the key benefit of zero-hours contracts is not the ability to shrink hours, but the “at-will” employment. Without that, I would risk the inefficiency and disruption that a contractual dispute, or some government or union functionary demanding payments, would cause, if I fired an employee, which has to be done not infrequently. The safety net for my fired employees is unemployment payments I make (as is not well known, unemployment is paid by the employer, though checks are written by the government, making it appear like a government benefit). Thus, at-will employment is not an inherently awful system.

In the British context, and even more in other European countries, it is nearly impossible to fire a worker. Presumably, when unions were strong, much the same thing was true. “At-will” employment has the legitimate purpose of reducing the risk to a company of making new hires. True, when workers become viewed as commodities, it can have malign effects. For example, according to Bloodworth, Amazon holds out the possibility of a permanent job, a “blue badge,” as a manipulative carrot, but rarely or never delivers. I’d like to say that much of the responsibility is on employers to behave decently, but that can’t be relied on, and especially not now, because social degradation affects all levels of society, and the old ideal, of a social compact among employers and the employed, doesn’t get much traction anymore. Perhaps the answer is some type of probationary status, “at-will” for a time before the worker receives some additional security—maybe not guaranteed employment, but a guaranteed severance payment, perhaps. Still, such solutions are band-aids on the real problem, that the social compact has broken down.

[Review continues as first comment.]

[Marika_reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

„Zatyrani” to reportaż wcieleniowy o pracy w Wielkiej Brytani na urągających godności umowach śmieciowych. Autor chcąc poznać realia życia osób pracujących za minimalną stawkę, zaczął po prostu żyć i pracować wśród nich. Zatrudnia się więc np. w magazynie Amazona i mieszka wśród innych tam pracujących, w wilgotnych i brudnych mieszkaniach. Wiedzieliście, że w Amazonie pracownicy noszą ze sobą urządzenia mobilne, które wydają im polecenia i przez które są non stop kontrolowani? Staniesz na chwilę odpocząć podczas swojej dwunastogodzinnej zmiany, to już kierownik opieprzy cię przez to urządzenie i da Ci jeszcze punkty ujemne, bo każdy twój ruch, twoje potknięcie jest ocenine. Tak, oceniane jak przedmiot, tylko, że pracownicy dostają raczej punkty karne, a nie te pozytywne. Nigdy nie kupowałam na Amazonie UK czy US i na pewno robić tego nie będę - choć takie deklaracje są trudne bo z jednej stronie to i tak nic nie zmieni, a jakby nawet zaczęło zmieniać to Ci ludzie (głównie imigranci) straciliby pracę...
Kolejny zawód, w który się wciela to pracownik opieki domowej. Nie trudno się domyślić, że sposób traktowania pracowników tego sektora realnie odbija się na jakości opieki i samych pacjentach. Czytanie o tym, zwyczajnie bolało. Kolejne miejsca pracy to call center oraz rynek gig economy, czyli samozatrudnienie, jak np. w Uberze. Wszystkie te prace są nędznie płatne, niepewne bo bez gwarancji godzinowej i bez stabilnego i stałego dochodu, z płacami które stoją w miejscu mimo inflacji i bez jakiejkolwiek realnej ochrony prawa pracy. A dodatkowo oprócz głównego zagadnienia „Zatyranych”, autor podejmuje też temat z nim nierozerwalny, czyli brytyjską klasowość.
Nie będę Wam opowiadać co dokładnie w każdym tym zawodzie się dzieje, w jaki sposób traktowani są ludzie na śmieciowym rynku pracy w cywilizowanym bogatym kraju. To oczywiście nie jest książka dla każdego, ale jeśli ten temat społeczny Was interesuje to przeczytajcie, bo warto.

[Tess · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well-researched, highly self-aware and accessible insight into the state of Britain’s in-work poverty (with a healthy examination of class too). I knew Amazon warehouses and zero-contract hours were a bad thing, but boy, was this an eye-opener into just how bad.

Highlights:

“The difference... between the man with money and the man without is simply this - the one thinks ‘how shall I use my life?’, the other ‘how shall I keep myself alive?’” - Edward Reardon

“The speedy efficiency which characterises middle-class life is non-existent in many working class homes. Poverty is the thief of time.”

“(The office walls were plastered with) ‘Keep Calm and Drink Prosecco’; ‘Dream it, Live It, Love it’; ‘Love is all you Need’ etc. This thought-terminating cocktail of uplift seems to have spread like a particularly contagious disease in recent years, and it is hard not view it as soothing palliative churned out en masse with a particular end in mind. Religion no longer has much hold over young people in Britain, yet some of its fatalism has been cleverly appropriated by consumer capitalism... This sort of thing is at root a call to stop thinking, a homely retreat to an isle of fatalism dressed up as liberation, whereas times like these demand one’s full engagement in the world.”

[Sharon Bakar · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

An important book - looking at low-paid, insecure work in the UK which seems to be part of the trend - not just in Britain but around the world. Bloodworth took jobs in an Amazon warehouse (sorry "fulfilment centre"), with care services assisting the elderly, in a call centre in Wales, and as an UBER driver in London so that he could experience at first hand the conditions he's writing about; and he talked to other workers in same and similar jobs, and ordinary folks living in the depressed towns he visited. What emerges is a disturbing portrait.

[Alex Givant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting look in to British 'gig' economy, reminded me Down and Out in Paris and London and Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.

[Joy Lamb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Should be compulsory reading for all politicians.
Depressing to find that so little has changed since Polly Toynbee's earlier book on a similar subject.

[Vichta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Autor książki postanowił zrobić rajd po kraju i przez jakiś czas spróbować żyć tak, jak żyją miliony kiepsko opłacanych, niemiłosiernie wykorzystywanych legalnych niewolników, w dużej części imigrantów. Po kolei odkryje przed czytelnikami, jak wygląda życie w Rugeley, Blackpool, Swansea i w Londynie. Zajrzymy do firm, z których wylecieć jest jeszcze łatwiej niż zostać do nich przyjętym.
W Rugeley autor zatrudnia się w magazynie Amazonu, czym wywołuje szok swoich współlokatorów i współpracowników. Że jak to tak? On, Anglik naprawdę chce pracować w takim miejscu? I nic dziwnego, bo praca dla tego giganta, to koszmar. A miało być tak pięknie. Kiedy premier Tatcher pozamykała kopalnie i przemysł upadł, miliony ludzi czekało na cud. I cud się zdarzył. Powstał magazyn, który dał ludziom zatrudnienie. Tylko, czy na pewno o to chodziło? To nie jest praca marzeń, tylko najgorsze piekło, stworzone przez Wielkiego Brata.
Blackpool. Niegdyś miejsce masowego wypoczynku dla obywateli całego kraju. Wciąż wielu tam przyjeżdża. Ale jak żyje się jego mieszkańcom po sezonie? Gdzie znajdują zatrudnienie? Autor rekrutuje się do prywatnej agencji opieki. Wydawałoby się, że do takiej pracy trzeba mieć jakieś predyspozycje, doświadczenie, ale nie. Nabór wygląda, jak łapanka. Napisz w cv, że opiekowałeś się chorym dziadkiem, nikt tego nie sprawdzi i masz pracę. A wraz z nią cały pakiet "przywilejów", czyli niepłatny czas za przejazdy, harówka od rana do wieczora, brak wolnego, opóźnione wypłaty wynagrodzenia i to tego minimalnego.
Jedziemy do Walii. Jak wygląda życie w mieście, które kiedyś zamieszkiwał kwiat społeczeństwa, czyli górnicy? Swansea zamieniło się w ogromne call centre. Dostajesz specjalny trening, jak rozmawiać z klientami, gotowe skrypty i do dzieła! Nie chcesz takiej pracy? To stań na kasie w miejscowym supermarkecie.
Ostatnim przystankiem jest Londyn, miasto miliona możliwości. Masz dość wstawania na gwizdek i siedzenia ośmiu, dziesięciu, czy czternastu godzin w pracy? Bądź elastyczny i zostań kierowcą Ubera albo kurierem na rowerze. Zainstaluj aplikację i... stań się jej niewolnikiem. To nieprawda, że wszystko zależy od ciebie. To firma kontroluje każdy twój ruch, sprawdza czy przyjmujesz pojawiające się zgłoszenia, widzi opinie wystawione przez klientów, również tych pijanych. Jeśli twój rating spada, zostaniesz zablokowany. To nie ma znaczenia, że znikniesz z ulic miasta, bo firma dba o wysycenie rynku kierowcami, nawet jeśli będzie ich zbyt wielu. Ważne żeby klient miał pojazd podstawiony natychmiast po odłożeniu telefonu.
Generalnie obraz przedstawiony w reportażu nie napawa optymizmem. Świat krzyczy, że skoro jesteś biedny, to sam jesteś sobie winien. Bądź kreatywny, nie poddawaj się! Naprawdę? Problem nie dotyczy wyłącznie Wielkiej Brytanii, ale ogromnej większości krajów. Likwidacja przemysłu wytwórczego i przestawienie się rynku pracy na usługi. Ale jak wielkie może być na nie zapotrzebowanie? Cieszymy się z tego, że zniknęły kopcące kominy, a nasze miasta stały się czystsze. Produkcja wielu towarów stała się nieopłacalna. Produkty sprowadzane z Azji były tanie, a my przymykaliśmy oczy na prawdziwy koszt ich produkcji. Byle tanio. Za zaoszczędzone pieniądze można sobie "zrobić" paznokcie. Dziś Azja staje na nogi, a życie mści się na reszcie rozleniwionego świata.
Przypomniał mi się wiersz Tuwima z mojego Elementarza:
"Wszyscy dla wszystkich"
Murarz domy buduje,
Krawiec szyje ubrania,
Ale gdzieżby co uszył,
Gdyby nie miał mieszkania?
A i murarz by przecie
Na robotę nie ruszył,
Gdyby krawiec mu spodni
I fartucha nie uszył.
Piekarz musi mieć buty,
Więc do szewca iść trzeba,
No, a gdyby nie piekarz,
Toby szewc nie miał chleba.
Tak dla wspólnej korzyści
I dla dobra wspólnego
Wszyscy muszą pracować,
Mój maleńki kolego.

[Maggie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Of course I agree with the main message of this book. My beef, as identified in O’s review, is that it’s been said better, with more detail, more context, more specifics and more analysis previously. See Toynbee’s Hard Work in Low-pay Britain or Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed - which was a page turner. Hired was not a page turner. Bloodworth is more recent of course, and in that was more relevant. Overall, I found it relied too heavily on the reader’s pre-existing shared belief that the zero hour contract economy wasn’t fair to workers rather than explaining or persuading why and how.

[Kaelan Ratcliffe ▪ كايِلان راتكِليف · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a very similar book to this one called The New Poverty by Stephen Armstrong - a study of poverty in Britain- that I read a few years back.

Absolutely nothing has changed since then with regards to my reaction to the content in either of these texts. Despite being quite desensitised to many of the topics I read, nothing stirs up a potential panic in me quite as effectively than staring into the void that is the hyper abused and exploited class of humans ballooning in size throughout the UK. Its real, tangible, and hits horribly close to home. Everything is quantifiable for myself as a resident of the UK whos been on a lower 20's salary in London. This makes me feel spoilt. Not only in terms of understanding and comparing ways of living and the sheer lack of money people are barely surviving with, but also the mental stress and complete lack of stability.

I absolutely recommend this as a 'must read' for an on-the-ground expose of life under the tail end of neoliberal capitalism that's been leeching away at society since the 70's. However do not expect to walk away unaffected. Its truly depressing stuff.

[Jake Goretzki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hardly what you’d call enjoyable, but this an important portrait of the bleak experience of zero hours and gig economy employment. The ‘undercover’, investigative dimension is perhaps a teeny bit of a red herring; I think interviewing people who worked at Amazon, B&M, Uber, etc might eventually yield the same portrait. Still, the lived, authentic personal experience adds another layer, especially given Bloodworth’s experiences of renting rooms and trying to budget. His points about bad diet and poverty are bang on by the way.

The upshot: that working experience is fucking awful. Working at amazon sounds borderline drone-level dystopian and utterly miserable. Towns like Rugeley sound heartbreaking. The experience in Blackpool (a place I’d assumed had gained from a Cameronesque seaside revival) similarly miserable, including chilling encounters with the newly homeless.

There are plenty of reasons to wince about Uber, but the sustained state of anxiety in which they hold drivers and the algorithmic bullying they apply is depressing. These are fairly well known: if a driver declines a ride too often, they’ll be kicked out. If their rating falls below 4.6 they’re out (how many malicious fucks caught in traffic jams beyond the control of the driver does that take?). Uber’s whole language of ‘autonomy’ and freelance freedom is pure Newspeak. Awkward, right.

I also liked the observations about how when you’re poor, the seemingly ‘small stuff’ - toilet breaks, a fobbing off from officials, the tone you’re spoken to by customers, fag breaks, etc - become so much more significant when your everyday grind is this shit. He makes a broader argument that these jobs fail to foster a sense of pride or communion (not to be nostalgic about coal mining, but that was a job), since they’re infantiling, skimping, tiring and chronically unstable. Mining was dangerous shit, but it was stable, respectable dangerous shit. Likewise his points on meritocracy deserve a hearing (his other book is about that). His argument is that isolated successes and ‘social mobility’ of people from poor backgrounds let us overlook the rest who don’t win in the meritocracy game.

One small ray of light - when it does happen - comes in the from of trade unionism. When companies have been unionised, things improve. It’s a reminder that unions can make a difference. These days they’re pretty much the preserve of the public sector, and seem to be dominated by identity politics-playing Trotskyite arseholes like Len McCluskey. Yet imagine if they applied their energies to the gig economy and the zero hours workforce. Maybe they do - but I haven’t heard them through the Jew-baiting and the drumbeat of Cuba Solidarity.

In all, it’s a valuable study, with little to fault it. My only quarrel is James’ occasional fondness for a mildly Partridgesque simile (a noise ‘like a tic burrowing into the fleshy part of an exposed leg’; I’m sure there was one about the sloughed skin of a snake… but can’t find it now). This is one to file alongside Ben Judah’s similarly bleak ‘This is London’, but at its best it’s an heir to ‘The Uses of Literacy’ and, dare i say it, dear Georgie O. It’s certainly a fuck of a lot better than anything Owen Jones has written.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

An unflinching investigation of the exploitation of underpaid workers in the UK. This book is revealing and shocking yet slightly voyeuristic at times.

The book uncovers heartbreaking accounts from low-wage workers and each are a damning indictment of the industries Bloodworth explores. Although this book is insightful, I don’t think it is as powerful as other investigative books.

[Laura May · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this a very worthwhile book. It's well-written, and beyond that, it did make me consider my privilege and biases (it is, after all, easy to write someone off as a 'chav' or a 'bogan'). It also left me disquieted - of course I'm aware of many of the problems mentioned by the author, and naturally you want to help change or redress them. But what can an individual actually *do* beside vote? Do we stop spending money with Amazon or uber? Are our marginal spending habits the problem? Do we feel guilty if we earn enough to cover our bases for the next couple of months should we be struck down with illness? Should we be more grateful to have a job and thereby continue to reconstitute the abusive system? While the book is emotive and well-researched, the author himself acknowledges that he's not a policy-writer nor a politician, and he doesn't feel equipped to give us answers. As such it's a little difficult to understand the purpose of this book, other than shock/outrage porn - because simply generating empathy may not lead to substantive results - results I suspect the author would like to see.

[Vanya Prodanova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Личи си по стила на писане на автора къде стои той в социалната стълба (поне на този етап от живота си) - твърде помпозно се изразява, ��оето предполагаме е ок ако се е опитвал да достигне до определен елит на британското общество. Ако целта му е обикновените хора да прочетат книгата и да осъзнаят манипулацията, на която са подложени, вероятно не е била добра идея. Чувстваш се глупаво като четеш, особено на моменти, е много трудно да не въртиш очи и да не се чудиш дали не прекалява с "елитния" английски език. Личи си, че е добър писател и вярвам, че е можел да пресъздаде същото послание на по-достъпен и чист език.

Това настрана. Книгата образно може се раздели на четири части като всяка част е обвързана с различна работа, която е пробвал за кратък период. Добре ги е избрал - Amazon доставчик; социален работник, работещ с възрастни; оператор в call centre и uber шофьор в Лондон. Не само е работил тези работи, но и се е опитал да оцелява на парите, които е получавал. Споделя директно колко му е струвало като пари всичко и докато работи различните ниско платени работи, е интервюирал други хора от средата, в която е бил. Това ти дава една доста добра картина на какво е да работиш на дъното на хранителната верига в UK.

Тъжното е, че пет години по-късно от публикуването на тази книга, нещата са все така зле и стават по-зле, визирайки размириците от последните седмици в Англия, насочени към бежанците. Всъщност отношението към емигрантите си е все така скапано, каквато и работа да вършиш, колкото и да си се постарал да се адаптираш. Виждам моят съсед колко е "щастлив" да има нас българите и италианци за съседи... :)

[Nika · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have become aware of “Hired” through one of the chapters within it, speaking about the author’s experience of working at an Amazon warehouse, which has been published as an article within The Guardian. Besides that, the book is divided into chapters accompanying the author through other badly remunerated jobs, such as being a care worker, an agent in a call center and an Uber driver. In my opinion, this should be a must-read before anyone should be allowed to use the aforementioned services. You want to order a package off of Amazon? You want to reach out to some customer service? You want to hire help at home for an older relative? Or you might need to get a cheap Uber to get to the airport? Read this book first!

Few of the people I would meet on my journey had the time to pontificate in the Guardian about their lifestyle. One of the reasons there are so few working-class authors today is precisely because a working-class job is typically incompatible with the sort of existence required to dash off books and articles. At a very basic level, a prerequisite to sitting down to quietly turn out 80,000 words is not having to worry about the electric being turned off or the discomfort of an empty stomach.
p. 5

What you’re getting yourself into is a grueling account of how those people occupying the work positions mentioned in the beginning, living their day to day life, trying to earn money and to survive. Going from “zero hour contracts”, to having to chase your employer to get paid, not having proper medical insurance, not being able to take sick leave, not being able to afford proper food or have the time to cook it and being treated in an inhumane way at one’s workplace. Especially the chapter about the work in an Amazon warehouse was as bad as you can imagine it. I really hope that it will make potential purchasers on the website reconsider getting their products elsewhere, supporting the local economy instead.

The place had an atmosphere of what I imagined a prison would feel like. […] You had to pass in and out of gigantic airport-style security gates at the end of every shift and each time you went on a break or needed to use the toilet. It could take ten or fifteen minutes to pass through these huge metal scanners. You were never paid for the time you spent waiting to have your pockets checked. […] Lunch […] marked the halfway point in a ten-and-a-half-hour shift.
p. 13

The author managed to highlight the many things that are so wrong with the current day society. It’s especially scary thinking how it might develop further in the future. Knowing that the majority of the population will need even more assistance living until a very advanced age in a couple of decades, we don’t seem to be ready for it at all. Care work sounds to be as far away as one could imagine it from being supportive and empathetic towards its patients/clients. The worst though is that local-level structures are completely disappearing and the work sector is becoming owned by giant agencies, dictating working conditions and their workers’ pay. When those that are making the most money in an economy don’t feed a part of it back into the local structures of where they are installed, that’s when you know this is not a state that can continue eternally.

At the time of writing, in 2017, Uber pays no VAT on booking fees by treating every driver as a separate business. By legally operating its app via a sister Dutch company, Uber also pays most of its corporation tax in the Netherlands rather than in UK. […] It classifies its divers not as its employees but as its customers, who are essentially paying a small commission on each fare in exchange for permission to use the company’s driving app.
p. 229

The only reason I reduced one ★ from the final rating was because the second chapter speaking about care work was much more superficial (and it made up almost a quarter of the entire book). There were less descriptions of the work itself and more accounts from people living in the town, not having anything to do with the care sector. But even with that in mind, I thought that the book was brilliant! An absolute suggestion to those, who are interested in understanding the current-day base of the job market. I don’t know whether the author would be able to gather up the courage and continue such an experiment working other badly paid jobs (thinking of food delivery services or Amazon delivery drivers, reminding me of the heart-breaking movie "Sorry We Missed You") but I’ll surely be up for reading whatever he writes next!

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many years ago I read Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay Britain by Polly Toynbee and more recently Getting By: Estates, Class & Culture in Austerity Britain by Lisa McKenzie, and now having read James Bloodwith's Hired, I am saddened once more by the inequalities and social injustices that have become an accepted part of everyday life for so many people living in Britain. When I read Polly Toynbee all those years ago, I really didn't imagine that fifteen years later I would still be reading about how badly the working classes are treated in this country.

James Bloodwith writes very well. Hired is his story of spending six months undercover. Working in the lowest paid jobs, with no contract of employment, no rights and all dignity stripped away. Living amongst the people who have to contend with this every day, with no hope of ever getting out, with no hope of owning their own home, or of feeling valued.

He travelled to four parts of Britain; Rugeley, Blackpool, the South Wales Valleys and London. In Rugely he became part of the world of Amazon; the biggest employer in a town that was once filled with manufacturing firms, where coal mining was big business and where nobody was ashamed of 'going down the pit'. Nowadays, the men that are left tell James that they 'just work at Amazon' - they would never have said that they 'just worked down the pit'. The employment practices operated by this huge firm have stripped the dignity from the locals, and whilst many of them did get work with Amazon, very few stayed. Now the workforce is mainly Eastern Europeans; working long shifts, often not getting paid properly. Being searched as they leave for their lunch break, being shouted at and humiliated and asking James why he, an English bloke was working there.

James also went undercover as a care worker in Blackpool, a call centre operator in Wales and as an Uber driver in London. Each and every one of these jobs was sold to him as wonderful employment, where he could earn a fortune and become skilled. Not one of those jobs were anything like that.

This book angered me, but also made me question some of my beliefs. I've worked as a Community Development Worker, usually with rurally isolated communities for many years. I've worked with Youth Offending Teams and with Advice Services and I've seen the people in this book time and time again. I've been angry on their behalf, I've tried to help, but I've always felt like a small fish swimming against the strongest of tides. I'll admit that there have been times when I've wondered why some British people don't take the jobs that Eastern European nationals are doing, and here in Lincolnshire that's a big thing. I've thought that maybe British people are not prepared to work as hard, or lower themselves. After reading Hired, I've realised that James is right, and it's not always down to laziness or ineptitude, it's often because British workers are not prepared to be treated so badly. Lets be honest here, why the hell should they?

Hired is a thought-provoking book that made me angry. It also made me desperately sad and helpless, and wondering just what is going to happen next. The gig economy is getting bigger all of the time, despite the bad press and despite people knowing that they have no rights. Every time I open my door to a delivery driver, I get a twinge ... of guilt that I'm contributing to this, of horror that the guy handing over the parcel is probably making a loss, yet still goes out every day, to try to make an honest living.

For me, that's the whole issue here. The majority of us want to make an honest living. We want to work, we want to feel valued and we want to know that we've contributed.

Hired is an incredible read and James Bloodworth's writing is engaging and very human. His personality shone through and his honesty is welcome. James doesn't have the answers, nor do I - does anyone? Even so, this is a very worthwhile read, getting to the underbelly of low-wage Britain, concentrating on those who are at the heart of it. Bringing them to life, making us realise that they are not just statistics.

[Keen Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Discrimination is frowned upon in theory but acquiesced in practice. Second-rate ‘unis’ are, if you like, the political elite’s condescension to meritocracy-the utopian idea that opportunity in life can bear no relation to the prosperity enjoyed by one’s parents.”

Having done my fair share of these sorts of jobs back in the day, I can well relate to his various experiences, the awful people who get drunk on petty power, the BS rhetoric, the disrespect, the exploitation, empty promises and of course the dreadful pay.

Bloodworth admits that he is not the first writer to do what he has done here, and he doesn’t pretend to have the answers (the people running the country don’t have them either). But what he does do is raise awareness. And fair play to him, he never attempts to diminish or simplify the debate into wrong v right and he allows for some nuance and texture to his work. It’s not just about xenophobic, ignorant lager louts, and as he shows the ignorance and the intolerance is certainly not unique to any gender, class, colour or nationality either.

“You’ve got some rights, but you haven’t got the money to carry it out, you know, to take your bosses to court. So these bosses are laughing their heads off.” So says Alan, the hairdresser, summing it up nicely. As Bloodworth says, thanks to the Conservative party as of July 2013 if an employee wants to stand up for themselves then they must find £1,200 of their own money in order to fight a case in an employment tribunal.

We see the appalling attitude and disproportionate power of job agencies, and how a succession of corporate orientated governments have ensured that a culture of greed and impunity flourishes which systematically punishes the poorest and least able to stand up for themselves. Transline, the agency who employs the author, sending him to Amazon, come across as incompetent as they are greedy.

“In 1979, 64% of residential and nursing home beds were provided by the NHS and local authorities. By 2012 that figure had plummeted to just 6%.”

This is a genuinely shocking read at times. It is awash with damning statistics, depressing facts of legalised loan sharking, exploitation and profiting hugely from the most desperate, needy and vulnerable in society. We see the phenomenal importance of the role played in the community of working men’s clubs around the country. We learn that more than 2,000 have closed down since the 70s and they continue to close every year. The author remains wary of nostalgia and mythology, and strikes a nice balance whilst also showing exactly where the root causes of much of the problems lie.

“The idea of falling back on savings is as otherworldly to those at the bottom end of the labour market as taking a loan out from Wonga is to the middle classes.”

One of the more shocking and memorable accounts in here concerns a man by the name of Gary, who was sleeping rough in the streets of Blackpool. He had survived an attempted suicide from a building after someone opened windows which broke his fall on the way down. If this wasn’t bad enough he was diagnosed with aggressive type 2 Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. His story is indicative of the system and its failings.

“A wretched and miserable job does not appal the middle classes so much as the behaviour exhibited by a person who does such a job- never mind that it is the dismal work that has often driven them to such behaviour in the first place. From the perspective of a middle-class professional cocooned in a London office, the belief that workers gorge themselves on stodge, grease and sugar because they are feckless and irresolute makes sense.”

Bloodworth is up there with the many other British working class voices producing some powerful, refreshing and important books on the declining state of the conditions for huge swathes of society. As well as clear comparisons to Orwell’s “Down and Out In Paris and London”, this also sits nicely alongside other quality investigative journalism such as Nick Davies’ “Dark Heart” and Ben Judah’s “This Is London”.

This book does for Amazon what Trump does for democracy. It is a damning indictment on the state of the UK today and a reflection of every single government who has held power since 1979. Generation after generation of sweeping and draconian cuts to essential services, whilst ramping up privatisation have led us to this situation. 2008 to many was the start of the financial crisis, but the media, political and other metropolitan bubbles need to realise that millions have been living in a financial crisis since the advent of Thatcherism. It is only when it started to hit the middle-classes that real attention was paid to the growing crisis.

Where and when does all of this greed and avarice stop?...What is the end game?...How much is enough?...This is capitalism. This is neo-liberalism. And the only guarantee is that it is only going to get worse, before it gets better. In the highly unlikely event that the current British prime minister gets his way, a state of disaster capitalism would be implemented so that he and his upper class cronies could carve up what is left of the UK and really get to work on the poor and disenfranchised. Boris and his boys have got their eyes on the £9 billion a year the UK pays to Europe, they would appropriate these funds and perform a magic trick which would make it all disappear (Poof! As if by magic).

[micusiowo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reportaż z angielskiego Amazona, pracy na Uberze i w kilku innych nisko płatnych pracach.
Realia prosto przełożyć na nasze warunki a wnioski będą takie same.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's all too easy to fail to look beyond the low price we pay for many goods and services and to forget (often wilfully) the true human cost enabled by a constant erosion in worker's rights and corporate responsibility. 'Hired' presents us with a valuable window into the ever-increasing world of the underpaid, underappreciated, and overworked in this First World Country of ours. It's also filled with nuggets of wisdom that cut to the heart of work and life in 21st century Britain, while skilfully avoiding the temptation for lengthy digressions on policy or politics, instead letting the human stories do the talking.

[Vlejd · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really respect what author done. Joining the low paying jobs and reporting on what does it mean to work there is a very helpful reporting. Forcing yourself to really experience the full life of people working in this job is an honorable undertaking. I would give 5/5 for that.

The problem is, that the author tries to also do some conclusions and a comentary on reasons why there are these jobs and what is to blame (evil corporates, bloodthirsty landlords ir capitalism).

These conclusions are full of missunderstandings, logical errors contradictions, bias and all the logical fallacies you would expect.
Examples:

1. On part of the book is about working in amazon warehouses. The work is obviously not pleasant. Author clames, that amazon is evil and ripping of the people working there (because if the low pay, lack of benefits). In the same section he also notes, that there is a lot foreigners working these jobs that are periodically returning from other countries. That means, that this job is helping someone soo much, they are willing to travel for it from a different country! Would it be nice, if they could earn more money and get those benefits? Yes. Is it actually feasible? Who knows. The beauty of free market is, that if you think so, you have all the insentive to prove it (by starting a similar bussiness and employing those people under better conditions).

If I would give you 10$ and you accepted them, am I good? Or am I evil, because you can imagine that I could give you 100$?


2. Part of the book is about social cate providers. I am very glad that this chapter was there. Memento mori! The idea is, that there are elderly people whi need care (help with hygiene) and some companies that employ the caretakers do provide it. The problem is, that the caretakers earn very little and are pushed to provide very poor service (session with "clients" taking beeing too short, rushing some things, and manipulating the "client" to be fine with neglect). The word client is, because the companies reffed to the elderly people this way and the autor goes with it. Further more, author uses this naming convention as one of the proof, that this is capitalism with the obvious implication that if capitalism caused this horrible state, it must mean that capitalism is bad. Well, the problem is, that this setup is exact opposite of capitalism and free market! What author mentions, but fails to understand is, that the company was selected by the STATE, probably mainly by the price! In that case, the "clients" are bit real clients of the care taking, just a receivers of something, they had not asked for! If it would be capitalism, there would be a competition between different companies, and the receiver of their services would decide, which one to use. That would obviously make thr incentive for the company to actually provide a good service, for example by providing happy carr givers!

3. Coming soon...

[Rebecca]

Bloodworth took on four low-paid jobs: a picker in an Amazon warehouse (surrounded mostly by Eastern Europeans), a carer for the elderly, a call centre worker, and an Uber driver. He also writes about finding accommodation and how he budgeted his modest earnings. I think I would have enjoyed this as a long Guardian magazine sort of article, but it didn’t need to be a whole book. Undeniably eye-opening, though. “Around one in twenty people in Britain today live on the minimum wage. … Britain is one of the best places in the world to be born if your parents have a bit of money put away. But life can still be hard if you wind up in the wrong town or with a certain set of choices laid out before you. The market does not guarantee the good life, and working hard does not always bring that life any nearer.”

[Fyrrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ocena: 4+
Wrażenia: Przez rok autor zatrudniał się w kiepsko płatnych pracach w różnych miejscach w Wielkiej Brytanii i próbował się za to utrzymać. Dzięki temu mamy okazję przekonać się jak wygląda praca w Amazonie czy w Uberze i jaki standard życia można utrzymać dzięki temu, jak wygląda sytuacja imigrantów zarobkowych itepe itede.
Dla kogo: Dla "klasy średniej", żeby wyjąć głowę z dupy i zobaczyć co jest dookoła.

[Emily Moon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliantly written book that informs, entertains and most importantly educates in a sophisticated, accessible and readable manner. It tackles such a dynamic portion of society and gives faces to hardships in a way that can only be a force for good. Essential reading for anyone living and partaking in our capitalist society.

[Asia · Rating 4 out of 5]

W trakcie lektury miałam totalnie flashbacki z "Mieszkańców otchłani" Jacka Londona. Z tym, że początek XX w. zamienił się na początek XXI w., a głodowe stawki, wyzysk, odbieranie godności, bezdomność, przemoc pozostały bez zmian.