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Dirt Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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April 13, 2009
This is the Australian version of Nickel and Dimed, which the author even admits in her prologue. Nevertheless, just because the idea is not original doesn’t make the effort any less interesting or worthwhile. In fact, given the endless books that are copies of copies about celebrities and such nonsense, the least interesting thing that can be said about this book is that it has been done before. In fact, given how ‘invisible’ workers on minimum wages are generally, perhaps criticising this book on the basis that the idea has ‘been done before’ is yet another example of society ‘vanishing’ these people.
Anyway, taking a year off work to put yourself in a situation where you will work in a series of low paid and physically demanding jobs is never going to be ‘just the same’ as someone else’s experiences, especially not those of someone in another country.
I’m not sure it would be as easy for a man to do what these two women have done. It is easier for a woman to hide her previous career than it would be for a man. A woman can say things like they have been housewives for the last 20 years, but I would imagine that a man applying for a job, even a minimum wage job, would need to say more about what they’ve been up-to.
Today we define work as being either skilled or unskilled. The world of work is becoming Napoleon Dynamite-ised – “You know, like numchuck skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills. Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.” The world is moving toward a great divide where people with skills that are difficult to replace within the workplace are going to be increasingly treated like first class citizens. Their opinions will be sought after, they will be asked how the workplace (and their work within it) is able to be continuously improved, and they will be given opportunities to improve their skills and thereby improve their productivity and value within the job market.
The unskilled are becoming increasingly invisible. The largest growing sector of the Australian workforce is casual labour. For years virtually the only jobs that have been growing have been part time or casual jobs. A casual job in Australia is one which does not have access to sick leave or holiday pay. To compensate for not having access to these conditions casuals generally receive a ‘loading’ (normally 25% but sometimes less). The loading often encourages people struggling to make ends meet prefer casual work – despite the fact that this completely removes any job security. The consequences not only being that you can be sacked without any notice, but also that it is virtually impossible to get any sort of housing loan without a permanent full-time job.
Casual work also means that you must be available to work any shifts that are offered to you. As is pointed out in this book, that can mean working anywhere between 0 and 38 hours in any week – and just because you got 38 hours this week does not in any way mean you will not get 0 hours next. The fact that you can be offered any shift on any day – and in the cases discussed in this book, these shifts can be as short as three hours – means that it is very difficult to have another job to help make ends meet.
Australia also defines people as being ‘unemployed’ only if they do no work at all. So, people who get a single shift in a week would not be considered ‘unemployed’. The policies of our previous government were designed to ‘get people back into the workforce’. But for all their talk of reducing the burden of taxation – getting people back into the workforce often meant an effective tax rate that was nearly crippling for people at the wrong end of the job market. For instance, if you were a single mother (and therefore to be blamed for all of society’s ills, obviously), if you did not work you would receive benefits from the government. But going to work – even in a job that paid minimum wages – automatically meant a cut to those benefits. The effective tax rate, then could be huge (perhaps 50%) and would mean that people would be worse off working 38 hours a week than they were previously earned not working at all.
This book, it must be remembered, was written in the middle of what was a boom period for Australia. Australia once prided itself on being an egalitarian country. A country that even our last Prime Minister liked to say was based on the concept of ‘mateship’ – he would say this even while creating conditions that would turn us ever further toward the worst excesses of dog-eat-dog capitalism. Even in that period of virtually unparalleled economic growth the main feature of the new economy, and the most obvious feature, was the gulf that had opened up between rich and poor. It wasn’t just that minimum wages in Australia had done little to keep up, employers were finding new ways to avoid paying even these pitiful minima.
There are three things I really want to note in this review. The first is that this book, like the book that inspired it, was written by what could only be described as a middle class woman. I know we are all middle class now – but all jokes aside, journalists are middle class by any definition. They work in jobs that are ‘skilled’. So, in the divide I mentioned above, they are on the right side, the numchuck side, if you like. But the things I found most interesting about both women was that they found working in ‘unskilled jobs’ remarkably hard. Wynhausen particularly talks about how difficult she found much of the work she was expected to do. How hard she found it to pick up the skills in these low skilled jobs. And she doesn’t say this in the way I once heard someone say - a lecturer who had stuffed up the photocopying he had done for us and who explained that it was because he struggled to focus on menial tasks (wanker), but rather because these ‘unskilled jobs’ actually require lots of skills. Just not skills our society has decided to value.
The other is that neither is prepared for the physical damage these jobs will do to them. This author leaves some of the jobs because she is afraid she will so badly inflame her hands that she may be left with permanent damage. It is all too easy to say ‘at least she had the choice’ – but that is actually her point. She recognises that other people do not have this choice and end up crippling themselves, even while their employer displays their ‘commitment’ to occupational health and safety like a badge of honour. As she points out, in a world of employment that is becoming increasingly casual, with employees who are increasingly unable to take sick leave when they are sick, it seems obscene to talk about a company’s commitment to occupational health and safety when even this minimum is flouted by its employment practices. We may pay highly for this change in the composition in our workforce. With the threats of pandemics and with most casual jobs being in the service sector having people who cannot afford to stay home when they are sick who work in contact with all of us may just prove to be an incredibly stupid idea we all get to pay for. Oh well, as long as it helps the company’s bottom line – that is all that matters.
The third is how invisible they find this work makes them. Women of a ‘certain age’ tend to be invisible anyway, but nothing prepared Wynhausen for the near complete invisibility she would suffer in these low paid jobs. Worse was the patronising way virtually everyone thought they had a right to treat her. Strangers further up the picking order would tell her how to do her job, despite them having no supervisory role over her at all. It takes a hardy soul to retain any dignity and self-respect in such circumstances. A repeated theme in this book was how unlikely it was that these employees would stand up for their rights and therefore how few rights they ended up having – even when these ‘rights’ were supposedly mandated by law.
I enjoyed this book a lot. Now that the economy looks like it might be going pear shaped we are probably only beginning to witness the full consequences of these shifts in employment practices in Australia. Wynhausen was a nice person to spend time with, I can only look on with the greatest respect that someone would take so much time off work to put themselves through this experience. And, of course, I feel nothing but outrage for those who are seeking to create an Australia in the image of Victorian England.
Anyway, taking a year off work to put yourself in a situation where you will work in a series of low paid and physically demanding jobs is never going to be ‘just the same’ as someone else’s experiences, especially not those of someone in another country.
I’m not sure it would be as easy for a man to do what these two women have done. It is easier for a woman to hide her previous career than it would be for a man. A woman can say things like they have been housewives for the last 20 years, but I would imagine that a man applying for a job, even a minimum wage job, would need to say more about what they’ve been up-to.
Today we define work as being either skilled or unskilled. The world of work is becoming Napoleon Dynamite-ised – “You know, like numchuck skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills. Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.” The world is moving toward a great divide where people with skills that are difficult to replace within the workplace are going to be increasingly treated like first class citizens. Their opinions will be sought after, they will be asked how the workplace (and their work within it) is able to be continuously improved, and they will be given opportunities to improve their skills and thereby improve their productivity and value within the job market.
The unskilled are becoming increasingly invisible. The largest growing sector of the Australian workforce is casual labour. For years virtually the only jobs that have been growing have been part time or casual jobs. A casual job in Australia is one which does not have access to sick leave or holiday pay. To compensate for not having access to these conditions casuals generally receive a ‘loading’ (normally 25% but sometimes less). The loading often encourages people struggling to make ends meet prefer casual work – despite the fact that this completely removes any job security. The consequences not only being that you can be sacked without any notice, but also that it is virtually impossible to get any sort of housing loan without a permanent full-time job.
Casual work also means that you must be available to work any shifts that are offered to you. As is pointed out in this book, that can mean working anywhere between 0 and 38 hours in any week – and just because you got 38 hours this week does not in any way mean you will not get 0 hours next. The fact that you can be offered any shift on any day – and in the cases discussed in this book, these shifts can be as short as three hours – means that it is very difficult to have another job to help make ends meet.
Australia also defines people as being ‘unemployed’ only if they do no work at all. So, people who get a single shift in a week would not be considered ‘unemployed’. The policies of our previous government were designed to ‘get people back into the workforce’. But for all their talk of reducing the burden of taxation – getting people back into the workforce often meant an effective tax rate that was nearly crippling for people at the wrong end of the job market. For instance, if you were a single mother (and therefore to be blamed for all of society’s ills, obviously), if you did not work you would receive benefits from the government. But going to work – even in a job that paid minimum wages – automatically meant a cut to those benefits. The effective tax rate, then could be huge (perhaps 50%) and would mean that people would be worse off working 38 hours a week than they were previously earned not working at all.
This book, it must be remembered, was written in the middle of what was a boom period for Australia. Australia once prided itself on being an egalitarian country. A country that even our last Prime Minister liked to say was based on the concept of ‘mateship’ – he would say this even while creating conditions that would turn us ever further toward the worst excesses of dog-eat-dog capitalism. Even in that period of virtually unparalleled economic growth the main feature of the new economy, and the most obvious feature, was the gulf that had opened up between rich and poor. It wasn’t just that minimum wages in Australia had done little to keep up, employers were finding new ways to avoid paying even these pitiful minima.
There are three things I really want to note in this review. The first is that this book, like the book that inspired it, was written by what could only be described as a middle class woman. I know we are all middle class now – but all jokes aside, journalists are middle class by any definition. They work in jobs that are ‘skilled’. So, in the divide I mentioned above, they are on the right side, the numchuck side, if you like. But the things I found most interesting about both women was that they found working in ‘unskilled jobs’ remarkably hard. Wynhausen particularly talks about how difficult she found much of the work she was expected to do. How hard she found it to pick up the skills in these low skilled jobs. And she doesn’t say this in the way I once heard someone say - a lecturer who had stuffed up the photocopying he had done for us and who explained that it was because he struggled to focus on menial tasks (wanker), but rather because these ‘unskilled jobs’ actually require lots of skills. Just not skills our society has decided to value.
The other is that neither is prepared for the physical damage these jobs will do to them. This author leaves some of the jobs because she is afraid she will so badly inflame her hands that she may be left with permanent damage. It is all too easy to say ‘at least she had the choice’ – but that is actually her point. She recognises that other people do not have this choice and end up crippling themselves, even while their employer displays their ‘commitment’ to occupational health and safety like a badge of honour. As she points out, in a world of employment that is becoming increasingly casual, with employees who are increasingly unable to take sick leave when they are sick, it seems obscene to talk about a company’s commitment to occupational health and safety when even this minimum is flouted by its employment practices. We may pay highly for this change in the composition in our workforce. With the threats of pandemics and with most casual jobs being in the service sector having people who cannot afford to stay home when they are sick who work in contact with all of us may just prove to be an incredibly stupid idea we all get to pay for. Oh well, as long as it helps the company’s bottom line – that is all that matters.
The third is how invisible they find this work makes them. Women of a ‘certain age’ tend to be invisible anyway, but nothing prepared Wynhausen for the near complete invisibility she would suffer in these low paid jobs. Worse was the patronising way virtually everyone thought they had a right to treat her. Strangers further up the picking order would tell her how to do her job, despite them having no supervisory role over her at all. It takes a hardy soul to retain any dignity and self-respect in such circumstances. A repeated theme in this book was how unlikely it was that these employees would stand up for their rights and therefore how few rights they ended up having – even when these ‘rights’ were supposedly mandated by law.
I enjoyed this book a lot. Now that the economy looks like it might be going pear shaped we are probably only beginning to witness the full consequences of these shifts in employment practices in Australia. Wynhausen was a nice person to spend time with, I can only look on with the greatest respect that someone would take so much time off work to put themselves through this experience. And, of course, I feel nothing but outrage for those who are seeking to create an Australia in the image of Victorian England.
March 25, 2020
Elisabeth Wynhausen is the senior writer for The Australian newspaper. Dirt Cheap is a memoir of sorts, her nine month sabbatical from the newspaper where she decided to give up life as she knew it and find casual work at the ‘wrong end of the job market’.
I picked this up thinking that this could be an important book but soon realised my mistake. Although I read the whole book I never really got the feel that Elisabeth was taking it too seriously. The point is to give up her large income and seek work in the much lower paying jobs such as factory work, cleaning, hotel reception and the like. The only thing she was really to keep from her previous lifestyle were her friends and family. She would find cheap accommodation and travel on public transport to her jobs in both Melbourne and Sydney, Australia. And this she did.
The book is separated into the six jobs that she held, in all of which she made new friends, or at least acquaintances. My issue is really with the part of the book where she finds herself almost dead broke and destitute and she discusses having to dig into her funds. At this point she totally lost me and don’t get me wrong, I know this would be a big task and I wouldn’t want to do it, but if you are doing it to write this book then do it properly. To me if you were always considering this as your fall back then you were not taking on your new role completely – people in these lower paying, blue collar, ‘dead end’ jobs have no funds to fall back on so they never have those thoughts. They make do, somehow.
I guess I may come across too critical and as I said, I wouldn’t want to do it but then I wasn’t aiming to write a book on the experience either.
I picked this up thinking that this could be an important book but soon realised my mistake. Although I read the whole book I never really got the feel that Elisabeth was taking it too seriously. The point is to give up her large income and seek work in the much lower paying jobs such as factory work, cleaning, hotel reception and the like. The only thing she was really to keep from her previous lifestyle were her friends and family. She would find cheap accommodation and travel on public transport to her jobs in both Melbourne and Sydney, Australia. And this she did.
The book is separated into the six jobs that she held, in all of which she made new friends, or at least acquaintances. My issue is really with the part of the book where she finds herself almost dead broke and destitute and she discusses having to dig into her funds. At this point she totally lost me and don’t get me wrong, I know this would be a big task and I wouldn’t want to do it, but if you are doing it to write this book then do it properly. To me if you were always considering this as your fall back then you were not taking on your new role completely – people in these lower paying, blue collar, ‘dead end’ jobs have no funds to fall back on so they never have those thoughts. They make do, somehow.
I guess I may come across too critical and as I said, I wouldn’t want to do it but then I wasn’t aiming to write a book on the experience either.
February 4, 2019
Pretty poor attempt at journalism. The task was to live as someone on the dole or minimum wage, however author makes no real attempt to do so. Perhaps had she tried the experiment for a year it might have given her better insights than she gleaned in six months. She even admits to not really trying (she dips into her savings and keeps living in her Bondi apartment for most of the experiment). Unoriginal, sloppy, lazy.
August 4, 2016
Elisabeth Wynhausen, a writer from The Australian newspaper, decided to spend most of a year living life as a worker in Australia's increasingly casualised workforce. Working a maximum of one month in each role, she worked a string of jobs, including stints as a factory hand, checkout cashier, kitchen hand, and cleaner.
Wynhausen, a 55-year old woman at the time of her experiment, deliberately thinned her resume to the point that it only listed menial jobs that she had done decades ago. She chose not to mention her credentials as a respected writer, and nationally-syndicated columnist. Her bosses, co-workers and customers would have to take her on face value as an unskilled, presumably unambitious middle-aged woman.
I like the premise of Dirt Cheap better than the execution. In many ways, the book feels like a missed opportunity. I have two major problems with the book, that I will describe below:
1)
Firstly, I was disappointed that she did not fully commit to the experiment. Rather than living totally on her wits, and the money earned from her casual jobs, Wynhausen had a security buffer. She describes multiple times where she dipped into her savings to pay for expenses (e.g. a parking fine) that she simply could not afford with her casual income. I wonder whether this decision kept Wynhausen from experiencing the full depths of the cycle of poverty that low-income are susceptible to. This itself could have been an interesting trail to follow.
2)
My second, and major criticism of the book is the way it is written. Wynhausen's experiment contained the seeds of a compelling narrative but, to my tastes, she focused on the wrong elements of the story.
Dirt Cheap is written as a chronological account of Elisabeth Wynhausen's period of casual employment. Her book is divided into chapters for each of the jobs that she took, describing the conditions within the workplace, and the people that she was working with at the time.
As such, the book is largely a chronological series of events, as we move from week to week, and job to job. As such, some elements of the book were repetitive and superfluous. Rather than recounting the events in succession, I would have preferred a book structured around the deeper issues at play.
I would have preferred if Wynhausen had divided the book into the underlying themes of life as a working class, casual worker. How do customers look at you if you are a 55-year old woman performing menial work? Did they speak to Wynhausen differently as a cashier, compared to the way that she was spoken to in her role as a writer? What is it like to be expected to drop everything and immediately work a shift with minimal notice? How did her co-workers spend their leisure time, compared with her newspaper colleagues?
Wynhausen hints at these deeper themes, but she doesn't dwell or expand upon them. For example, on page 176. she mentions that she was so drained from an overworked shift as a cashier that she developed a lingering headache that ruined her next day. A mere half-sentence mention of an awful burden that impacts the quality-of-life for working class people.
Rather than mentioning these things as brief asides, Wynhausen should have expanded upon them in greater detail. She should have spent more time describing the burdens that society expects the working class to carry, and how it affects the lives of those working menial jobs at the bottom of society.
Instead of reading this book, I recommend Hand to Mouth by Linda Tirado, which engagingly does all of the things that Dirt Cheap does not.
Though not a bad book, Dirt Cheap (2005) is simply a missed opportunity to place readers in the shoes of the 'working poor' underclass of society. It is largely a redundant read, now that the superior Hand to Mouth (2014) exists.
Wynhausen, a 55-year old woman at the time of her experiment, deliberately thinned her resume to the point that it only listed menial jobs that she had done decades ago. She chose not to mention her credentials as a respected writer, and nationally-syndicated columnist. Her bosses, co-workers and customers would have to take her on face value as an unskilled, presumably unambitious middle-aged woman.
I like the premise of Dirt Cheap better than the execution. In many ways, the book feels like a missed opportunity. I have two major problems with the book, that I will describe below:
1)
Firstly, I was disappointed that she did not fully commit to the experiment. Rather than living totally on her wits, and the money earned from her casual jobs, Wynhausen had a security buffer. She describes multiple times where she dipped into her savings to pay for expenses (e.g. a parking fine) that she simply could not afford with her casual income. I wonder whether this decision kept Wynhausen from experiencing the full depths of the cycle of poverty that low-income are susceptible to. This itself could have been an interesting trail to follow.
2)
My second, and major criticism of the book is the way it is written. Wynhausen's experiment contained the seeds of a compelling narrative but, to my tastes, she focused on the wrong elements of the story.
Dirt Cheap is written as a chronological account of Elisabeth Wynhausen's period of casual employment. Her book is divided into chapters for each of the jobs that she took, describing the conditions within the workplace, and the people that she was working with at the time.
As such, the book is largely a chronological series of events, as we move from week to week, and job to job. As such, some elements of the book were repetitive and superfluous. Rather than recounting the events in succession, I would have preferred a book structured around the deeper issues at play.
I would have preferred if Wynhausen had divided the book into the underlying themes of life as a working class, casual worker. How do customers look at you if you are a 55-year old woman performing menial work? Did they speak to Wynhausen differently as a cashier, compared to the way that she was spoken to in her role as a writer? What is it like to be expected to drop everything and immediately work a shift with minimal notice? How did her co-workers spend their leisure time, compared with her newspaper colleagues?
Wynhausen hints at these deeper themes, but she doesn't dwell or expand upon them. For example, on page 176. she mentions that she was so drained from an overworked shift as a cashier that she developed a lingering headache that ruined her next day. A mere half-sentence mention of an awful burden that impacts the quality-of-life for working class people.
Rather than mentioning these things as brief asides, Wynhausen should have expanded upon them in greater detail. She should have spent more time describing the burdens that society expects the working class to carry, and how it affects the lives of those working menial jobs at the bottom of society.
Instead of reading this book, I recommend Hand to Mouth by Linda Tirado, which engagingly does all of the things that Dirt Cheap does not.
Though not a bad book, Dirt Cheap (2005) is simply a missed opportunity to place readers in the shoes of the 'working poor' underclass of society. It is largely a redundant read, now that the superior Hand to Mouth (2014) exists.
August 8, 2009
Leave it to a salaried, professional author with ten week's holidays and properties in upscale neighbourhoods to slum it amongst the working poor and write about it to make a buck. Not impressed. Thank goodness we have someone literate to speak for us, though. Goodness knows none of us working poor could have replicated an American idea and retooled it for the Australian market under the guise of sharing what it's like to be who we are.
June 9, 2012
Easy read, should make for some thoughtful discussion in Book club. I will NEVER ignore a cleaner in again, thinking that they want to get on with their work. The invisible workforce should not be ignored.
If you are in a hurry, read the last chapter (epilogue) it says it all.
If you are in a hurry, read the last chapter (epilogue) it says it all.
December 24, 2010
I am reading this book with 'awful' fascination. As an undergrad student I experienced some of what she experienced and as a temp more recently.
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