Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

by James Bloodworth

On one occasion22 I witnessed a particularly disgusting scene. Wheeling a trolley down a deserted corner of the warehouse one dull afternoon, I saw a supervisor – a dead-eyed young middle manager who was puffed up from the gym and pungent with aftershave – set upon an older man. Shaking his finger at him, the young man called the older worker every name he could think of. The words came out of his mouth like sour milk poured from a jug. He might as well have knocked the old man over with scorn. The man on the receiving end, who must have been at least sixty, grew pale and tense as he cowered under the wave of cruel invective. The wrath of the manager – whose face had turned from red to purple and back to red again – was only abated when he was summoned downstairs by a muffled voice on his walkie-talkie. The old man he left behind had by that time shrivelled up like a melted crisp packet. Nirmal, who had been watching the spectacle unfold from further back, sidled up to me, shaking his head. ‘Fucking hell,’ he chuckled softly. ‘He ain’t gonna last long.’ And he didn’t. While I was stood outside smoking a cigarette at lunch that day, I watched the old man stagger out of the building and through the second set of tall metal security gates. These sat between hulking black metal fences at the end of the car park. This ungainly man with bloodshot eyes moved as if all the life had been drained out of him. He teetered into the car park and towards a little red Nissan Micra which w...