Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

by James Bloodworth

work for many people has gone from being a source of pride to a relentless and dehumanising assault on their dignity.

The forces that have ruthlessly turned almost every British high street into a cultural wasteland of dull and identikit chain stores offering the same sensory experience are now so vast and incomprehensible that it is the single Polski sklep that is singled out. If English culture is being trampled on then Ronald McDonald should take more of the blame than Eastern European fruit pickers.

You might be stacking shelves in Tesco or flogging useless junk to pensioners from a cow-shed converted into a call centre, but when you get a tattoo or a celebrity haircut, you feel a temporary affinity with the pop stars, rock stars and footballers who strut across the pages of the tabloids like peacocks.

The sheer misery of the work left you craving cigarettes and alcohol and everything else that offered the promise of any kind of emotional kick.

Regularity of dietary habit is simply incompatible with irregularity of work and income.

The fact that a growing number of British people are unwilling to be treated like animals by unscrupulous employers is often viewed as shameful, when it really ought to be considered a sign of progress. British workers have minimum standards with respect to what they will put up with – standards that many of the precarious and poorly paid jobs our economy now relies upon fail to satisfy.

‘The difference ... between the man with money and the man without is simply this,’ the downtrodden novelist Edward Reardon declared in George Gissing’s novel New Grub Street, ‘the one thinks, “How shall I use my life?” and the other, “How shall I keep myself alive?”’

It is easy to slip into an unhealthy regime like this. You get up each morning at eleven, you have breakfast, shower and prepare your feet for the day ahead – several sticking plasters, two pairs of socks – and then you drag yourself out of the door by twelve thirty. You return home at midnight and you are usually in bed by one. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Poverty has made them fat. Bloomfield is the unhealthiest district in Blackpool, which is England’s unhealthiest town. The signs outside the local eateries clamour to tell you that everything on offer is fried and embalmed in a thick pool of grease: deep-fried, pan-fried, stir-fried, sautéed. As for smoking, lighting up is just something to do.