Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

by James Bloodworth

This was life at Amazon, the world’s largest retailer. I was an order picker in one of its huge distribution centres in the small Staffordshire town of Rugeley. The warehouse employed around 1,200 people. The majority of my co-workers were from Eastern Europe and most of those were from Romania. The Romanians were often dumbfounded as to why any English person would want to degrade themselves doing such lowly work.

We lacked a manager in the usual sense of the word; or a flesh and blood manager, at any rate. Instead, each of us carried around with us a hand-held device that tracked our every move as if we were convicts out on house arrest.

Along with other prominent intellectuals of his day, Taylor did not consider the working class to be fully human: they were more usefully viewed as a resource to be exploited for profit.

Every contract that we pickers were on at Transline was zero-hours and temporary. Despite requesting it several times, I was never given a copy of my actual employment contract, and was eventually told by a Transline rep that a contract did not exist because I was on a zero-hours contract. The documents I did see on the day I was invited in for the interview were quickly whisked away as soon as I had filled out the requisite details.

B. L. Coombes, who in his 1939 novel on Welsh colliery life These Poor Hands wrote: It is a rotten feeling for a man who is working to come outside and see that a crowd of men are waiting for work. It warns him that the masters can treat him as they wish, for he dare not insist on his rights when there are so many waiting for a chance to start.

Unlike professional jobs, where there is usually some aspect of the work that is enjoyable, working on the bottom rung of the ladder at Amazon was no fun at all.

the utopian idea that opportunity in life can bear no relation to the prosperity enjoyed by one’s parents.

The sudden collapse in people’s health does not derive from the collapse of industry, but from their own moral laxity.

‘Progress is not the elimination of struggle but a change in its terms,’

One thing I’ll take my hat off to Merkel for: that she took over Europe without firing a bullet. You know, fair play to her.’

The fewer things that our managerial political elite believe they can change, the bigger the chasm for these small men writ large to swagger into.

As Arthur Koestler phrased it in The God that Failed, the discovery of a complete ideology gave reassurance precisely because it supplied ‘an answer to every question’.