Hired Quotes

“Working with the public for any length of time always has the potential to turn even the most serene person into a bitter misanthrope.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“By destroying traditional safety nets and undermining old coping mechanisms, the atomisation modern life carries with it can sometimes make the struggle feel even more arduous. Freedom, if it is to mean anything at all, must mean the freedom for everyone to live decently rather than the freedom of a growing consumer class to order another class around, even if extra ladders are occasionally sent down to raise up a fortunate few and turn them into Eloi.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“This sort of thriftiness is typically jumped on by people who have always wanted to ration the poor. It is held up as the final 'proof' that poverty is really not as bad as all that: as long as you have a bit of middle-class pluck and ingenuity tucked away in reserve. If you are too useless to be able to survive on such a lowly amount, it is put down to some piteous deficiency in one's character.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“Today the common man is celebrated so long as he is no longer common. Respect isn't automatically granted to people who do working-class jobs. Instead, it goes to those who grab the slipper levels of social mobility and climb out on the backs of those they leave behind.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“It has been estimated by industry insiders in the US that relying on independent contractors rather than employees can lower direct business costs for companies by as much as 25 per cent. At least some of those costs are being offloaded onto the state, and by extension onto taxpayers and other workers. Due to the paucity of many people's earnings in the 'gig' economy, signing on for social security when you fall ill is sometimes the only option. Thus the taxpayer is essentially out of pocket twice over – first as employer national insurance contributions fall, and secondly as this casual workforce turn to the state to survive.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“In this sense, the incentives inherent to the 'gig' economy resemble those that draw people into casinos or bingo halls, where unpredictable rewards stimulate you just enough to reel you back in – you carry on dipping your hand in your pocket in the hope of beating the odds.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“That was the other thing about Uber and the rest of the 'gig' economy: the grim atomisation of it all. It hardly resembled a 'gig' at all: you certainly had no fellow band members. It was just you, strapped inside a metal shell and directed around town by an algorithm. it was not so much autonomy as isolation. There were more of you, but you felt, as Aman, had put it to me, like 'just a number'.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“Many of the things that appear in this book exist because of the widely accepted creed of meritocracy. In this view of the world, it is primarily the job of politicians to sort the sheep from the goats. It is perfectly acceptable for someone to toil away hopelessly in a rotten job, as long as that person has been judged to lack the requisite merit to do anything better. Our entire political vocabulary – social mobility, bright but poor kids, grammar schools – is geared towards pulling a few people out of the soup without changing its basic ingredients. The debate in 2017 around grammar schools in instructive in this regard: it is not seen as wrong that a child who fails the 11-Plus team should have to spend a lifetime doing soul-destroying work; rather, the tragedy is that it should happen to the wrong child. Woe betide if a 'bright but poor child' should slip through the net, so to speak. One can do what one likes with the other lot.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“All politics seem to offer places like Ebbw Vale is the defeatist idea of 'social mobility', a philosophy in which a golden ticket is available to a lucky few. Those unable to reach the handle of the oar are left to fall through the rotten boat and sink.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“Yet it is capitalism that has truly lost its patriotic element, preferring instead the global marketplace in which cultural sameness is mistaken for genuine diversity. It is odd in a way that anger at the slow erosion of British culture should be directed so overwhelmingly at migrants rather than at the companies whose identikit stores plaster a bland façade of monotonous homogeneity upon every high street throughout the world. But it is a question of proximity, I suppose: the immigrant, or the drinker next door who you suspect of robbing the social to pay for his beer, is a lot more solid – a lot more real – than the shadowy multinational that serves up trash under a slice and anodyne fascia.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“In truth, the greatest impediment to collective organisation in a call centre environment is probably the apathy of the workforce, especially among younger workers, who often do not know even what a trade union is. Society is far more broken down and atomised than it was, say, forty or fifty years ago. The idea of collective strength is an alien concept for many; problems are solved in isolation or through managerialism masquerading as 'teamwork'.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“The most important trade union work is typically quite dull. The best trade union leaders are also, by extension, interested in the boring stuff – the length of the toilet breaks, the rules governing agency workers, the quantity of the paid breaks a worker is entitled to, and so on and so forth. These are the things that matter when you work in a job at the bottom end of the labour market, not the rigid dogmas and slogans summoning a radiant utopian future, nor a new set of superiors booming at you in impenetrable jargon.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“There were the sweet old men and women you inevitably become close to – you saw them almost every day, sometimes for years on end. And then you might check your rota one day and, where previously there was a familiar name, there was blank space. Death was blank sheet of people and you were moved on.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“According to research carried out in 2016 by the charity Age UK, half a million over-sixties spent every day alone, with no interactions with others. Nearly the same number would not see a living soul for five or six days at a time. Often that was all people wanted once we'd taken them to the toilet or made them a cup of tea: a bit of company. I would see their disappointment etched on their faces as we dashed out of their front door: the realisation that even a brief chat was too much to ask. We were racing against the clock and it was the customer who lost out. That, after all, was what they were – a customer, engaged in a frigid transaction with you, a representative of the business.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“It would be easy to make this purely about local authority budgets, but the privatisation of social care has cloaked the profession in a profit-making penumbra which at times seems to trump the welfare of those the sector is supposed to serve. For many of the companies that vie with each other for business, elderly people are first and foremost pound symbols on a balance sheet. The corporate jargon which permeates the sector reflects this avaricious raison d'être. Elderly people are 'clients', 'customers', and 'service users'. 'Patients' are a separate category of people for whom the NHS has to send a ambulance in emergencies.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“Almost as bad were the passers-by who expected some show of contrition in exchange for their meagre generosity. 'Make sure you spend that on food!' they would instruct Gary, as if the very purpose of handing something over was in fact to squeeze the last bit of self-respect from the person they were glaring down at.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“It suits the English to have some anonymous foreign drudge, invisible to the outside world, tucked away in an enormous warehouse carting stuff back and forth with perspiration dripping from his brow. In truth, we want to ignore it as our grandparents turned contentedly away from what went on 4,000 miles away in an Indian sweatshop.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“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 behavior in the first place. From the perspective of a middle-class professional cocooned in a London office, the belief that workers gorge themselves on stooge, grease and sugar because they are feckless and irresolute makes sense. After all, a middle class person only indulges like this in a moment of weakness or as part of a rational cost/benefit calculation. He or she will 'treat themselves' to a chocolate bar or a slice of cake because they feel that they deserve it. It is the cherry placed on top of life itself: a rational decision representing a sugary part in the back. A working-class person, on the other hand, will buy a greasy packet of chips as an emotional escape from the present.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“One of the first things to catch your eye on arriving in Rugeley is the obtrusively large red shopfront advertising private detectives. Is your partner cheating? Ask about our tracking service, reads the huge white lettering in the window. The shop also advertises lie-detector tests for hire. This is the paranoid world of The Jeremy Kyle Show writ large. Fidelity and faithfulness have been slowly chipped away by more ephemeral, market-driven principles promising instant gratification. You ditch one lover and take another, just as you might throw away an iPhone and buy a newer model in an emotional flight of fancy. 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.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“In 2015, 38% of workers earned less than the amount the average homeowner made from the increase in the value of their house.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

“As for those who doled out bursts of sudden violence to the men and women who bedded down under the decaying grandeur of Blackpool’s doorways and verandas – ‘This is not a human being,’ they must have told themselves as they climbed into their waiting taxis and slipped home to hot showers, warm beds and plates full of food, averting their eyes from the smoke that came from other people’s fires.”
― James Bloodworth, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain