The Guardian 8 June, 2005
Book Review by Bob Briton
Dirt Cheap
Life at the wrong end of the labour market
Published by Pan Macmillan Australia, rrp $30, pp246.
There is a category of non-fiction books developing in which well-off authors from comfy
backgrounds take time off from their usual, more rewarding work to experience what it is
like to live among the "have nots". And the genre is not new. It dates back at least to the
time of George Orwell with his famous examples The Road to Wigan Pier and
Down and Out in Paris and London.
I can remember reading one in the late 1970s (do you think I can remember its name?) in which a
woman author battles to keep her dignity and sanity while working at a tuna canning factory, the
subscriptions department of Reader's Digest and elsewhere. In 2001, Barbara Ehrenreich —
author and regular contributor to magazines such as Time, The Nation and
Harper's — delivered on an idea she had at a meal in French country-style restaurant with
the editor of the last-mentioned publication. "How does anyone live on the wages available to the
unskilled? How, in particular, we wondered, were the roughly four million women about to be
booted into the labour market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour?"
Insightful humour
In March this year, an Australian equivalent of Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed found its way
into the bookstores. Elisabeth Wynhausen is a senior writer with The Australian who made a
spur-of-the-moment decision to take nine months leave from her respected position and go
undercover in the world of the minimum-wage worker. Dirt Cheap is the tale of her gruelling
experiences.
I thoroughly enjoyed Dirt Cheap although "enjoyed" is probably not quite the right word to
use in reference to a description of other people's misery. I did not think I would at the outset. I
expected to be annoyed at the anthropological aspect of an author — with $20,000 sitting in an
account "just in case", with qualifications and networks, property and the self-confidence that only
"professionals" seem to have — lobbing into the realms of "shit jobs" where I (and I bet most of our
readers) have spent a good deal of time. I remember the reaction I had in the early 1980s to a plan
by well-meaning senior public servants to join in a "day of rage" at the unemployment crisis by
trying to live on the equivalent of the adult dole for a day. A day!
However, I am sure the efforts of Ehrenreich and Wynhausen would be appreciated by the workers
trapped in the low-paid jobs they both describe with great insight and wit. Neither author actually
managed to live as they had planned on the pitiable incomes they got from uncertain shifts serving
food, cleaning, working in shops, old people's homes, factories and the like. Nevertheless their
reporting conveys the feel of this grim, impersonal segment of the labour market very
effectively.
Dirt Cheap is particularly valuable to Australian readers. Wynhausen puts her own
harrowing experiences into its expanding context throughout her account. The recent statistics she
cites are shocking and are trending worse: nine out of ten jobs created in the "boom" decade we
have just experienced are paid less than $26,000 a year; half are paid less than $15,000, 46 per
cent of people aged between 55 and 64 have no paid work at all, casual employment for workers
aged 15 to 29 grew from 38 to 66 per cent between 1988 and 2001.
If you read only the more general facts and figures quoted in the body of the book and the
endnotes you could predict many aspects of misadventures and hardships that befell the author.
Wynhausen never managed to get tolerable low cost accommodation within her imaginary budget
and close enough to where she found low-paid work. Her sympathy goes out to the majority of
workers in this bracket in Australia's major cities who live with "housing stress" — the term used to
describe housing costs that chew up more than 30 per cent of their income.
Even in rural "Greendale" (most names in the book have been changed to protect the innocent) the
researcher is obliged to part with $200 a week for acceptable no-frills lodgings. Being a 55-year-old
jobseeker, you could anticipate that she would spend a lot of time scanning the newspapers (the
best source of the worst jobs) and traipsing door-to-door to shops, cafés, and hotels. Like so many
other Australian job-seekers today, she had to fill in the "normative tests" for outfits like Pizza Hut
and KFC to find out (none-too subtly) if she would dob on a fellow worker she found to be pilfering
supplies.
To her credit Wynhausen steeled herself and pressed on till she got a string of different McJobs.
There was the exclusive club in her native Sydney; the egg plant in "Greendale" where 30 women
and a handful of men unloaded, sorted, stacked and packed an astonishing 47,000 dozen eggs a
day; a cleaning job in a huge Melbourne office/clinic complex; helping kitchen staff at a couple of
three star hotels; in a department store and finally working in the kitchen and laundry of a couple of
nursing homes.
"Unskilled" jobs
The challenges of the jobs varied greatly. At the Melbourne hotels surveillance cameras and an
intrusive management led to long stretches wiping up imaginary dust and marks from cupboards
and gym equipment. The club also involved extended periods at "make-work" pursuits or standing
at attention looking ready to spring into action. At the nursing homes there was the stench of urine
and faeces and the task of loading arms full of filthy bedding and "personals" into washing
machines. The egg sorting job was carried out at a pace that she later found out nobody gets used
to.
However, there was one activity that the author refused. For the princely sum of $13.77 an hour,
there was no way Wynhausen was going to go into the egg factory's huge barns and collect the
dead chickens that had been trampled by the others over the course of a week. She knew this
refusal was a luxury that none of the other women could afford.
Contrary to the propaganda in favour of "flexible" labour markets, none of her colleagues in any of
the workplaces she toiled in had well-off spouses propping up their unenviable lifestyles. This was
one of several admissions with which Wynhausen concedes that her experience of the "wrong end
of the labour market" could never be as dispiriting as it was for the majority of her co-
workers.
Dirt Cheap reaffirms what I think would be most people's experience of unskilled jobs. For
starters, they usually require a stack of skills that do not get passed on by what passes for
"training". Fellow workers are isolated and do not chat breezily about every detail of their personal
lives. Often they are "moonlighting" at other crappy jobs or having their income supplemented by
social security. They guard their hours on the roster against newcomers. They can be starved out
of a job when the hours dry up. Even part-timers have very few guaranteed hours of employment.
Unions are non existent or remote. The Jobs Network is a bloated, expensive, useless
joke.
Class consciousness
In the end, however, it was not the frustrating jobs or the abysmally low pay that made the
strongest impression on the senior writer. It was the unaccustomed feeling that she and her talents
were not valued, that the businesses she approached would take pains to convey the impression
that the "unskilled" worker is a supplicant and a nuisance.
"It was excruciating walking into an office to tell someone staring at me as if I'd just tracked dog shit
over the floorboards that I was looking for work and willing to do anything. Is it any wonder that
jobseekers routinely subjected to such slights grow too discouraged to look for work?"
Another distressing feature of her temporary status was that the battlers she shared it with it did not
have a consciousness that fit the situation:
"It was as if I existed only as a part of a class of people doing menial work for minimum wages, a
particular irony considering how few of the people I met identified themselves as working class.
Like everyone else in society, they were encouraged to think of themselves as individuals, with the
freedom to sign individual contracts."
Like several of its predecessors, Dirt Cheap does not propose an alternative to the growing
income gap and the substandard working conditions decried very eloquently in its pages. One of
the motivations for the book was the author was curious to see if life on the minimum wage in
Australia was producing anything like the hellish conditions endured by millions of workers in the
US — where she had lived in the '90s. It does not quite plumb those depths but Wynhausen's
research reveals injustices that scream out for action.