Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain by James Bloodworth ( Atlantic Books)

Journalist James Bloodworth’s story of being ‘embedded’ for six months as a zero-hours worker is vital reading for allWe perpetrate a swindle every time we use that hip phrase “the gig economy” to describe the modern labour market. If we wanted to be accurate, we could call it the “piece-rate” or the “precarious” economy. If we wanted to be polemical, we would call it the “rapacious” or the “boss-takes-all” economy. Silicon Valley’s success in prompting us to talk of “the gig economy” instead suggests that exploited men and women are the equivalent of rock stars, nipping into a club for a surprise session one night and heading off to Glastonbury the next. Far from being beaten down by lives of grinding insecurity, workers are freewheeling bohemians liberated from the routines that tied down their boring parents.

y allowing the myth that drudgery is freedom to pass unchallenged, we have sold out our fellow citizens so thoroughly they no longer even have the language to describe their predicament.

In this exceptional book, James Bloodworth sets out to work among “that now permanent class of people who live a fearful and tumultuous existence characterised by an almost total subservience to the whims of their employers”. While he was walking the miles of corridors in Amazon’s Rugeley warehouse, a comparison between today’s gig economy and yesterday’s Soviet Union hit him. All around were admonishments “to workers to feel joyful at the prospect of struggle”. Socialist realism had mutated into corporate uplift. In a Staffordshire warehouse the size of 10 football pitches, feelgood slogans were plastered next to pictures of beaming workers. “We love coming to work and miss it when we are not here!” they announced. 

 

‘Jeff Bezos is an associate, and so are you’: Amazon’s logistics centre in Pforzheim, Germany. Photograph: Christoph Schmidt/EPA

Bloodworth avoids the narcissistic style that blights so much leftwing journalism

Language was policed as thoroughly as every other aspect of the working day. Bloodworth’s supervisors told him he should not call the warehouse “a warehouse”. It was a “fulfilment centre”. No one Bloodworth met lasted the nine months required for Amazon to give them a full-time job. Like worn- out machines, they were scrapped after six. But their bosses did not “sack” them, they “released” them. Not that the bosses were “bosses”. Everyone was an “associate”.

“Jeff Bezos is an associate and so are you,” a cheery supervisor said. The only difference being Bezos was worth $100.7bn, while Bloodworth and his fellow “associates” walked back at midnight to fetid digs “with heavy legs supporting suppurating feet which over the course of the day had puffed up half a size bigger”. All the contracts he worked on, first for Amazon and then at Carewatch UK in Blackpool, the car insurers Admiral in Wales, and Uber in London, were zero-hours or nonexistent. Everywhere, “any vitality new employees might possess falls away from them like an old coat”.

We know this, don’t we? All who order from Amazon or hail Uber on our phones have had the opportunity to read many exposés. Why then is Bloodworth’s book being praised across the political spectrum when the work of so many other writers has been forgotten? The answer, I believe, lies in his physical and intellectual integrity. Bloodworth does not just take jobs. He moves into the slums his fellow workers live in. He gives you the smell of the cheap paint, the sight of the cockroaches scurrying across the floor, and the craving for junk food and cheap booze when an exhausting shift is over.

Equally important, Bloodworth avoids the narcissistic style that blights so much leftwing journalism. He has no time for the identity politics of those who imply that because they are speaking as a woman/queer/person of colour/transgender person they can be excused the need to think clearly and write well. “If it matters,” he says, he is the son of a single mother from Somerset. He might have been one of the labourers or care workers he now reports on, if he had not escaped to university. Prohibitions on cultural appropriation, in any case, fall particularly harshly on the working class because it, like all groups facing discrimination, needs support from every available quarter. As Bloodworth says, a working-class job is almost incompatible with becoming an author, when the “prerequisite to sitting down to turn out 80,000 words is not having to worry about the electric being turned off or the discomfort of an empty stomach”.


Immigration and class are now inseparable subjects. By Bloodworth’s account, the native working class has respectable reasons to worry about mass migration. The recruitment agencies that supplied eastern Europeans to Amazon warned their workers that, if they made a fuss about their conditions, there was a reserve army of their fellow countrymen ready to take their place. Bloodworth and his colleagues made about £250 a week. The average weekly wage in Romania was a little over £100. One migrant told Bloodworth he worked like an animal and was a nobody in the UK. But in Romania he would be a nobody without enough to eat.

Bloodworth argues it is progress that most British workers will not take jobs from employers who treat them like animals. He does not want to lionise migrants for putting up with intolerable conditions. Instead, he takes a nice swipe at stereotypical reactions to migration. The average eastern European meets two types of people in England: “those who wanted you to go home and those who wrote letters to liberal newspapers waxing colourfully about how wonderful and hardworking you were”.

The point is that no one should have to work in the conditions Bloodworth experienced. This is an easy sentence to write. But if we were to build a society where its sentiments were made a reality, every reader would have to accept paying more for the goods and services they now receive at bargain rates. Even from a selfish point of view, I think it a price worth paying. Jason Moyer-Lee of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain warns at the end of this book that, if we do not stop the mistreatment of Uber drivers and Deliveroo riders, one day everyone could wake up to find their employment rights gone.

It feels wrong to say that it is a pleasure to read Bloodworth when he is describing the true location of poverty in Britain, which is not among the allegedly workshy, but in the lives of the women at checkouts and the men packing boxes for 30 hours one week and two the next. That said, the element of pleasure or at least satisfaction cannot be denied. For Bloodworth is the best young leftwing writer Britain has produced in years. And it is not only the exploited who are lucky to have him.