Disappointing reading

[trixtah]

I just re-read Dirt Cheap: Life at the wrong end of the job market, by Elizabeth Wynhausen. I initially read it a few months ago, and was blown away by the shocking low-end job conditions that exist here in Australia. Things aren't perfect in NZ either - I lost my first career after being "made redundant" with no compensation during the worst throes of the Employment Contracts Act, which mandated individual bargaining for all workers - but since the Labour government was returned to power, a lot of that was undone, and the minimum wage has grown a lot. Here, of course, the Liberal/National coalition has been in power for over a decade, and workers' rights have been eroding all the time.

This book is kind of the Australian version of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich, which I unfortunately haven't read yet. All in the spirit of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, although in these instances, it's journalists going "undercover" to expose employment inequities, not a fictionalisation of the conditions that people have to endure at the bottom of the heap.

All very well, it seems. But, on a more considered re-reading, the book irritates the hell out of me. The author takes a year off work and takes on a succession of low-paid or casual jobs. She acknowledges her middle-class background and her lack of experience of any kind of manual work. She talks about her fear of being uncovered, and her determination to stick each position out to the end of the time she allocated to it (4-6 weeks), despite the temptations of returning to her "normal" life. So far, so very Black Like Me.

Leaving aside the condescending nature of not asking the people who actually work permanently in those circumstances to tell their own stories - I can sometimes see the utility of comparing and contrasting oppressive situations with what more privileged people consider to be the "norm" - what really gets me is that she was a crap worker. She bitches about the physical hardness of the work, and the social hardness of many of her co-workers, and yet seems to have no qualms in allowing other workers  to pick up her slack. The last scene involved her working as a kitchen hand in a rest home, and  one of the duties involved taking fresh water to the residents. Since she appeared to spend more time gasbagging with the residents than actually doing her job, she fell behind on that task. So it was devolved to the careworkers so that she could get on and do the rest of the work she was supposed to do. That wasn't the only instance of her incompetence on the job, but it was the most galling one.

In the instance of her working at a Target/Kmart/Big W-type shop, the incompetence she went on at great length about did serve to highlight the absolutely abysmal training they offered, and the lack of support they gave to their employees, nearly all of whom were "casual". But who the hell can't mop a floor and deliver water to a bunch of resthome inmates? I think part of the reason for highlighting the level of labour involved was to point out that paying $12-$14 an hour for work that takes such a physical toll on the body is not enough. But it would have seemed better coming from the perspective of "I had to do this, this and this, and this was the cost of doing my job adequately".

So, you know, I think this kind of story needs to be told, and I do admire her determination to do that kind of shit work for a year - I certainly wouldn't ever again, if I have the choice. Having an insight into just how disgusting workplace conditions can be here is invaluable. But I do wish she'd taken the approach of telling real stories from people who truly do their utmost to do their job and stay ahead - or the ones who don't, because they know the futility - and wrapping it up in the information and statistics she obviously researched thoroughly. That would have been a good journalistic exercise.

Comments

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

Much of what is bad about many crap jobs isn't the job so much as being stuck in that kind of work with no end in sight. This is lost on the privileged much more often than not IME.

No, work for pin money isn't the same as work for real and 4eva!

I won't bother with this book, it sounds as if on some level she was slumming.

[pretentiousgit.livejournal.com]

Prepare to be equally irritated by "Nickle and Dimed."

[saluqi.livejournal.com]

There's a new one out too by a Canadian guy who did the homeless thing for 12 months.

I suppose I see them as fairly blunt intruments. I've read Nickel and Dimed, and while I think the criticisms leveled at it are usually fair, it has also been an eye-opener for a lot of middle-class slobs who otherwise have no clue. If it encouraged a few more people to be polite and pay service workers as if they were human beings, well, it's probably been useful.

[moorspede.livejournal.com]

Just rocked in from Audiography and saw you talking books. I haven't read it yet but my best mate is raving about heading to the US to be Ehrenreich's love slave (a bit of eyebrow raiser since I know he's never had sex with a woman).

What can I say, the "Black Like Me" thing works, I don't mind being condescended to (I've become unemployed recently) if it gets the word out. Australians believe the employment figures, they believe the stitch ups they see on the current affairs programs. People like hearing biographical stuff because it's more palatable than reading a bunch of boring stats. Reading about a *person* humanises the situation. But yes, I agree, we also need to hear from people who actually *have to* work in those sorts of situations. I just wonder if anyone would read them.