‘An extraordinary and unsettling journey into the way modern Britons work. It is Down and Out In Paris and London for the gig economy age.’ Matthew d’Ancona, Guardian columnist and bestselling author of Post- Truth ‘A tautly written exposé of the swindle of the gig economy and a call to arms.’ Nick Cohen, journalist and author of What’s Left? ‘I emerged from James Bloodworth’s quietly devastating and deeply disturbing book convinced that the “gig economy” is simply another way in which the powerful are enabled to oppress the disadvantaged.’ D. J. Taylor, author of Orwell: The Life ‘A truly devastating examination of the vulnerable human underbelly of Britain’s labour market, shining a bright light on the unjust and exploitative practices that erode the morale and living standards of working-class communities.’ Frank Field, MP ‘James Bloodworth pulls back the carpet and exposes the rotten floorboards of Britain’s low-wage, insecure and exploitative economy, describing living and working conditions that Dickens would recognise. It must surely act as a wake- up call to our political elites to genuinely tackle the gross inequality at the heart of our society.’ Wes Streeting, MP ‘Whatever you think of the political assertions in this book – and I disagree with many of them – this is an important investigation into the reality of low-wage Britain. Whether you are on the Right, Left or Centre, anybody who believes in solidarity and social justice should read this book.’ Nick Timothy, former Chief of Staff to Theresa May, now columnist for the Daily Telegraph and The Sun ABOUT THE AUTHOR James Bloodworth is a journalist, broadcaster and author. He writes a weekly column for the International Business Times and his work has appeared in the Guardian, New York Review of Books, New Statesman and Wall Street Journal. He is the former editor of Left Foot Forward, an influential political blog in the UK. @J_Bloodworth Published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2018 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd. Copyright © James Bloodworth, 2018 The moral right of James Bloodworth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 014 8 E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 015 5 Printed in Great Britain. Atlantic Books An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ www.atlantic-books.co.uk CONTENTS Preface Part I: RUGELEY Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Part II: BLACKPOOL Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Part III: SOUTH WALES VALLEYS Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Part IV: LONDON Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Epilogue Notes Index Life is good, and joy runs high Between English earth and sky William Ernest Henley, ‘England, My England’ PREFACE Early in 2016, as the sun crept out from behind the clouds and the bitter winter frosts began to subside, I left London in a beaten-up old car to explore a side of life that is usually hidden from view. Around one in twenty people in Britain today live on the minimum wage. Many of these people live in towns and cities that were once thriving centres of industry and manufacturing. Many were born there and an increasing number were born abroad. I decided that the best way to find out about low-paid work in Britain today would be to become a part of that world myself: to sink down and become another cog in the vast, amorphous and impersonal machine on which much of Britain’s prosperity is built. I would penetrate the agencies that failed to pay their staff a living wage. I would live among the men and women who scratched a living on the margins of a prosperous society that had supposedly gone back to work after a long, drawn-out recession. And I would join the growing army of people for whom the idea of a stable, fulfilling job was about as attainable as lifting an Oscar or the Ballon d’Or. In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, ‘austerity’ became the raison d’être of the British government. There was ‘no money left’ – so it was confidently proclaimed – and public services had to be cut back drastically or else contracted out to private companies who supposedly knew better how to run them than the state. Since then the mood music has grown more optimistic: Britain is enjoying record levels of employment. Yet sunny optimism about the labour market masks the changing nature of the contemporary economy. More people are in work, but an increasing proportion of this work is poorly paid, precarious and without regular hours. Wages have been failing to keep pace with inflation. A million more people have become self-employed since the financial crisis, many of them working in the so-called ‘gig’ economy with few basic workers’ rights. Toiling away for five hours a week may keep you off the government’s unemployment figures, but it is not necessarily sufficient to pay the rent. Even for those in full-time work the picture is hardly rosy: Britain has recently experienced the longest period of wage stagnation for 150 years. I set out to write about the changing nature of work, but this is also a book about the changing nature of Britain. Half a century ago Arthur Seaton, the anti- hero of Alan Sillitoe’s cult novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, may have hated his dull job as a lathe worker in a Nottingham factory, but he could at least take a day off now and then when he was ill. There was a union rep on hand to listen to his grievances if the boss was in his ear. If he did get the sack he could usually walk into another job without too much fuss. There were local pubs and clubs at which to drink and socialise after work. All in all, there was a definite sense that, while the struggle between bosses and workers was not at an end, there had been a fundamental change in its terms. The social democratic era probably ended in 1984, when the police batons came crashing down onto the heads of working men whom the former Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had once described as ‘the best men in the world, who beat the Kaiser’s and Hitler’s armies and never gave in’. The stunned faces of the miners, knocked for six by the police and plastered luridly across the tabloids, seemed to capture the realisation of the time that, after a brief interregnum, to be a working man or woman was once again to be, if not despised, then only just tolerated. Life in Britain has improved a great deal for many over the past forty years. Unthinking nostalgia is a dead end, the equivalent of an attempt to reside in the ruins of a crumbling old house that is full of cobwebs and on the verge of collapse. A sepia-tinged yearning for the mid-twentieth century is especially insulting to those for whom the century of the ‘common man’ was just that: the century of the white, heterosexual man. We live in a time that is both richer and more free than the era of hanging and the Notting Hill race riots. But as our world of liberal progress was being built, another world was being dismantled. The mines are gone but so, almost, are the trade unions, reduced to rump organisations largely confined to the public sector. Were Arthur Seaton alive today, he would conceivably be trapped on a zero-hours contract in a dingy warehouse, cowed, fearful and forever trying to slip off for a two-minute toilet break out of sight of a haughty middle manager. Or maybe he would have gone on to university – a prospect quite unthinkable for most working-class young men and women when the novel that made him famous was first published in 1958. A book about work is inevitably a book about class. Each generation we tell ourselves that class is dead, yet with every generation we fail to dispose of the cadaver. Those who lose their footing and slip down the social order very often sink into poverty; but even today a relegation to the lower depths of the social hierarchy can invite onto one’s head a class hatred that burns every bit as painfully as economic dislocation. I would not claim that what follows is an original or pioneering way of reporting on working-class life. Nor did I set out with the intention of confirming my already-existing prejudices. I did not know what to expect on my travels. It would be more truthful to say that I went into the project with an open mind and was to some extent radicalised by the process. Many of the things I found were worse than anything I had expected to see in one of the richest countries in the world. But then, pick up almost any newspaper in Britain today and the message leaps off the page at you: poor people are the way they are because of their moral laxity or their irresponsible life choices. The old Victorian attitude still prevails. As Henry Mayhew subtitled the fourth volume of his epic nineteenth- century documentary on London, there are: Those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work. Neat divisions of this sort are as illusory today as they were when Queen Victoria was on the throne: an era when pseudo-scientific theories of class put people in the workhouse at home and threatened them with a bayonet in the guts abroad. The gap between comfortable prosperity and miserable squalor is not always as vast as many would like to believe. It is easy enough to sink down into poverty in modern Britain, and it can happen regardless of the choices you make along the way. I do not claim that my going undercover was the same as experiencing these things out of necessity. Ultimately, I was a tourist. If things got too bad I could always draw on money in the bank or beat a hasty retreat back to a more comfortable existence. But my aim was never to get drawn into an ego-driven squabble over the ‘authenticity’ of my approach. I simply decided that going undercover would be the most effective way of learning about low-paid work, and I still believe that to be true. I will, of course, be denounced by some for writing this book at all. A healthy fear of paternalism can occasionally be replaced among well-meaning people with a blanket lionisation of ‘authenticity’. Many would undoubtedly have preferred that I deferred the task of writing this book to an ‘authentic working-class voice’. This desire to hand working people the pen or the microphone is an admirable impulse in its own right; yet it can lead to quietism if treated as an absolute. Few of the people I would meet on my journey had the time to pontificate in the Guardian about their lifestyle. One of the reasons there are so few working-class authors today is precisely because a working-class job is typically incompatible with the sort of existence required to dash off books and articles. At a very basic level, a prerequisite to sitting down to quietly turn out 80,000 words is not having to worry about the electric being turned off or the discomfort of an empty stomach. There are many factors that can obstruct the paths of working-class authors. The existence of this book is probably not one of them. Any movement that seeks to change those circumstances will also have to bring a significant section of the middle classes along with it if it is to succeed. I believe that books like this one are a more effective way of doing that than yet another hair-splitting pamphlet preaching to the already converted. And besides, if it matters, I was doing precisely the sorts of jobs that appear in this book well into my early twenties. I was born to a single mother in Bridgwater, Somerset. I left school with few qualifications; after various arduous retakes I was the only one of four children to study at university. This book is less an exercise in ‘slumming it’, and more a return visit to a world I narrowly escaped. As for what I have sought to avoid, I did not want to write another dry and turgid tome about ‘austerity’ or ‘the poor’. There are enough books of that sort already. I wanted instead to experience at least some of the hardship myself, and to write a book that contained real human beings rather than unusually saintly or malevolent caricatures. The media landscape is already soaked with the opinions of company directors, managers, bureaucrats and the orthodoxies of one political hue or another. Thus I have approached the worker and the man or woman who sleeps in the street with my questions, rather than the boss or the academic with a theory purporting to explain why they sleep there. Ultimately, I wanted to see things for myself rather than read about them second-hand in books and newspaper articles written by those who had never really looked. In terms of the practicalities, when I set out on my journey I had in my hand a scrap of paper with a rough plan scrawled upon it: I would spend six months taking whatever minimum-wage jobs I was offered. The aim was not to travel to every part of the country, but nor did I want to stay too firmly rooted in one spot. Outside of London I would look for work in the sort of towns that rarely interest governments or the media unless there is an election in the offing. I did not begin with a plan to go to anywhere in particular; I simply went where I was offered a job and when I got there I lived, where possible, on the salary I was paid. The only people who knew what I was up to were those I sat down with and interviewed along the way. In those instances, I stepped temporarily out of my adopted persona and became once again a writer. Had any of my employers ever got wind of what I was up to they would undoubtedly have fobbed me off with some PR dogsbody, which is what happened whenever I tried to speak to an organisation openly. I was tired of people telling me things they knew to be untrue simply because they had been paid to say them. Politically speaking, a lot has happened since I first set out to write the book. One government has fallen and another has taken its place. The present Conservative regime clings on but only just. The Labour Party has moved to the left and, for the first time in a generation, there is a whiff of socialism in the air. All of this – together with the ascendancy of a mercurial American President – has ignited a renewed interest in the plight of the so-called ‘left behind’ and others thought to be feeling disenfranchised by globalisation. This sympathetic mood may pass soon enough. But when it does, the resentments will linger on: there is much to be in disgust about, and it takes a certain type of comfort and affluence not to see it. Ultimately this is a book about working-class life in the twenty-first century. It is an attempt at a documentary about how work for many people has gone from being a source of pride to a relentless and dehumanising assault on their dignity. This is a series of snapshots rather than a comprehensive study. I could not go everywhere and work for everyone, but I do not feel that anything in these pages is particularly exceptional. I am certain that someone reading this book could go out and find similar things for themselves, which in a way makes what follows even more disconcerting. James Bloodworth, November 2017 PART I RUGELEY