Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain
By Polly Toynbee
Bloomsbury, 2003
242 pages, $21 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/29219
Polly Toynbee, one of Britain's most prestigious journalists, was bothered by a letter from the Church Action on Poverty group. "Would you be willing to experience life on Britain's minimum wage during Lent [the 40 weekdays before Easter]", it asked, "and use your writing skills and reputation to publicise the plight of the low-paid worker?"
As a "left-of-centre" journalist, Toynbee's moral conscience was tugged, but she hesitated. Could a "well-heeled" writer cope on the British minimum wage, which is just £4.10 per hour — a week on this wage would pay for only two of the restaurant meals she had recently enjoyed in the smart end of Clapham.
However, Toynbee took the plunge and joined Britain's 4 million working poor. As nearly all of them live in council housing estates, Toynbee had to find accommodation to match her new budget. From her grim, cold, curtainless flat, in London's biggest and worst council housing estate in Lambeth, she glumly surveyed her work options.
Her local Job Centre was the favourite fishing spot for the casual labour-hire agencies, through which she found a job as a hospital porter at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. This was the world of National Health Service "efficiency" via outsourcing. With porters' pay restrained through short-term contracts, which handily expire just before qualifying for holiday pay and other costly labour "overheads", the hospital was achieving a "labour efficiency" that would gladden the hearts of its accountants and government masters.
The 11 porters (there used to be 16 before privatisation worked its magic) worked at a frenetic pace (eight hours a day walking) and rigid performance pressures (a maximum of 15 minutes spent to move each patient, no matter how lacking in wheelchairs, or how frail or distressed the patient).
Back in her flat, a dejected Toynbee wryly reflects on the ethics of income justice (it would take 80 hours working as a hospital porter to make what she could make for a half an hour's appearance as a media celebrity on the BBC. Despite regarding herself as "extremely frugal", she was £7.94 in arrears before buying a crust to eat, let alone "extras" like shoes, toothpaste, toilet paper or paracetamol.
So, as with the rest of the working poor, Toynbee went into debt, postponing payments in a delicate dance with the debt-collector, and swimming with the loan-shark companies that loaned to the poor with interest rates of 70% per annum. She managed to stay out of the clutches of the other predators of the poor, the hire-purchase stores, which advertised incredibly low weekly payments for goods bought on the "HP", goods which the poor cannot afford to buy up front and for which they wind up paying a vastly inflated total price.
Job number two was as a school-kitchen assistant (privatised), a hellish frenzy of scrubbing, degreasing and scouring before the next grime wave delivered by the binmen, who brought in port-a-loo sized bins of unwashed kitchen utensils from other schools whose kitchens had been closed by the contractor to save money.
This was gruelling labour, not "light work for mothers". Only the camaraderie of shared suffering and an instinctive pride in doing a difficult job well, kept the "dinner ladies" this side of a breakdown.
The temperature of Toynbee's low-pay baptism by fire was reduced to just simmering with her next job as a nursery assistant, providing workplace childcare for the staff of the British Foreign Office. This leg of the "women's work" trifecta of cleaning, cooking and caring showed Toynbee not only how underpaid, but how unseen, is female labour.
Despite being garishly attired in the bright blue Kinderquest company uniform as she pushed a pram, during the nursery's afternoon excursion, into a Downing Street swarming with ministers and senior civil service bureaucrats — who Toynbee had regularly interviewed — she found she had become a "non-person"; an absolutely invisible low-paid female worker, no longer a highly paid elite journalist.
After a "soul-wearingly pointless" job doing cold-calling tele-sales for office cleaning services (small business capitalism at its meanest, "small is definitely not beautiful" worst), Toynbee's penultimate job took her back to the National Health Service as an early morning privatised hospital cleaner. The last job she landed was as a "personal care assistant" (PCA) in a (privatised and understaffed) nursing home for the frail aged.
PCAs are a growth occupation, their cheapness making them more attractive than nurses to profiteering employers. The work was demanding of time, energy and sensitivity (the residents were on "death row", their brains and bowels already going or gone) in an environment that was emotionally and physically draining. While the nurses and PCAs generously expended kindness and care on the neediest people, the business end of the operation was clearing £1000 profit per bed, achieved through keeping staffing levels and wages low.
With her Lent adventure behind her, Toynbee was lucky enough to be able to walk away from it all and return to her well-feathered journalist's nest. Meanwhile, her oh-so-brief work colleagues remained trapped by poverty-level pay, lack of affordable child-care, racism (the hardest and least desirable jobs are the preserve of blacks and recent immigrants) and, above all, gender discrimination (the lowest-paying 10% of occupations are 80% female).
Toynbee is highly empathetic to the plight of the low-paid, and richly indignant about the under-valuing of stereotypically women's work compared to the exorbitant pay of executives' salaries. She regards with contempt the self-interested business mouthpieces who predict unemployment, inflation and general economic doom whenever a minimum-wage increase is proposed.
Faring little better at Toynbee's hands are the politicians actively keeping a lid on minimum-wage increases. These "representatives" of the people (who stumble at the first hurdle by "earning" more than 96% of the population) are paralysed with fear at upsetting the business sector: a 50p rise in the minimum wage "sending a cold sweat down their collective spinelessness".
So far, so good. But it is when Toynbee suggests solutions that her liberal framework, which accepts the class fundamentals of capitalism, buckles under the political strain. Yes, she supports larger increases in the minimum wage, but the economy is a "zero sum game" and some must "sacrifice" to make way for the low-paid. But those required to sacrifice are not the capitalist class but "high-income earners", who turn out to be train drivers, firefighters and other mainly male "middle-class" workers.
According to Toynbee, these workers are gobbling up far too much of the economic pie because of the "reckless militancy" of the 1970s, when trade unions and their "strident leaders" were committed to "conflict rather than harmony". Fortunately, Toynbee indicates, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher "forced democratisation on the unions" in the 1980s and ensured the "win-win deals" of responsible modern unionism. This is what she recommends to the dinner ladies and PCAs.
As a one-time candidate for the conservative Labour breakaway Social Democratic Party, we should not be shocked that Toynbee's recipe is for "steady social-democratic gradualism". She believes there are "limits to what governments can do" without jeopardising prosperity for all, and that "there is absolutely no need for socialism". Nor should we be surprised that Toynbee's book lacks the red edge of the recent, and funnier, Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, as she embarked on a similar journey among the USA's low-paid.
But we are entitled to feel duped by Toynbee's willingness to deny the working poor the socialist solution of fighting unions, working-class solidarity, aggressive proletarian feminism and a revolutionary assault on the economic (and political) power of the capitalist class which, for the sake of the filthy fat profits, directly cause their poverty.