Overview

Could you live on the minimum wage? Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee took up the challenge, living in one of the worst council estates in Britain and taking whatever was on offer at the job centre. What she discovered shocked even her. In telesales and cake factories, as a hospital porter or a dinner-lady, she worked at breakneck pace for cut-rate wages, alongside working mothers and struggling retirees. The service sector is now administered by seedy agencies offering no prospects, no screening and no commitment. Most damning of all, Toynbee found that despite the optimism of Tony Blair's New Deal, the poorly paid effectively earn less than they did thirty years ago. Britain has the lowest social spending and the highest poverty in Europe. As the income gap between top and bottom has widened, so social mobility has shuddered to a halt. The low-paid are caught in an economic double bind that victimises them and shames the rest of us.

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9780747564157

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Reviews

Few non-fiction books have caused such a stir in America in recent times as Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, in which the writer took a succession of low-paid jobs in order to see whether it was possible to survive on these pitiful wages. Her answer - that it was not - sparked a huge debate in the USA about the working destitute, as opposed to the more familiar stereotype of poor people living on welfare. Polly Toynbee, the well-known Guardian journalist who was asked to write the introduction to the British edition of Nickel and Dimed, was an apt choice for the reason that she is not only a champion of the poor in the UK, but she had herself, some 30 years previously, written a very similar book, in which she travelled the length and breadth of Britain, living and working with those in low-status jobs. Last year she was due for a sabbatical from The Guardian and decided to revisit her earlier experiences in order to find out how much had changed for those at the bottom of the pile. Instead of travelling around, Toynbee managed to arrange a short lease on a council flat in one of South London's most unappealing estates. Her conclusions should shame us all: for those who don't know, the (grudgingly introduced) minimum wage is just #4.10 per hour, and this in an era and a city (London) where living standards for the middle classes, and a huge swathe of the working class have improved immeasurably. Yet for agency-employed kitchen porters, care assistants, call-centre operatives, cleaners and dinner ladies, the world of consumer indulgences, as portrayed in nearly every television drama or advertisement, is unattainable. Toynbee managed, to her credit, to eke out a miserable existence, living on potatoes and split peas, in a bleak flat where household waste, urine and excrement tainted the communal stairwell. Commuting to work by underground was an unaffordable luxury: a journey of two or three buses was the only alternative. Interspersing the narrative are statistics and historical facts that make it clear that the depressing existence she describes is common to many more of our fellow Britons than we might realize. This compelling book should be read by everyone with an interest in public policy - or simply in other people's lives. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist and broadcaster and was formerly the BBC?s social affairs editor. Previous books include Did Things Get Better? An Audit of the Labour Government (with David Walker), Hospital, Lost Children, The Way We live Now and A Working Life. She has won the National Press Awards and What the Papers Say columnist of the year. She lives in Lambeth and has four children.

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