Robert Colls
Working Five to Nine
Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain
By James Bloodworth
Atlantic Books 288pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
Question: do you know what the minimum wage is? In 2016 James Bloodworth went in search of low-wage Britain. He found it working as an order picker for Amazon, a care worker for Carewatch, a call centre operator at Admiral and a cabbie with Uber. Bloodworth is a man of the hard Left and he certainly did not plan this as a journey into human fulfilment. He comes across as sane and fair-minded. He is also very angry, but we’ll return to that later.
What did he earn filling plastic boxes in Rugeley, changing smelly pads in Blackpool, talking to a screen in Swansea and driving round in circles in London? At Amazon he earned (or would have earned had he stuck around) £12,740 per annum and at Uber £18,115, both before
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