Sociology, July 2004 v38 i3 p623(8)
Through a glass darkly: undercover in low-pay Britain and America. (Book
Review) Tom Hall.

Barbara Ehrenreich Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-wage USA London:
Granta, 2002, 8.99 [pounds sterling] pbk (ISBN: I 86207 521 2), xiv+221 pp.

Fran Abrams Below the Breadline: Living on the Minimum Wage London: Profile
Books, 2002, 6.99 [pounds sterling] pbk (ISBN: I 86197 471 X), 184 pp.

Polly Toynbee Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain London: Bloomsbury, 2003,
6.99 [pounds sterling] pbk (ISBN: 0 7475 6415 9), 242 pp.

Fran Abrams is working 'undercover' as a cleaner, scouring urinals on her
knees in a London hotel, for 3.43 [pounds sterling] an hour. One month on
and she's stacking boxes of bottled chutney onto pallets in a factory, at
3.83 [pounds sterling] an hour. Next she's a care-assistant in an old
people's home, this time on 3.92 [pounds sterling] an hour, her best wage
yet. Abrams is really a journalist, hence 'undercover'; but for her
co-workers, Sergio, Lara and Shirley, this is the real thing. Sergio cleans
urinals too (at arms length with a mop though he's not supposed to); he
works midnight through to the early morning, with just time for a quick
shower before college starts at nine. Lara's kids are in care and her heart
is not in packing pickle; she would be better off financially if she didn't
work at all, the hours she's putting in. Shirley is busy changing
incontinence pads and dreaming of marriage. She works days, her boyfriend
Dave works nights; they have five kids between them. Shirley and Dave are
saving for a special wedding--all the trimmings:

   The stretch limos are Dave's big thing, apparently. He's been down
   to see them and they're the business. They even have a drinks
   cabinet and a video player in them. The glass is smoked so you can
   see out, but other people can't see in. (Abrams, 2002: 140-1)

The thing with smoked glass is that it works best from across the street.
If you get up close enough--really close--you can see in. And this is what
Abrams has done: crossed the street and got up close. Her book, Below the
Breadline: Living on the Minimum Wage, is an account of life on low wages
in Britain, based on three months spent doing menial work--cleaning,
packing, ancillary care--in London, Yorkshire and Scotland; it was
published in 2002. Not long after, in 2003, Polly Toynbee published Hard
Work; Life in Low-pay Britain, another work of social exploration. Toynbee
set herself up in a London council flat and took on Church Action on
Poverty's challenge to live on the minimum wage for Lent, taking on a
succession of low-waged work--hospital porter, dinner lady, nursery
assistant. The idea for both these books sprang from Barbara Ehrenreich's
wonderful study Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-wage USA, first
published in 2001 and since a New York Times Bestseller. Nickel and Dimed
is Ehrenreich's first-hand account of time spent working 'undercover',
scrubbing, serving and selling across the US for $6 or $7 an hour.

What we have then is three middle-class, professional
women--journalists--doing low-paid work as an experiment to see what life
is like on the underside, and reporting back in print. The premise, as with
all social exploration, is that the underside is a side we seldom see; a
terra incognita which turns out to have been under our noses all along. The
trope is well established. 'In these pages', writes George Sims in 1883, 'I
propose to record the result of a journey into a region which lies at our
own doors--into a dark continent that is within easy walking distance of
the General Post Office' (1976[1883]: 65). Tales of darkest London (Booth,
1890), of shocking poverty and savagery (James Greenwood (1976[1876]), the
Daily Telegraph's 'Amateur Casual', records a fight between a dwarf and a
dog, organized as sport) thrilled and appalled a Victorian readership, (1)
as did 19th-century realist fiction (see, for example, Arthur Morrison's A
Child of the Jago (1996[1896])). Detective fiction has its roots here too.
Sherlock Holmes moves 'undercover', on occasion, through London's seedier,
criminal quarters. (2)

Stories of underclass depravity are still news today. Investigative
reporter Nick Davies' Dark Heart: the Shocking Truth about Hidden Britain
(1998) explicitly revisits the language of 19th-century social exploration
so as to drive home to a contemporary readership just how bad things have
got for the poorest of today's poor--the drugs, prostitution, crime,
violence. Abrams, Toynbee and Ehrenreich belong to this same tradition of
investigation and writing, but they are up to something a little different.
Theirs is social exploration in a less heroic, perhaps a less masculine,
mode; not death-defying undercover work, as Ehrenreich puts it, but time
spent wiping tables, fetching and carrying, folding clothes and stacking
shelves--something millions of people do every day. This is not Britain's
darkest heart then, nor America's, but instead the marches--the borderline
where, as Abrams has it, 'the "respectable" world meets the underclass'.

All the same, travellers' tales fall flat if they contain no surprises; no
exotica. And the three books do not disappoint. The workaday, low-wage
world turns out to be a topsy-turvy place in which 'entry level' jobs are
not where people start out but where they end up; a place where help-wanted
ads may not mean that any help is wanted just now; where regulations
proliferate but nothing goes to rule; where, having spread the dirt around
with a damp cloth, spraying air freshener will signal that a house has been
'cleaned'. Strange, hybrid creatures dot the landscape: 'See,' gushes the
instructor in a training video, strapping on a backpack vacuum, 'I am the
vacuum cleaner.' Above all, this is a world where the laws of supply and
demand warp: where low labour supply does not boost the price of labour
whatsoever; where jobs are so cheap that a worker is encouraged to take on
as many as she possibly can.

All three books are descriptive in the main; the principal intent is
documentary. And there are many memorable scenes. The elderly care-home
resident, manoeuvred into the Trixe hoist by Toynbee and left dangling
'like a monstrous baby brought by the stork'; Abrams' pickle factory--'a
cheerful vision of Hell'--hulking cauldrons, clouds of steam and the
chest-stopping smell of ketchup; Ehrenreich's desperate row with her
co-worker Holly--'as low as I can get in my life as a maid'.

What then do we learn from all this? First and foremost we learn that these
jobs are hard. Not all that hard to come by perhaps, but hard to do;
physically demanding, unpleasant, and wearing in myriad ways. 'Shit
happens'--some wag from Toynbee's block of flats writes this on the
stairwell, above a pile of the stuff--and, as Ehrenreich soon discovers, it
happens every day to a cleaning person. Abrams too has to deal with her
share of excrement, emerging nauseous from lunchtime toileting at the
care-home. Then there are the rashes brought on by cleaning fluids, the
bone tiredness, the blistered feet pressed into cheap shoes, the back-pains
and arthritis of fellow workers scrubbing floors on hands and knees--'the
old-fashioned way', the brochure boasts. More modern injuries include
'acoustic shock', from intensive telephone work. Add to this the petty rows
and workplace rivalries (which remind Toynbee of her school days more than
anything), and what Ehrenreich considers must be some 'repetitive injury of
the spirit' to be got from humping away, day after day, at menial and
cosmetic work. We also learn that these jobs are thankless. 'Fuck the fuck
off, with your fucking phone calls!' a cold-called 'customer' yells down
the line at Toynbee, who quits her job in telesales after one day, unable
to face another shift. Praise is in short supply and the money is no real
reward. Workers' pay slips make it quite clear, in pounds and pence,
dollars and cents, just how much--how little--their work is worth.

Once earned, low pay has to be lived on, and this means that the hard work
continues well past the end of the shift. All three women struggle to make
ends meet. Expecting to find hidden economies that might make low-pay life
add up, they discover instead a series of penalties and special costs.
'[E]verything cheap is big and I can only afford small amounts,' Toynbee
complains; Abrams finds herself 'dragging up and down the high street,
trying to get the best price on a single pepper or a couple of bananas'.
Wages are, of course, always paid in arrears, and (private) landlords, of
course, want rent up front. It is the struggle for affordable rent that
finally does for Ehrenreich, but even the smallest (unanticipated)
expenditure--new watch batteries, job application fees, painkillers--can
knock a week's budget out of kilter. Abrams presents a final sum at the end
of each of her forays into low-wage work. She is 20 [pounds sterling]
adrift at the end of a month in London, comes out OK in Yorkshire, but
busts her budget again in Scotland. Toynbee mismanages her budget too, or
would do were she not running two parallel economies--meeting her bills on
time, out of her own pocket, but keeping paper accounts of just how far she
would be falling behind were this for real. Which it isn't.

And this, the artificiality of the arrangement, is a problem, surely. 'Who,
in real life,' asks Ehrenreich, 'plops herself down in a totally strange
environment--without housing, family connections, or job--and attempts to
become a viable resident?' Doing so makes things different. In some ways it
makes things easier: Ehrenreich's co-workers get by on the same money she
does, but for real and with children to support. In other ways it makes
things harder: Ehrenreich is on her own, without extended networks of
familial and other support to sustain her. All three books recognize the
significance of this sort of embeddedness, but only from a distance.
Embedded is what Abrams, Toynbee and Ehrenreich are not. Family life is
something they have left behind, and it does not feature much in their
accounts of life on low pay) But the real difference is not in the plopping
oneself down so much as in the up and leaving. Undercover journalists can
go back home any time they like; they can pack it all in and return to the
lucky side of life. This makes social exploration a simulated life, 'play
acting' even, as Toynbee suggests: 'an interesting experiment, with none of
the emotional desperation'. And if so, barring some extraordinary effort of
the literary imagination, is it not the case that accounts like these are
never going to tell us anything about what it really is to be poor?

A similar criticism is sometimes levelled against participant observation,
but it only really sticks if the claim is that this sort of fieldwork works
through a process of immersion in which an investigator or researcher
becomes one of those whose lives she wants to know, able to think and feel
as they do. This really would be a tall order. But it would be depressing
to conclude that just because we cannot be another person we cannot know
their life in some meaningful way. The truth, surely, is that you don't
have to get under anyone's skin in order to forge an understanding.
Alongside will do. Abrams may not know what Lara or Sergio's lives really
are, but this does not stop her finding out a bit about what they're like
(see Jenkins, 1992: 56). The difficulty though, and this is where the
criticism finds some purchase, is that this is covert research. Finding out
what Sergio's life is like is something Abrams has to do in secret, without
letting on; which means she has to rely rather a lot on what it feels like
to her. Same but different--one of the creative tensions that drives social
exploration and participant observation alike--is a tension these writers
have to manage on their own, as no one else is supposed to know what they
are up to. This leaves little or no room for what is otherwise one of the
strengths of ethnographic research: openly acknowledged difference and the
(then mutual) attempt to work across this.

As undercover investigators, all three writers are an undoubted success.
Despite initial worries that their cover will not hold, all three 'pass'
without much difficulty. This is a lesson in itself:

   Several times since completing this project I have been asked by
   acquaintances whether the people I worked with couldn't, uh,
   tell--the supposition being that an educated person is ineradicably
   different, and in a superior direction, from your workaday drones.
   I wish I could say that some supervisor or coworker [sic] told me
   even once that I was special in some enviable way--more intelligent,
   for example, or clearly better educated than most. But this never
   happened, I suspect because the only thing that really made me
   'special' was my inexperience. To state the proposition in reverse,
   low-wage workers are no more homogeneous in personality or ability
   than people who write for a living, and no less likely to be funny
   or bright. Anyone in the educated classes who thinks otherwise ought
   to broaden their circle of friends. (Ehrenreich, 2002: 8)
This basic, humanist, message is at the root of all three books. And yet
the divide--us and them--remains. Indeed Ehrenreich's undercover work, her
invisibility, turns on its continued operation. In a variant on worries
about 'passing', both she and Toynbee fret that (even if their co-workers
do not see them for who they are) their cover may be blown by a chance
encounter with a friend or colleague. This never happens. Donning a tabard
proves to be as effective a disguise as one could wish for, because it is
such a ready and recognizable signal of difference. Working as a nursery
assistant in central London, pushing buggies along Whitehall, Toynbee is
sure some politician or policy person will recognize her, but in her
colourful uniform she turns out to be 'an absolutely invisible non-person
here'. Nor do any of Ehrenreich's customers, those she waits on and cleans
for, ever recognize her face or name. Indeed her name seldom enters into
it: '[i]n this parallel universe ... I am "baby," "honey," "blondie," and,
most commonly, "girl".'

Perhaps the most telling question to ask of social exploration is not
whether it's altogether real, but whether it's altogether right; whether
there isn't something a little (morally) suspect about this sort of
enterprise. Again, the covert nature of the research is a part of the
problem. There is, after all, a basal dishonesty to going 'undercover'; all
three journalists admit to being made uneasy by this, and discuss their
feelings at some length. The charge of voyeurism--noses pressed against the
smoked glass--is something of a cheap shot perhaps, but does need to be
minded, as much in the writing as in the doing of social exploration. Here
I would have welcomed rather more unease, and a greater reflexivity. I have
referred above to the familiar tropes of social exploration's golden age:
dark continents within easy reach. Such literary strategies are perhaps
constitutive of social exploration as a distinctive branch of modern
literature (see Keating, 1976: 13), but they remain as loaded today as 100
years ago. (4) 'Let me tell you about the nearly poor,' writes Abrams,
'They are ... different from you and me.' 'Standing at my fourth-floor
misted-up window,' writes Toynbee from her council flat, 'I feel as far
away as a foreign correspondent up in the hills of Kashmir or Afghanistan.'
And here is Toynbee again, this time introducing the UK edition of Nickel
and Dimed: '[Ehrenreich's] work invites all middle class people to come
with her on a journey into this other uncivilised world, not in the third
world but here, swept beneath our carpets.' The reader is supposed to sit
up and take notice, but doesn't this language shore up the very
dichotomy--us and them, the poor as 'other'--that these authors elsewhere
seek to bridge and blur?

There can be no doubt as to the conscious intent behind any one of these
studies. All three journalists see a social injustice that wants putting
right. The pay and prospects their co-workers endure are shameful, and
things ought not to be this way. Nor are they getting any better. Toynbee
is dismayed to find herself worse off as a low-wage worker than when she
undertook a similar investigation 30 years previously

   So in 2002 I was now being paid far less in real terms than in 1970
   when there was no minimum wage--75.45 [pounds sterling] [a week]
   less. This is something I did not expect when I started out on this
   book, yet whenever I could make the comparison, I was now always on
   lower wages despite the great increase in national wealth since
   then. It was the most shocking discovery. (Toynbee, 2003: 178)
How much more of this can the low-waged take? Ehrenreich closes her book
convinced that change must come, that the low-waged will make a stand
eventually. But she does not say when, and her own attempts to unionize her
co-workers at Wal-Mart come to nothing. There are a host of reasons why.
Poverty, it turns out, is not much of a leveller for the nearly poor. 'On 4
[pounds sterling] an hour or thereabouts you can't afford working-class
solidarity,' notes Abrams. Instead it is the minor status distinctions and
sad little pay differentials that seem to matter most. Time and again the
low-wage workplace is shown to be a complex hierarchy, often colour-coded:

   ... white hats, green hats, red hats, blue hats, purple hats and
   even the odd hard hat. What does it all mean? ... Women have floppy
   caps, men have plain ones. Drones wear white caps--all the same for
   men but pleated for permanent women, elasticated for agency. Quality
   controllers have green hats, coordinators--one down from supervisors
   --have blue hats and supervisors have red hats. Fitters have purple
   overalls and purple hats, forklift drivers have green overalls and
   green hats. Only the shift managers have hard hats--because, as [her
   co-worker] Michael explains, 'their brains are more valuable than
   ours'. (Abrams, 2002: 75-6)
The distinction between 'agency' and staff is one that Toynbee notes as
particularly divisive. Collective action is further undermined by the high
turnover of staff. In some of the jobs hardly anyone lasts more than a
couple of weeks. And those who do stick around have good reasons to keep
their heads down. All three writers note the normalization of suspicion in
the low-wage workplace. Workers are closely watched and monitored in myriad
ways, and to such an extent that one suspects this has less to do with
guarding against any loss to productivity than with the exercise of power
for its own sake. The demeaning surveillance begins before an offer of work
is even made, with personality tests, urine samples, and job interviews
'the real function of which', Ehrenreich concludes, 'is to convey
information not to the employer but to the potential employee, and the
information being conveyed is always: You will have no secrets from us'.
Such veiled threats are coupled with more co-optative management
strategies--the upbeat and inclusive language of team work and team
targets. All of which makes for a puzzling workplace and a puzzled, put
upon workforce--rushed, fretful, tired, determined, loyal, cowed,
indifferent, anxious. Abrams, Toynbee and Ehrenreich each convey this
complexity very well.

In conclusion, I found all three books worthwhile and interesting. Two
points came across forcefully. The first, made over and over, is that we
are looking for poverty in the wrong places if we look only to the
spectacularly poor. Most of the poor are hard at work, but getting nowhere:
they are poor because they are working. In uncovering how and why this
happens, Abrams, Toynbee and Ehrenreich cover a richly complex terrain. On
the whole they do so engagingly, writing with a clarity and focus that
sociologists would do well to match. Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed deserves
to be singled out as sharply observed and wholly absorbing. The second
point, implied throughout, is that we are looking for poverty in the wrong
places if we look only from our desks. If the poor are hidden away somehow,
then so too, perhaps, are the sociologists. We publish less of this sort of
work--good, realist ethnography addressed to pressing social issues--than
we might. '[Y]ou can think all you want,' writes Ehrenreich, harking back
to her days as a doctoral student in biology, 'but sooner or later you have
to ... plunge into the everyday chaos of nature.' Sherlock Holmes, that
arch explorer of the Victorian underworld, master of disguise and fictional
counterpart to the participant observer as professional stranger, would
agree. 'For strange effects and extraordinary combinations,' he instructs
Watson, 'we must go to life itself' (Doyle, 1981[1892]: 51).

Notes

(1) Across the Atlantic, consider Jacob A. Riis' illustrated tour of New
York's slums, How the Other Half Lives (1997[1890]).

(2) Denzin (1997: 163-98) writes engagingly about crime fiction, journalism
and ethnography.

(3) For Toynbee, family contact is a guilty pleasure: she 'cheats' by going
home some weekend nights. Abrams and Ehrenreich also bend or break the
various rules they have set themselves.

(4) In resorting to geographic metaphors to convey a sense of enormous
social distance, social explorers of the 19th century--Sims, Greenwood,
Booth--not only revealed how far from home the city slums seemed to much of
Victorian society, but further cemented that difference. These places, thus
described, were indisputably foreign (see Hebdige, 1988: 20), the
inhabitants akin to savages--as much primitives as paupers.

References

Abrams, F. (2002) Below the Breadline: Living on the Minimum Wage. London:
Profile Books.

Booth, W. (1890) In Darkest England and the Way Out. London: Salvation
Army.

Davies, N. (1998) Dark Heart: the Shocking Truth about Hidden Britain.
London: Vintage.

Denzin, N.K. (1997) Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for
the 21st Century. London: Sage.

Doyle, A.C. (1981[1882]) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books.

Ehrenreich, B. (2002) Nickel and Dime& Undercover in Low-wage USA. London:
Granta.

Greenwood, J. (1976[1876]) 'A Man and Dog Fight in Hanley (from Low-Life
Deeps)', in P. Keating (ed.) Into Unknown England, 1866-1913: Selections
from the Social Explorers. Glasgow: Fontana.

Hebdige, D. (1988) Hiding in the Light. London: Routledge.

Jenkins, R. (1992) Pierre Bourdieu. London: Routledge.

Keating, P. (ed.) (1976) Into Unknown England, 1866-1913: Selections from
the Social Explorers. Glasgow: Fontana.

Morrison, A. (1996[1896]) A Child of the Jago. London: Everyman.

Riis, J.A. (1997[1890]) How the Other Half Lives. London: Penguin.

Sims, G.R. (1976[1883]) 'The Dark Side of Life (from How the Poor Live)',
in P. Keating (ed.) Into Unknown England, 1866-1913: Selections from the
Social Explorers. Glasgow: Fontana.

Toynbee, P. (2003) Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain. London: Bloomsbury.

Tom Hall

Cardiff University

Tom Hall

Is a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. His
ethnography of youth homelessness, Better Times Than This, was short-listed
for the BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2004.

Address: School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Glamorgan Building,
King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WT, UK.

E-mail: [log in to unmask]

Named Works: Undercover in Low-wage USA (Book) - Book reviews; Below the
Breadline: Living on the Minimum Wage (Book); Hard Work: Life in Low-pay
Britain (Book)

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