How about...

1. Paul Harrison, Inside The Inner City (Penguin 1983).
A survey of inner city poverty based in London's East End.

2.Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.

3.Katherine Newman, No Shame in My Game

And

4. Polly Toynbee, Hard Work: The other side of the tracks

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,873460,00.html

Thirty years ago Polly Toynbee took a series of menial jobs to investigate
life for Britain's lowest-paid workers. Last year she repeated the
experiment to find out if anything had changed. In this exclusive first
extract from her remarkable new book she travels a few hundred yards from
her comfortable home... and enters a different world

Monday January 13, 2003
The Guardian

When the letter arrived, I thought briefly about it then dumped it in the
cluttered tray of awkward ones where it lay unanswered on my desk for
weeks. I would glance at it occasionally, then drop it back undecided.
Church Action on Poverty were inviting me, among others, to live on the
minimum wage for Lent. It would be impossible. When New Labour finally
introduced the minimum wage in April 1999, it did raise the wages of some
1.3 million people a little, but fewer than the government expected because
it was set far too low. Introduced an ultra-cautious £3.60 an hour, it has
barely risen in relation to other wages since, now standing at £4.10 an
hour [since the book was written it been raised to £4.20]. How could I
possibly live on £4.10 an hour?

That's £164 a week, twice what two of us paid the other night for one local
restaurant meal in Clapham, nothing exceptional. Every time I thought about
my own gold-plated life as a journalist - the taxis, the Guardian's car, my
mobile phone, eating out, or the gifts for my family and what's called
"discretionary spending" on pleasing non-necessities - it seemed undoable.
I had to carry out my ordinary working life. How would I get from place to
place in a hurry, to press conferences, seminars or interviews, with just a
bus pass?

I thought about my Victorian house bought decades ago and, like most in
London, now worth a fortune. I thought about how much comes in each month,
never needing to count the cost. It couldn't be done. Or at least, nothing
remotely resembling my life could be lived on that sum.

As a patron of the National Secular Society and profoundly anti-religious,
I should have had no problem in scribbling Church Action a polite refusal.
And yet the challenge chimed with something in my past: 30 years ago, when
I was starting out in journalism, I wrote a book entitled A Working Life.
It was a personal exploration of a world of manual work I knew nothing
about. I had travelled the country taking jobs as they came, describing the
lives of people, many just getting by, with hardship lurking around the
corner. I worked in factories and on assembly lines; I was a hospital
orderly and a private in the Women's Royal Army Corps; I visited steelworks
and coal mines. My book now seems redolent of another era, a time of strong
trade unions and comforting but sometimes malign social solidarity. Pay
rates were rising at a time of social progress and the chance of upward
mobility for working-class children was in the air.

Then and now. There is no need for cloying nostalgia, but let's get it in
perspective. The economic story of the past century was growth: national
income multiplied by seven. After the last war, the gap in income between
rich and poor got steadily narrower: we have never been more equal than in
the late 1970s. Wealth as well as income was shared more evenly: the
richest were taxed progressively, while more people started to acquire
wealth by owning their own homes, building up pensions and savings. But
that historic progress towards greater social justice stopped dead with
Margaret Thatcher: then, the rich got richer and the poor were left behind,
both in income and in wealth.

I wanted to go back again and look at the world of work as it is now. How
much social progress has there been since 1970 in these minimum-wage jobs?
After all, the greatest single group of poor people are already in work.
three and a half million poor people live in working households. There are
more working poor than there are unemployed. There are more working poor
than there are poor pensioners. As growing numbers of single mothers,
people with disabilities and anyone else who possibly can is urged into
work, it becomes ever clearer that most poor people are not the
feckless/hopeless/helpless, but people who work very hard for long hours
and yet still fall below the official poverty line.

1) Jenny from the housing office walked me over to my flat, swinging the
keys in her hand as we picked our way across the estate between potholes
and puddles. Yes, she said, there were plenty of empty flats in this block,
unlettable in its present state while renovation work was unfinished.
People who had waited years to reach the top of the council house list were
given three choices. "But no one would choose the White House. It's the
hardest to let of them all."

For the past year I had been following the fortunes of a council estate
near where I live. Clapham Park Estate had been picked as a New Deal for
Communities project in Labour's flagship regeneration programme. As the
biggest and worst estate in one of London's poorest boroughs, it had won a
£56m grant to see what the residents themselves could do with the money to
breathe new life into a semi-derelict community. They had agreed to let me
sit in on their meetings and get to know the local people who were trying
to effect a miracle. I wanted to watch the scheme's progress at first hand,
as a way of observing government targets close up, not just through reams
of annual statistics. Now my connections on the estate gave me the chance
to go and live there for a while, making my attempt at living on the
minimum wage a little more realistic.

Even among the grimmest blocks on the west side of Clapham Park, the White
House was an eyesore. Its once-white facade was pockmarked all over with
deep holes exposing concrete and metal wires, as if it had been bombarded
in a long Balkan war, which was why the residents called it Little Kosovo.

Jenny led the way into my staircase in the block. The stairway walls might
once have been painted a pinkish beige, but they had been overlaid with
layer upon layer of brownish stuff scattered on the surface, something
indescribable and horrible. Jenny wrinkled her nose but said she'd smelled
worse. There was a small lift just inside the passage with a battered,
graffiti-covered silver door. "Sorry, but I never use the lifts in these
places," Jenny said. "I was stuck in one once. Never again." So we walked
up four floors past gaping broken windows on each stairway, past rubbish
chutes clogged with filth.

My fourth-floor flat shared a dark cul-de-sac landing with two other closed
front doors, but all was silent. The doorway had been clamped over with a
temporary heavy metal security door to stop squatters breaking in. "Not
just squatters," Jenny said, as she tried to sort out the right keys to the
maze of locks on the outer door and the three locks on the inner door.
"It's the crack dealers who move in, set up in a flat and intimidate
everyone else. But these doors don't keep them out. They use cutting
machines and they just wrench the whole metal frame out." I didn't like to
ask what was to stop them doing that to the flimsy door underneath once the
security doors were removed and a tenant moved in.

By now my expectations of this flat were zero. I feared the worst as Jenny
finally pushed open the door and we stepped into a dark passageway.

I felt immediate relief. Once inside with the door shutting out the smell
from the corridor, it wasn't bad, not bad at all. A good-sized sitting
room, two bedrooms, a small kitchen and bathroom were all in cream-painted
good condition. "You want to remove the carpet?" Jenny asked. She wrinkled
her nose at its uncertain spillages, dubious smears and brown sticky spots.
I considered it, paced up and down, but thought whatever was underneath
might be worse and I would have no money for anything else, so I said I'd
keep it. I would just keep my shoes and slippers on.

2) The clock starts ticking. From the day I was given the keys to my flat I
started to live on the income of a single woman alone and looking for work.
I had just £53.05 a week in Job Seeker's Allowance, so I needed to find a
job fast. But first I needed to furnish my flat. Where would I turn? The
only place to go is the state social fund. It is a strange and fickle
beast, a flexible friend, dubious and duplicitous, as I was about to find
out.

The main Lambeth benefits office in Blackfriars Road is an old-style
monstrosity filled with rows of depressed or angry people gazing at a
television set high on the wall, waiting for their number to be called. I
had come to see Arthur Jones, a battle-hardened Lambeth officer with more
than 20 years' service with the old DSS, now the Department of Work &
Pensions.

As he came down to greet me, he looked like a well-seasoned police officer
in a short-sleeved white shirt with cotton epaulettes and grey hair cropped
en brosse. As a social fund officer he had seen claimants by the thousand.
He had heard every kind of entreaty and he had witnessed plenty of genuine
hardship, he told me as he led the way to an upstairs interview room.

I had arranged a hypothetical interview with him to find out what the
social fund would give me if I was down on my luck arriving in an empty
council flat with few possessions. I might be a woman fleeing a violent
husband. I might be a refugee family. I might have had my home repossessed
after losing my job and defaulting on my mortgage. "How much can you give
me to furnish my empty flat?" I begin.

"Nothing at all."

"Nothing?"

"I can only loan you money."

"Even if I am destitute?"

"Yes. That's all there is, loans."

"OK, a loan then. How much can you loan me?"

"What's your income?"

"Right now I'm on Job Seeker's Allowance of £53.05 a week, but I hope to
get a job soon that ought to bring in somewhere around £160 a week."

"Well, how much do you want?"

"My flat is completely empty so I want whatever you can give me."

"No, it doesn't go like that. You have to make a bid and I have to decide
if it's reasonable. I judge you on how reasonable your demands are."

"So if I make a lowish request I'm more likely to get it than if I start
too high?"

"Perhaps. It certainly helps your credibility. Tell me what you need this
loan for and I will tell you if I think it's reasonable."

"First I need a bed."

"Right. I'd agree a bed was essential."

"How much will you give me for a bed?"

"£75 from Argos."

"What else can I have?"

"We mostly reckon a cooker is essential, too, though some people don't
cook."

"OK, how much for a cooker?"

"£99.99 from Argos, page 474 in the catalogue."

"What about a table and chair?"

"I might say you could sit on the bed. Some officers would say that. But if
I said yes to you, then I'd allow you £75 for a table and four chairs from
Argos."

"Curtains?"

"Only if you tell me you are overlooked and you need them for decent
privacy. If so then it's £35 for those."

After that he allows me £15 for crockery, £25 for pots and pans, £10 for
cutlery and £50 for bedding. So, I ask, how much in all will he give me?

"OK, £400 in your case," he says. "I think that's all you can afford. That
will be £8 a week off your benefit, 15%."

"How long for? When do I have to pay it back by?"

"Fifty weeks."

"Does it matter what I spend it on?"

"Not at all. Spend it on anything you like."

"Thanks. Is that it then?"

"Just one other thing. How much I loan you also depends on how much I have
in the fund on this particular day. We're very low at the moment."

"Does that mean you might turn me away altogether?"

"No, it just means I'll trim the sum I give everyone. Maybe instead of £75
for that bed, it'll be £35."

"I see. So where do I buy a bed for £35? Second-hand, perhaps?"

"Yes, but we're not allowed to recommend second-hand. We only recommend
new."

"Is there anywhere else except Argos?"

"Sometimes I suggest Crazy George's in the Elephant and Castle. Try there."

3) I found the stores on the ground floor of the Elephant and Castle
shopping centre. Amid the shabbiness, Crazy George's emporium stood out as
a gleaming beacon filled with brand-new bright furniture and electrical
goods, all bathed in golden, glittering light. It is laid out like Argos
with each item in the cat alogue on show, but the customer must go to the
desk to order from the stockroom the items they want. On the counter are
the Crazy George catalogues with this message: "Discover Affordable
Shopping Made Easy!" Inside it promises, "All our products are available
with NO DEPOSIT AND NO CREDIT CHECKS."

Unlike discount stores such as Argos or Ikea, everything here is
extraordinarily expensive, way beyond ordinary department-store prices for
things that looked bright but shoddy. All the prices are quoted at the
per-week hire-purchase price in bold letters. The total cash price is in
small letters underneath, because people don't come here to pay cash.

The cheapest double bed they offered, the "Nicole", was a basic
metal-barred number. It cost £4.99 a week for 156 weeks - three years. I
was not convinced Nicole would last that long. Even smaller print said,
"Mattress available separately", with no mention of what the mattress cost
extra. The APR was 29.9%. The small print underneath the picture said the
Nicole cost an astounding £432.38 cash, without mattress. Checking around
locally, I saw a bed that looked much the same in MFI in Clapham High
Street for £189, with mattress. Other items in the catalogue were equally
bad value: take the Accessory Package consisting of a small hearth rug and
a small lamp with a matching coffee table. That also costs £4.99 for three
years, or £432.38 cash.

But I could see why it was tempting to shop this way. However much better
value it would be for me to buy the MFI bed from the remnants of my Social
Fund loan, I just hadn't got £189 to buy it and I could not borrow that
money from anywhere else. If I really needed a double bed, I could see how
easy it would be to persuade myself that a mere £4.99 per week was more
affordable, in my circumstances. Crazy George would give me the bed on
production of nothing more than a payslip, a tenancy agreement and two IDs,
even though I was penniless. Like most of the well-off, I had never heard
of Crazy George because the well-off never need credit at these usurious
rates when every bank is tripping over itself to lend cash to the rich at
good rates.

We who own cars can drive out to vast department stores such as Ikea and
pay cash for a house full of good bargains. They who have no cars and no
cash end up paying 29.9% APR.

4) By chance, the very next week, as I scoured the pages of the South
London Press early on Friday morning before all the best jobs had gone, I
found this: "Are you persuasive, persistent, confident, tactful and able to
deliver results? Do you want the opportunity to prove it? Crazy George's
have a number of opportunities across London... You will be a central point
of contact for clients in resolving all queries or issues relating to late
payments. This will involve telephoning or visiting them at home. It will
mean using your initiative and problem-solving skills ... We can offer
fantastic career prospects and exceptional rewards - so act NOW!"

I called the number. "Yes," said an enthusiastic voice. "Crazy George's
always has loads of jobs for debt collectors." But it wasn't really the
kind of work I was looking for.

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