Book: Dirt Cheap

Dirt Cheap, by Elisabeth Wynhausen, is an Australian journalist’s record of her one-woman social experiment: to spend about a year in minimum-wage jobs and see if she can live solely on her meager income. I was immediately attracted to the book when I saw it at the library, but thought it would be recording other people’s experience rather than her own. While her experience is interesting, it’s not entirely genuine, as she does rely a little on her savings (she had little choice), and she is sometimes confrontational in the workplace, knowing that she’ll soon be leaving of her own will.

This experiment is not unique: it was inspired by a similar effort by an American woman, Barbara “Somebody”, and has been followed up by a TV show featuring Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame) doing the same thing for 30 days. I’m not entirely surprised that more than one person is documenting minimum-wage reality: despite all the information available to us in modern times, we’re probably less aware of how other people really live than we ever were. As Alain de Button told us in Status Anxiety, once upon a time everybody knew their place in life and accepted it. Now, with opportunity in theory extended to all, I think we tend to guard our life experience a little, as our friends and neighbours can seem to be our competitors in the rat-race of life. As work is the foundation of most people’s lives, if you don’t work with wage-slaves, you’re unlikely to know any. Of course, we all think our experience of life is more or less the norm, but of course it isn’t. Anyway, when I last worked in an office, I saw the cleaners doing their nightly duty and wondered what their life was like. I even conversed with a couple of them on the odd occasion, but of course never gained any real insight. Thus I’m grateful for Wynhausen’s book, and, though I haven’t consumed them, the work of “Somebody” and Spurlock as well. Many people would likely find themselves more grateful for their standing in life if they took advantage of these insights into the lives of others.

Turning to the book itself, I found it a compelling read. At about 300 lightly-worded pages, you can knock it over pretty quickly. It describes about six jobs she had, each lasting a month or so. She covered a lot of geography – two cities and a rural area – and paid for accommodation from her earnings. Occupations include: sandwich hand; an egg-packing factory; office cleaner; nursing home attendant; hotel breakfast attendant; checkout operator; and … that’s about it, I think. There are a wide variety of experiences with bosses, customers, and co-workers. The conclusion that each chapter seems to share is that the worst aspect of the low-wage existence is the lack of dignity afforded by employers: the low value placed on your time, convenience, and morale. Readers: when you deal with low-wage people in future, remember that they probably take crap from bosses, customers, and even workmates; do they really need to take it from you too?

It’s a book worth reading. I would, however, like to see a book that documents the lifestyles of genuine wage slaves, who lack the options Wynhausen could fall back on. One thing’s for sure, however: I’m less bitchy about the relatively low teachers’ pay I’ll be collecting next year.