Dirt Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market
By Elisabeth Wynhausen
Pan Macmillan Australia, 2005
246 pages, $30 (pb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
When Elisabeth Wynhausen surprised her friends by taking nine months off from her job as a Sydney-based journalist to find work on the minimum wage, she had little idea of just how surprised she, too, would be. Sampling a range of menial jobs, Wynhausen was on the wrong end of being ordered about, one muscle group after another aching with pain, as she became preoccupied with the next meal and the next bill. Welcome to the world of the under-appreciated, undervalued and under-paid minimum wage worker.
Wynhausen knew the theory — that Australia's "economic boom" was looking handsomely after executive salaries whilst the much-hyped jobs growth was in casual, part-time positions. Casual loadings do not compensate for the lack of paid holidays, sick pay or parental leave, or the lack of job security beyond the next shift. Nine out of 10 jobs created in the last 10 years have paid less than $26,000 a year; half have paid less than $15,000. Wynhausen was about to find out just what this meant in practice, despite her advantages over the typical minimum wage worker — she had a well-paying job and healthy bank balance to fall back on at any time. She had no money-draining dependants, or a rent or mortgage anchoring her to a miserable job.
To sidestep the age discrimination hurdle, 55-year-old Wynhausen took 10 years off her age (hoping that no prospective employer would ask to see her driver's license and unmask the deception) and landed her first job as a "food and beverage attendant" (at $12.95 per hour) in an exclusive club in a "mansion-speckled part of Sydney". The members, accustomed to having servants, "over-enunciated each word, as if talking to someone simple" when speaking to the "help".
Surging in like the tide from their games of tennis and rounds of golf, the assault of massed ranks of "privilege on the hoof" caused panic when orders went awry, like making a roast turkey sandwich without the usual sprig of parsley. This "serious oversight" of the rules was on a par with dressing incorrectly, a rule that Wynhausen also broke by wearing a sagging apron, earning her first dress code rebuke since being "reprimanded about my uniform [when] I was a girl at Manly Girls High".
The aristocratic contempt of the "well-bred", and the aching feet from standing all day ("no leaning" was a commandment etched in stone), spurred Wynhausen to her next job in an egg factory in rural NSW. In return for $13.77 an hour, she got sore hands, an aching back and further panic attacks as eggs rolled inexorably towards her on the remorseless production line, ending up with egg-splattered clothes like a Pollock on steroids whilst struggling with a masking tape dispenser "as if I were in a Buster Keaton film".
"Candling and sorting" was no relief, the visual checking for cracks in 240 eggs per minute inducing brain fatigue.
Moving on to Melbourne, Wynhausen at last joined the army of part-time workers. Office cleaning three hours a night reaped her a grand $39 a day, below (as she found out later) the award rate for a contract cleaner in Victoria. To make ends meet, she took, as one in 20 Australian workers have to take, a second job. As a hotel cleaner and general help (at $11.98 an hour) further contractual surprises awaited. Her $27,000 a year stipulated in her employment contract included superannuation, meaning the take-home pay was only $24,900. Weekend work would make not even passing acquaintance with penalty rates. She had to be available for as many, or as few, hours as necessary on any day of the year. This, Wynhausen observes, is modern workplace "flexibility", which all falls on the employee side, as she notes that knocking off early, even if the employees have completed all their work, is forbidden.
Wynhausen next joined the 2.3 million casuals in the Australian work force (one in every four workers, the highest rate in the developed world), and the major growth area of the Australian labour market, accounting for two-thirds of the growth in employment since 1990. Over half a million souls make up the retail casual labour force and Wynhausen joined them in a "low-end, high turnover" major chain store in Sydney, on an annual income that was "less than Frank Lowy, the shopping centre magnate, earned in a day". More aching feet, more stress (on a checkout with a dodgy scanner), and more Buster Keaton moments (when assigned to the fitting rooms on a Saturday where all day is peak hour) took the propaganda gloss off the jobs growth loudly trumpeted by the federal government and employers' federation spokespeople on six-figure salaries.
As a "stand-by" casual, Wynhausen was at the very bottom end of the casual labour force, learning never to knock back a shift, no matter how inconvenient the short-notice was, because this would mean a long wait until the next offer. She notes the hardly enviable fate of the "more secure" permanent casuals — split shifts (bosses employing a casual in blocks of three hours at a time to avoid having to pay for meal breaks) and payment by the designated shift hours rather than actual hours worked. Ever ready to denounce workers for stealing company time, employers routinely, with no sense of hypocrisy, steal 10 minutes of unpaid overtime here, half an hour or an hour there, whilst forcing new employees to attend training in their own, unpaid, time.
Wynhausen's final stop was in the community services industry, as a casual cleaner and kitchen hand in a small private nursing home (where she was again paid below the award) and in a large, church-run nursing home (which paid a magnificently uncharitable 40 cents above the award). The money came nowhere near enough to compensating for the problems of caring for people whose brains and bowels had gone, as dementia and incontinence threw up challenges beyond the call of her contract.
By the end of her odyssey, Wynhausen had given up the hopeless attempt to live on her earnings and was able to jack in the low-paying jobs, outcomes that the ruthless pressure of the minimum wage denies its more captive audience. Wynhausen also learns why most low-paid workers do not stand up more often for themselves against under-award payments — because they fear the sack or the withholding of shifts. In the hand dealt in the low-wage economy, the aces all go to the employer, a situation not redressed by the employers' governments — Coalition government policy, for example, is to not prosecute employers for underpayments amounting to less than $10,000, and, in 2003, only seven out of 5000 formal complaints resulted in prosecutions.
Lack of dignity marked Wynhausen's year in the cheap labour pool, from the humiliating charade of street-tramping to knock on employers' doors, "courting almost certain rejection" (the daily reality for "people getting Newstart, newspeak for the dole"), to the dirty work like toilet cleaning and slopping out bathrooms.
But the greatest assault on dignity was "being treated as a person of no consequence" in a low-wage job. Yet for all their invisibility and disposability, the minimum-wage worker is regularly in the sights of "members of the overclass", who "unceasing in their efforts at workplace 'reform' and labour market deregulation", sternly oppose all but minuscule increases in the minimum wage, which now stands at an "exorbitant" $24,000 a year.
Inspired by Barbara Ehrenreich's brilliant book on her stint in the low-paid work force in the US, Wynhausen has produced an Australian equivalent that frequently matches Ehrenreich's wit, story-telling colour, keen sense of class, gender and race, and indignation at the treatment of the low-paid. For a welcome break from our force-fed media diet of popes, princes and presidents, Wynhausen's hands-on exploration of the lives of Australia's minimum-wage workers is just what the doctor ordered.
From Green Left Weekly, May 25, 2005.
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