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Book Review
| Elisabeth Wynhausen, Dirt Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 2005. pp. ix + 246. $30.00 paper.
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| Given the current industrial relations climate in which we find ourselves, Elisabeth Wynhausen's work is a timely reminder of the bleak futures facing the most vulnerable workers in our society under John Howard's new world of WorkChoices. |
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Forsaking her status and income as a journalist and commentator, Wynhausen chooses to live for nine months at the bottom end of the Australian labour market, taking jobs as a cleaner, a factory hand, office worker, kitchen assistant and an assistant in a nursing home. |
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She describes this undertaking as a project, and the reader is inevitably drawn to make a judgement about the project's success. What were Elisabeth's objectives and has she achieved them in writing the book? |
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On balance, the book is a success. Firstly, because she deals with a number of assumptions that readers, particularly those well versed in Australia's cultural myths, might find surprising. Secondly, because her observations become very personal and deal intelligently with the so-called hidden injuries of class. |
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Transforming a commentator into a worker and making observations about it from a first person point of view, is part of an important literary and social commentary tradition which includes George Orwell's definitive Down and Out in Paris and London. In George Orwell's case, he focuses on a man working in a wide range of jobs, similar to Wynhausen's project, across Paris and London in the 1930s. |
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Elisabeth Wynhausen's story is Pygmalion in reverse. She goes from being an articulate and respected journalist to presenting herself as someone with limited skills and an invisible career. Her narrative about work skills, in particular that most so-called low skilled or unskilled jobs take a high degree of skill and many menial jobs are actually harder than higher forms of labour, is very perceptive and key in making the book a success. |
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One of the frustrations for me as a reader, though, was that Wynhausen does not speculate about whether her work colleagues could see through her disguise. Perhaps Wynhausen made the classic Margaret Mead mistake in Coming of Age of Samoa— she assumed her colleagues were treating her as if she was just another working-class companion when many of them had the insight to detect she was an imposter. |
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Except for the epilogue, which is the part of the book I enjoyed the most, there is surprisingly little reflection on her own transformation. While this allows her to concentrate on the differences between each of the jobs, it makes some of her tangential commentary, such as criticisms of unions, seem shallow. |
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Refreshingly, Wynhausen is prepared to show her vulnerable side. She demonstrates that as a middle-class woman she has a great deal of trouble in coping with the fatigue and physical pressure of a cleaning job and nursing home work wrings her out psychologically. She does a very good job of demonstrating that people at the bottom end of the labour market have little opportunity as individuals to influence events around them — leading to frustration and stress. |
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There is surprisingly little redemption in Wynhausen's book and this perhaps marks it out from some of the other commentaries in its genre. Unionism is cynically regarded as all but irrelevant in the individual worker's struggle to get some satisfaction, either economically or psychologically, from their work. Mind you, she occasionally refers to information she has gathered as a journalist indicating unions are still useful as a source of information and commentary. |
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Unsurprisingly, she makes a big deal of exposing the petty snobbery and arrogance of late middle-aged members in an exclusive club where she is working as a kitchen hand. It would have been interesting to see if Wynhausen had ever reflected on the pettiness and boorishness of many of her journalistic colleagues who can be observed in coffee shops and pubs all over the inner CBD behaving in an equally rude way to coffee hands, baristas and pub staff. It seems that the hidden injuries of class are only observable to her when she is being 'Liz' the kitchen hand rather than Elisabeth the journalist. |
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This is not only a good book, it's a very important book. The workers she has focused on are the very people who will suffer the most under the Howard Government's WorkChoices plan. These are the people who will have their few rights and entitlements, such as holiday leave and penalty rates, stripped away. No-one reading this book could reasonably expect 'Liz' or her workmates to powerfully negotiate their wages and entitlements in the way the Prime Minister pretends. |
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The book helps to highlight that John Howard's workplace changes are unjust and will only serve to destroy the remaining vestiges of an egalitarian culture and the fair go principle Australians used to pride themselves on. |
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| NSW Minister for Industrial Relations |
JOHN DELLA BOSCA | |
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