Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain

Freedom, if it is to mean anything at all, must mean the freedom for everyone to live decently rather than the freedom of a growing consumer class to order another class around.

Lifting the lid on the reality of our employment frontline, James Bloodworth delivers a truly eye-opening book about Britain’s most demeaning and poorly paid professions.

Cracking open Britain's divisions, journalist James Bloodworth spends six months living and working across Britain, taking on the country's most gruelling jobs. He lives on the meagre proceeds and discovers the anxieties and hopes of those he encounters, including working-class British, young students striving to make ends meet, and Eastern European immigrants.

From the Staffordshire Amazon warehouse where sick days (even with doctors notes) earn disciplinary points, to the zero-hours contracts of the care-industry and the taxi-cabs of Uber, Bloodworth narrates how traditional working-class communities have been decimated by the move to soulless service jobs with no security, advancement or satisfaction.

Hired is a gripping examination of Brexit Britain, a divided nation reliant on the work of an undervalued and overstretched workforce, which needs to understand the true reality of how other people live and work before it can heal. Described as ‘the best young leftwing writer Britain has produced in years’ by the Guardian, James Bloodworth has written an engagingly readable, thought-provoking book that makes for essential – if undoubtedly sobering - reading.

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• ISBN: 9781786490148
• Number of pages: 288
• Weight: 398g
• Dimensions: 225 x 148 x 21 mm