Dimensions
155 x 234 x 18mm
For three decades award-winning journalist Elisabeth Wynhausen has written compelling accounts of the lives of the working poor and the downside of Australia's ‘miracle economy’. In late 2001, she decided to join them.
Over a period of ten months Elisabeth went undercover and worked as a factory hand, an office cleaner, a retail worker and a kitchen hand, moving from state to state and attempting to live on her meagre earnings.
'Dirt Cheap' is the inside story of what it is like to work twelve-hour days on a factory line sorting eggs at a battery hen farm; of working a split shift of thirteen hours cleaning a nursing home for just over ten dollars an hour. As Elisabeth discovers that many so-called 'unskilled' jobs actually require an incredible amount of skill, so too does she learn that exposing the conditions of low-wage work can be sheer hell for your lower back, not to mention your morale.
Caustic, courageous and often funny, this is a unique view of class, power and middle management seen from the other side of the serving counter, and a very personal experience of what it is like to be under-paid, under-appreciated and part of Australia's emerging underclass.
