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Dirt Cheap

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.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 240
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 978-1-4050-3644-3
  • EAN
  • 9781405036443
  • Genres
  • economics, australia
  • Release date
  • 2005