Every fair from fair sometime declines

Polly Toynbee describes herself as ‘profoundly anti-religious’, but she had the energy and curiosity to accept an ingenious challenge from a group of Christians. Church Action on Poverty wanted her to spend Lent trying to live on the minimum wage of £4.10 an hour. She duly moved out of her comfortable house and into a cheerless flat on a nearby council estate, where she tried to support herself in such badly paid jobs as hospital porter, care assistant, packer of cakes in a bakery, school dinner lady, office cleaner and telesales rep. Her book sheds light on the kind of conditions endured by what she calls ‘the bottom 30 per cent’, the generally hidden multitude of workers who carry out essential tasks for wages which are sometimes lower than they were in the 1970s.

Perhaps the most depressing of her findings is that in many of the jobs she did employers not only expressed no appreciation of any extra effort, kindness or initiative shown by their workers, but actually insisted that their employees stuck rigidly to the letter of whatever contract they were carrying out.