Elisabeth Wynhausen

Elisabeth Wynhausen, a writer from The Australian newspaper, decided to spend most of a year living life as a worker in Australia's increasingly casualised workforce. Working a maximum of one month in each role, she worked a string of jobs, including stints as a factory hand, checkout cashier, kitchen hand, and cleaner.

Wynhausen, a 55-year old woman at the time of her experiment, deliberately thinned her resume to the point that it only listed menial jobs that she had done decades ago. She chose not to mention her credentials as a respected writer, and nationally-syndicated columnist. Her bosses, co-workers and customers would have to take her on face value as an unskilled, presumably unambitious middle-aged woman.

I like the premise of "Dirt Cheap" better than the execution. In many ways, the book feels like a missed opportunity. I have two major problems with the book, that I will describe below:

1)
Firstly, I was disappointed that she did not fully commit to the experiment. Rather than living totally on her wits, and the money earned from her casual jobs, Wynhausen had a security buffer. She describes multiple times where she dipped into her savings to pay for expenses (e.g. a parking fine) that she simply could not afford with her casual income. I wonder whether this decision kept Wynhausen from experiencing the full depths of the cycle of poverty that low-income are susceptible to. This itself could have been an interesting trail to follow.

2)
My second, and major criticism of the book is the way it is written. Wynhausen's experiment contained the seeds of a compelling narrative but, to my tastes, she focused on the wrong elements of the story.

"Dirt Cheap" is written as a chronological account of Elisabeth Wynhausen's period of casual employment. Her book is divided into chapters for each of the jobs that she took, describing the conditions within the workplace, and the people that she was working with at the time.

As such, the book is largely a chronological series of events, as we move from week to week, and job to job. As such, some elements of the book were repetitive and superfluous. Rather than recounting the events in succession, I would have preferred a book structured around the deeper issues at play.

I would have preferred if Wynhausen had divided the book into the underlying themes of life as a working class, casual worker. How do customers look at you if you are a 55-year old woman performing menial work? Did they speak to Wynhausen differently as a cashier, compared to the way that she was spoken to in her role as a writer? What is it like to be expected to drop everything and immediately work a shift with minimal notice? How did her co-workers spend their leisure time, compared with her newspaper colleagues?

Wynhausen hints at these deeper themes, but she doesn't dwell or expand upon them. For example, on page 176. she mentions that she was so drained from an overworked shift as a cashier that she developed a lingering headache that ruined her next day. A mere half-sentence mention of an awful burden that impacts the quality-of-life for working class people.

Rather than mentioning these things as brief asides, Wynhausen should have expanded upon them in greater detail. She should have spent more time describing the burdens that society expects the working class to carry, and how it affects the lives of those working menial jobs at the bottom of society.

Instead of reading this book, I recommend "Hand to Mouth" by Linda Tirado, which engagingly does all of the things that "Dirt Cheap" does not.

Though not a bad book, "Dirt Cheap" (2005) is simply a missed opportunity to place readers in the shoes of the 'working poor' underclass of society. It is largely a redundant read, now that the superior “Hand to Mouth” (2014) exists.… (plus d'informations)