Word: wynhausen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Statistics tell us it's a golden time in Australia: sustained economic growth, lots of jobs, growing household incomes. The thousands of Australians struggling on low wages might tell a different story, but they don't often get the chance to do so. Thank goodness, then, for Elisabeth Wynhausen, who decided the best way to listen to the poor was to struggle and sweat alongside them. For her book Dirt Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market (Macmillan; 246 pages), she shed her identity as a senior newspaper journalist and took up residence in a world most...
...Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London springs to mind, but, as Wynhausen acknowledges, this compelling inside account has a more recent precursor. In 1998, American journalist Barbara Ehrenreich set off for low-wage America, posing as a housewife newly returned to work and taking whatever unskilled jobs she could get for her best-seller, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Inspired to try the same thing in Australia, Wynhausen took a year off work, invented a c.v. and started knocking on doors...