All Day Long: a Portrait of Britain at Work by Joanna Biggs, book review

A devastating study of why capitalism isn't working

Politicians of all parties bang on about "hard-working families", while the right-wing media daily debases "benefits scroungers". It is OK to incite hatred of those who can't or won't toil for pitiful sums of money. They remain voiceless for fear of reprisals.

Millions of others are forced to take up jobs that can be arduous, evanescent and unrewarding. Desolate high streets are partly redeemed by charity outlets, pound shops and immigrant food stores. Meanwhile, the spoilt rich are well rewarded, many for doing no useful work at all. Then there are the hyperactive mega-earners, captains, who apparently keep Britain fired up and economically buoyant. They never stop or chill out.

Joanna Biggs, an editor at the London Review of Books, has created an intricate, verbal tapestry of these and other Britons at work. Look close and you find astonishing details, step back and you see just how splintered and wretched our nation has become. Hard modern capitalism seems to generate much money and unhappiness… callousness, too.

In 1974, Studs Terkel, the Pulitzer-prize winning author, travelled across the US and wrote Working, an illuminating anthropological and political enquiry into the impact of jobs on individuals, families and communities. Biggs, who references Terkel, has produced a similar, bravura study of our working nation. Strikingly, the lowest earners in Terkel's book had more hope, collective power and dignity than they do in the UK today. Few in the labour force have agency or fundamental rights. They can be fired without warning. Maybe this is why the rise in employment has not led to improved productivity.

Each chapter groups workers and focuses on what they actually do. Some make unlikely bedfellows. "Serving", for example, has a sex worker and barista and Nick Clegg's special adviser while "Repairing" features a rabbi, army major and nurse.Some firms seen as thoroughly modern, motivational havens, ruthlessly monitor and pressurise their staff. That sunny smile is forced. Care workers like Rochelle Monte work 12-day rotas on zero-hours contracts and are not paid for travel time. This is what she had always wanted to do and she remains true to her own decent values. But it is hard.

Biggs has penned a subtle, observant, quiet, devastating book. Work is tough and going to get tougher. Maybe one day the system will implode. In the meantime, we slog till we drop.