Hired
Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain
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Narrated by:
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Alister Austin
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By:
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James Bloodworth
About this listen
From the Orwellian reach of an Amazon warehouse to the time trials of a council care worker and the grim reality behind the glossy Uber app, Hired is a clear-eyed analysis of a divided nation and a riveting dispatch from the very front line of low-wage Britain.
We all define ourselves by our profession. But what if our job was demeaning, poorly paid, and tedious? Cracking open Britain's divisions, journalist James Bloodworth spends six months living and working across Britain, taking on the country's most gruelling jobs.
He lives on the meagre proceeds and discovers the anxieties and hopes of those he encounters, including working-class British, young students striving to make ends meet and Eastern European immigrants.
From the Staffordshire Amazon warehouse to the taxicabs of Uber, Bloodworth narrates how traditional working-class communities have been decimated by the move to soulless service jobs with no security, advancement or satisfaction. This is a gripping examination of Brexit Britain, a divided nation which needs to understand the true reality of how other people live and work before it can heal.
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- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In this adventurous, original book, NPR correspondent Frank Langfitt describes how he created a free taxi service - offering rides in exchange for illuminating conversation - to go beyond the headlines and get to know a wide range of colorful, compelling characters representative of the new China. They include folks like "Beer", a slippery salesman who tries to sell Langfitt a used car; Rocky, a farm boy turned Shanghai lawyer; and Chen, who runs an underground Christian church and moves his family to America in search of a better, freer life.
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Too political
- By dah551 on 06-26-19
By: Frank Langfitt
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The Road to Wigan Pier
- By: George Orwell
- Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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When Orwell went to England in the 30's to find out how industrial workers lived, he not only observed but shared in their experiences. He stayed in cramped, dreary lodgings and subsisted on the scant, cheerless diet of the poor. He went down into the coal mines and walked crouching, as the miners did, through a one- to three-mile passage too low to stand up in. He watched the back-breaking, dangerous labor of men whose net pay then averaged $575 a year.
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Frederick Davidson's a Great Reader
- By Debali on 01-11-09
By: George Orwell
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China's Second Continent
- How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa
- By: Howard W. French
- Narrated by: Don Hagen
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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An exciting, hugely revealing account of China’s burgeoning presence in Africa - a developing empire already shaping, and reshaping, the future of millions of people. A prizewinning foreign correspondent and former New York Times bureau chief in Shanghai and in West and Central Africa, Howard French is uniquely positioned to tell the story of China in Africa. Through meticulous on-the-ground reporting, French crafts a layered investigation of astonishing depth and breadth.
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He knows Both Africa and China
- By Malick Tchakpedeou on 12-01-16
By: Howard W. French
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The Unwinding
- An Inner History of the New America
- By: George Packer
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 18 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.
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Can't understand the low ratings!
- By Janet Pittman Henley on 05-27-13
By: George Packer
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Country Driving
- A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory
- By: Peter Hessler
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 16 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the longtime Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, acquired his Chinese driver's license. For the next seven years, he traveled the country, tracking how the automobile and improved roads were transforming China.
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Pass the white rice please
- By Nick on 02-18-10
By: Peter Hessler
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Strange Stones
- By: Peter Hessler
- Narrated by: George Backman
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Full of unforgettable figures and an unrelenting spirit of adventure, Strange Stones is a far-ranging, thought-provoking collection of Peter Hessler’s best reportage - a dazzling display of the powerful storytelling, shrewd cultural insight, and warm sense of humor that are the trademarks of his work. Over the last decade, as a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of three books, Peter Hessler has lived in Asia and the United States, writing as both native and knowledgeable outsider in these two very different regions.
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funny, entertaining
- By Katherine on 08-02-13
By: Peter Hessler
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The Road to Little Dribbling
- Adventures of an American in Britain
- By: Bill Bryson
- Narrated by: Nathan Osgood
- Length: 14 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to discover and celebrate that green and pleasant land. The result was Notes from a Small Island, a true classic and one of the bestselling travel books ever written. Now he has traveled about Britain again, by bus and train and rental car and on foot, to see what has changed—and what hasn’t.
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No Bryson?? Alas, another disappointed fan
- By Rick on 01-25-16
By: Bill Bryson
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My Korean Deli
- Risking It All for a Convenience Store
- By: Ben Ryder Howe
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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This sweet and funny tale of a preppy editor buying a Brooklyn deli with his Korean in-laws is about family, culture clash, and the quest for authentic experiences. It starts with a gift. When Ben Ryder Howe’s wife, the daughter of Korean immigrants, decides to repay her parents’ self-sacrifice by buying them a store, Howe, an editor at the rarefied Paris Review, agrees to go along.
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Absolutely delightful!
- By Grace O'Malley on 03-19-11
By: Ben Ryder Howe
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The Godmother
- By: Hannelore Cayre, Stephanie Smee - translator
- Narrated by: Julia Franklin
- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Meet Patience Portefeux, 53, an underpaid Franco-Arab judicial interpreter for the Ministry of Justice who specialises in telephone tapping. Widowed after the sudden death of her husband, Patience is now wedged between university fees for her two grown-up daughters and nursing home costs for her ageing mother. She’s laboured for 25 years to keep everyone’s heads above water.
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Had me at "my family were crooks."
- By Patricia on 03-04-23
By: Hannelore Cayre, and others
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The Almost Nearly Perfect People
- Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia
- By: Michael Booth
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 13 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Journalist Michael Booth has lived among the Scandinavians for more than 10 years, and he has grown increasingly frustrated with the rose-tinted view of this part of the world offered up by the Western media. In this timely audiobook, he leaves his adopted home of Denmark and embarks on a journey through all five of the Nordic countries to discover who these curious tribes are, the secrets of their success, and, most intriguing of all, what they think of one another.
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Obsessed with bad politics
- By Erik on 09-07-20
By: Michael Booth
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Glass House
- The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town
- By: Brian Alexander
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world's largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster's society was built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With access to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster's citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st century, and wrecked the company.
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What really happened to the American Dream?
- By Bill on 05-10-17
By: Brian Alexander
What listeners say about Hired
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jussi Korhonen
- 08-16-21
Not quite what it promises
The first and last parts (Amazon and Uber) are interesting. The other two parts (homecare and call centre) ramble on about other things, such as the history of coalmines and working class in general, and hardly mention the jobs he was supposedly working. I assume the author didn't really have enough material for a full book, so he added some fairly irrelevant stuff to make it longer. In short, the parts where the author actually talks about "working undercover" are interesting, while the rest of it is tedious to listen. While I'd find listening to a former coal miner interesting and their stories deserve to be heard, it was not what I picked this book up for. I also think the author only concentrated on the negatives of each job - in particular the call centre job did not sound horrible, but since he didn't need to stay working there, he was able to write any offered "perks" off as silly and argue that they should pay people more instead. He also earned what Uber told him he would, but then complained that he spent a lot of it on expenses such as renting a car and paying someone to clean it. All in all it was a fairly shallow book. Some of it was interesting, a lot of it wasn't. The narrator I thought did okay, he didn't have a lot to work with.
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- jared
- 02-05-22
Complaints without solutions
Interesting peak behind the curtain of the newest form of crappy jobs...but what is the point? Is cleaning a toilet better or worse than driving an Uber? All societies have jobs of all types. A much better book is Woke, Inc which better calls out the hypocrisy of big corporations and now the masses that have been tricked into supporting them.
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