You must read this book

If 'What Would Barbra Do' made me smile earlier this year, my most recent reading, Polly Toynbee's Hard Work, made me angry.

Guardian correspondent Toynbee is well known for her left of centre views but this book is in no way a rant. She went and tried to live on minimum wage and, while admitting the artificiality of her own position, her experience and the stories of the people she met, spell out just how hard it is for the poorest people in society to get out of poverty.

While the Daily Mail would have you believe that the underclass is mainly made up of skivers and benefit cheats, Toynbee came across a large number of hard-working people, many quite talented, who the system traps in poverty. Many of them have to run two or three jobs just to survive.

She shows how the system of contracting out services like hospital cleaning, not only means the cleaners are paid peanuts and have terrible working conditions while the companies make big profits, but it is also providing an inefficient service.

She explains how difficult it is for the low paid to change jobs even for something paying better, without running up debts that are almost insurmountable.

She graphically illustrates the problems of living on the meanest estates where a few crack heads and anti-social yobs can make life almost unbearable for the rest.

She demonstrates that the treatment of applicants - making them travel to apply, often during working hours, and then back again for interviews - trap people in unrewarding jobs. While the piling on of targets that mean working many unpaid hours, and the constant cost cutting that adds to the work load and reduces the equipment to do the job, make already grindingly awful jobs even worse.

The most moving section is where she takes a job as a care worker in an nursing home for the elderly. Her description of the work is harrowing and the thought that the people who are doing these jobs, trying to give dignity and care to some of the most vulnerable people in our society, are among the lowest paid is simply a disgrace. And when a director of one of those homes spouts off about how it is important to the profits of his company to keep wages low, you just want to strangle him.

We live in a deeply unfair society in which the lowest earners pay an unfair proportion of tax, especially indirect taxes, and some of the most important but unpleasant jobs are so undervalued that we refuse to pay a living wage to the people doing them. Yet others - from city whiz kids to footballers - are paid obscene amounts of money. Banks, who make billions of pounds in profits, refuse to deal with the poorest, sending them into the arms of loan sharks and rip-off merchants.

Everyone, especially politicians, company directors and Daily Mail readers should be made to read this book. And afterwards they should ask themselves how much would they have to be paid per hour to wipe the backsides of several pensioners with dementia. It may not need a degree or the ability to pull off a city killing, but it is much more valuable than most jobs undertaken by the very rich.

Saltaire Sam