politics | Temporary flexible work in France

Hectored, humiliated, bullied: how women bear the brunt of flexible labour
A new bestseller reveals how the financial downturn has heaped stress on those trapped in insecure, dead-end jobs

The harder he makes us work, the shittier we feel. The shittier we feel, the more we let ourselves get ground down." A cleaner sums up her life to the French journalist Florence Aubenas, who went undercover to explore the 'unmaking of the French working class' and the recession. The result, The Night Cleaner, has been a bestseller in France and is now being published in Britain, an appropriate memorial for 1 May, International Workers' Day, a reminder of forgotten traditions.

It tells its tale in gritty detail. The churn of employment agencies with their cheerful euphemisms – they even talk of solidarity – and endless training courses for jobs that the agencies and the trainees know don't exist. It's a charade in which applicants have to think up ways to convince prospective employers of their motivation for the most menial of cleaning jobs. "Needing work" is not considered satisfactory. CVs, even for temporary cleaning jobs, have to "stand out" from the crowd. The lesson that Aubenas, a successful Paris-based journalist, is taught again and again is that she is one of hundreds, even thousands, chasing every opportunity: she is surplus.

"Permanent" jobs are like gold dust in such low-paid, low-skill agency work. For a woman in her late 40s with no qualifications, as Aubenas claimed to be, she discovered there weren't even jobs in any traditional sense, there was work sliced into small portions – a couple of hours here, an hour there.MORE

Florence Aubenas, undercover on the crisis

When she had the idea for the project, Florence Aubenas read several books by undercover reporters, starting with one of the most famous Ganz unten (Lowest of the Low), in which Günter Wallraff recounts his experience when he disguised himself as a Turkish guest worker. At the time, she was plagued by doubts about the effectiveness of journalism. Does writing an article really change anything? "We were told, 'There's an economic crisis. Everything's going under.' There I was sitting at my desk wondering what to do — how to render the reality of that. Ever since I entered the working world, there had always been some kind of crisis. Problems with the economy were both omnipresent and intangible, but I didn't understand what that really meant."

It was then that she decided to leave for Caen, where she signed on the unemployment register for a firsthand experience of the job seeker's life. Her goal was "to tell the story of the people in France who are going under:" to do her job as a journalist, but delve more deeply into her subject matter to reveal something real. Instead of talking to people with a notebook in her hand, "she was going to become one of them, and accept all the limits that implied." To walk the proverbial mile in the shoes of an unemployed woman, because "not everything can be conveyed by words. I wanted to break through the barrier of language: to live there, so as not to be tempted, for example, to focus on people who know how to express themselves, as I would if I had approached the topic as a journalistMORE