Three women pitch up for a job. They mostly wear smart clothes and ingratiating smiles, but it makes no difference. No one shakes their hands or even looks them in the eye. The supervisor offers everyone coffee, without mentioning that they must pay for it. The women will come to this factory at night to clean, on zero-hours contracts. Some hurried training follows. But what they’re really being inducted into is an entire way of life: marginal, insecure, cut loose from the usual bonds of family and friends and workmates.
So begins Beyond Caring, a remarkable play at the National Theatre about life on zero-hours. Some of the details it shows will be familiar to readers of this paper: the text messages bearing instructions on when you’ll be working and when you’ll get paid. And anyone who’s done a crap job will recognise the depicted futility of doing drudge-work that has no purpose or endpoint. But the play also illustrates something quite new going on at the bottom of the labour market.
