Then she makes her real mistake, for which her co-workers will not forgive her – she says it is junk work anyway. Clearly, the fragile self-esteem of the women depends on holding down jobs for which the heroic fiction is required that their labour has dignity and significance.She writes that "the poor have disappeared from the culture at large, from its political rhetoric and intellectual endeavours" Indeed Inequality is the contemporary euphemism for class society. Class suggests living flesh and blood, with possibly antagonistic interests, while there are no actors in the great drama of inequality, a beautiful abstraction which rich and poor are united to combat in their universal dedication to wealth-creation.Not that the poor create much for themselves. Ehrenreich lingers on the details of living and working in environments unfamiliar to her; she evokes the sheer physical pain of each day; she muses on the ubiquity of pubic hairs in the bathrooms of the rich, and the varying nature of filth in lavatories.This physical intimacy between poor and rich is belied by their social distance.

Employers sometimes install CCTV cameras to discourage their staff from rifling through drawers or stealing the objets d'art. Ehrenreich observes that: "Work is supposed to save you from being an 'outcast', but what we do is an outcast's work, invisible and even disgusting. Janitors, cleaning ladies, ditch-diggers, changers of adult diapers – these are the untouchables of a supposedly caste-free and democratic society."The book has all the raw energy of the work, performed by those best described in that archaic phrase, "the labouring poor", who work all hours, hold down two or three jobs, and still fail to earn enough to keep themselves and their dependents. Ehrenreich is self-deprecating about her shortcomings as a proletarian; indeed, she has great comic gifts. Much of the narrative reflects the tragi-comic sensibility of the poor, for whom a sardonic humour is one of the few defences against a labour which doesn't ennoble, but effaces, and makes prematurely old the most desperate, the non-voters, the dead souls of America's democracy. Ehrenreich says low-paid workers abandon democracy and human rights when they enter the totalitarian tyranny that is the domain of many employers.The book is an eerie precursor of the social policies of New Labour: the welfare-to-work rhetoric has meant the compulsory impoverishment of those forced into a labour market which inexplicably fails to respond to the laws of supply and demand Labour shortages do not raise rates of pay.

The crisis of "affordable housing" leads to people spending 50 or 60 per cent of their earnings on rent; with the consequences for health and well-being that must be expected.But the rich are increasingly insulated from the poor, so that injustice can be managed discreetly, and most beneficiaries of the global economy never confront the secret behind the great conjuring trick of the disappearing poor. Jeremy Seabrook's latest book, the 'No-Nonsense Guide to Class, Caste and Hierarchies', is published by Verso. What are you missing when an audiobook has been abridged? I once ruffled through the pages of the real book as I was listening on headphones. The effect is like speed reading – running your eyes down the centre of each page, keying in to essential elements. It must be sobering for authors to do this: watching helplessly as best-loved phrases, entire characters, are born away on a stream of silent omissions.