The Night Cleaner

I reviewed this for The London Student, who have very kindly agreed to publish it in their next edition, so forgive the formal style...!

The disastrous economic climate at the moment is one that is affecting everyone. The crisis that essentially, kicked off with the collapse of the US housing market ended up having an effect, whether small or big, on the economy of many countries. One of these countries – often overlooked when we talk about the 2008 recession – was France. ‘The Night Cleaner’ by Florence Aubenas, tells the story of a successful journalist who decides to go undercover as one of the hundreds of thousands of France’s unemployed in order to get the inside story on this global phenomenon.

Florence Aubenas is a French reporter who has written about many politically difficult situations. In 2005, she was captured by a group of guerrilla fighters in Iraq, and emerged after 157 days of captivity relatively unscathed. Soon after this, Aubenas decided to immerse herself in the life of the unemployed, and determined to uncover what for many people was the reality of the economic recession. She spent six months as “Madame Aubenas”; a woman aged forty eight with only one qualification – the French Baccalaureate. She posed as a woman who had never worked before, who had just split up from a long-term relationship with a man who had been the sole provider, and who refused to continue to pay for her needs after the split. Ingenious disguise though it may have been, it meant giving up her entire way of life for six months in order to keep her real identity safe; that meant that she couldn’t draw any money from her bank account or ask anyone she knew for extra financial help. This led her to the decision of going to stay for six months in Caen, a town in Normandy and a town where she was anonymous. She intended to stay in a furnished room, look for any amount of temporary work until she was offered a permanent job somewhere.

Florence Aubenas

“Among the rules I’d established for myself, one was that I would bring this experiment to a halt as soon as I was offered a permanent job.” Aubenas says in the book “I didn’t want to block anybody else’s chances of a real job.” The result of the experiment, as she so terms it, is the writing of a conscientious observer to a situation so engulfing of every type of person. On her first visit to the job centre, it is established that, as her character, she must be patient when looking for work, as her lack of a vehicle and her status as a single woman over forty five with no recent pay-check will put her to the bottom of an employer’s list of priorities. 

After six weeks of searching for a semi-permanent job which would help her to pay the rent, Aubenas applies to be a night cleaner at the Ouistreham Ferry Company; a company infamous for its low wages and appalling employee care. She is told upon entering the world of the unemployed to avoid working for them at all costs. Although the situations of many were worse than Aubenas’ none would dare to go near such a place. After working with the ferry company, she gets a job, for a few hours a week, as a cleaner at a holiday site. This leads to several offers for a few hours here and there from the same company, until she is finally offered a job at the ZAC, an office block.

The book itself is very revealing of the difficulties an unemployed person can face. One must spend one’s time waiting for job opportunities, driving to and from far-off places to work for just a couple of hours, attending workshops held by the job centre, figuring out how to pay the rent, and, crucially, working for those few hours every day, doing backbreaking work for a scanty wage. Aubenas’ ability to be able to empathise with the people she meets sets this book apart from all others of its kind. In every respect, it shows just how problematic being unemployed can be, and reveals the human side of the economic crisis, one which not many of us would know about unless we ourselves had experienced it. Humans have a tendency to avoid looking at the difficulties in a situation, and Florence Aubenas has made the difficulties of this particular situation obvious and unavoidable. She makes people face up to reality, and she is to be applauded.

So, next, I'll be reading Gone With The Wind, by Margaret Mitchell, so look out for more updates!