In early 2016 I set out to spend six months working in low-paid jobs around the country. At that time, there was a great deal of optimism swilling around about Britain’s record employment levels. Yet trends such as the precipitous growth of zero-hours contracts after the 2008 recession suggested that much of the work being created was not on a par with what had existed before.

Flexible “gig” work was once associated with bar and restaurant jobs, but in recent years it has spread to a wide range of industries. Toiling away for 30 hours one week, five the next, may take you off the unemployment roll, but it isn’t synonymous with a stable income and a fulfilling life. Nor does such work necessarily impart a sense of pride and dignity. As one former collier put it to me in Rugeley, Staffordshire, a former mining town where I worked as an order picker for Amazon: “People say, ‘I’m only working at Amazon’ – whereas you’d never have said, ‘I’m only a collier.’”

I soon discovered why. A typical working day for me at Amazon lasted 10 and a half hours and consisted of an exhausting slog up and down the aisles of a vast warehouse that the company liked to boast was the size of 10 football pitches. Each day I would walk several miles, directed at all times by a handheld device that would regularly admonish me to speed up in order to “get our productivity up”. Toilet breaks were frowned upon by disdainful line managers; a day off sick resulted in a disciplinary “point”, regardless of whether you had phoned in beforehand or not. Rack up six points, and you were out. Along with my co-workers – mostly recent immigrants – I was on a temporary agency contract.

The jobs that have replaced the mines – to the extent that they exist – often don’t give people the same sense of identity

Three decades ago, Rugeley’s largest employers were the Lea Hall colliery, two power stations and Armitage Shanks. As Jeff Winter, a local Labour councillor, put it to me: “If you went back 40 years … you had a pit which employed a lot of skilled men. There were mechanics; there were electricians. There were labouring jobs at the pit, but they were still good jobs.” Today, Rugeley’s biggest employer is Amazon.

The legacy of Thatcher’s deindustrialisation agenda is still being felt in many working-class mining communities. But nostalgia for that world of dust and smoke is a dead end. When George Orwell went down the pit in Wigan in 1936, there were on average 134 deaths annually per 100,000 miners. But the jobs that have replaced them – to the extent that they exist – often don’t give people the same sense of identity. Take the Welsh valleys, where I worked in a call centre. The work was tedious rather than laborious or dangerous. But few of the people I met drew pride from this sort of labour. You turned up at a glass-plated office and read a prepared script down the telephone to customers who were very often irritable and tetchy. Then you went home, and came back again to do it all the next day. Trade unions were invisible or nonexistent.

The Amazon ‘fulfilment centre’ in Peterborough. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA

These contemporary production lines certainly haven’t plugged the hole left by the disappearance of industry. Almost 30 years after the last round of pit closures, 12% of working-age residents in Blaenau Gwent are receiving government support for disability or incapacity – twice the national average. There are five food banks within its 109 sq km (42 sq miles), and life expectancy is among the lowest in England and Wales. One in six adults is being prescribed antidepressants. There is a lesson here as to what a “post-work” society might look like, if we get things as wrong as we did in the 1980s.

But it’s not just former mining communities that are afflicted by insecure work. I also worked as an Uber driver in London’s burgeoning gig economy. Like the Amazon warehouse, it was a world of predominantly migrant labour. I asked an Eritrean Uber driver why all his friends were working for Uber and companies like it. “It’s like they’ve accepted it because they’re immigrants,” he told me.

At both Amazon and Uber, migrants were putting up with conditions British-born workers would never tolerate. “I wouldn’t work there,” several people told me when I brought Amazon up in Rugeley. Some see this as an ominous development, a sign that British workers are cosseted idlers turned soft by the welfare state. To others, even acknowledging that migration can affect pay and conditions is seen as a racist dog-whistle. I saw how an endless supply of cheap labour thrusts more power into the hands of employers. But we needn’t resort to draconian border controls: we should instead focus on improving standards.

In many former industrial areas, it was largely men I encountered lamenting a lost world of pits and steelworks; in Blackpool, however, it was mostly women who were feeling the strain. I got a job as a home carer in a sector where 80% of workers are female. The high rate of turnover in care betrays a great deal about a job in which, as one care worker put it to me, staff are treated like “glorified cleaners”.

Half a million elderly and disabled people in Britain rely on home care visits for things such as washing and dressing. They are served by a minimum-wage workforce of whom nearly a quarter are on zero-hours contracts. One care worker at another company told me that if you made a complaint or filled out an accident form, “they [the company] push you out [or] they send you on all the worst cases so you get fed up and leave”. The profit motive drives almost everything about the job. Elderly people are first and foremost “clients” who receive perfunctory care visits by private care providers. One in five councils still commission care visits of 15 minutes, despite government guidance specifying the minimum should be half an hour.

There are various ways of tackling the employment practices I witnessed: we could ban zero-hours contracts and 15-minute care visits, abolish draconian anti-trade union laws, and enforce existing legislation more effectively. I regularly encountered workers being paid less than the minimum wage. Increasing the social housing stock would mean fewer holes in the social safety net for those moving in and out of work, whereas stronger rights for agency workers would go some way to abolishing what is in effect a two-tier workforce.

But the indignity of modern low-paid work will not be fixed by a list of policy prescriptions. There’s a deeper problem: our attitudes towards low-paid work and the people who do it. What I saw is the product of a consumption-driven society with unrealistic expectations: of a consumer class bossing another class around. If we believe everyone has the right to live a decent life, with dignified work, something more fundamental needs to change.

• James Bloodworth is the author of Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain