In this election it has become obligatory for politicians to appear on TV, at a workplace, in a hi-vis jacket. Because work is the new obsession. “Hard-working families” are a key meme in all the campaigns. The workplace – once a no-go arena in British politics – has become the ideal venue for photo-opportunities.

Strange, then, that the actual politics of work barely get a look in. Job numbers we have: the coalition has seen 1.7 million jobs created during its term. Apprenticeships are the new coinage of politics: to be offered to everybody who wants one. Zero-hours contracts are to be contested; the minimum wage raised.

But what goes on inside the workplace is still hard to make subject to public debate. Last week I stood outside a fast-food chain interviewing a man who had tried to organise a union there. He told me how, despite the smiles of the people on the counters, the situation behind the scenes was about tears, stress and constant pressure. “If the mystery shopper comes in and somebody is grumpy to them, the entire shift lose their bonus. Then everybody gets on to you: why were you grumpy? And so on.”

It was an eloquent interview, followed soon after by a terrified phonecall, begging me not to use it on camera. Though now in a much better job, my contact feared losing it if his face were seen. So the full story will be lost until somebody writes it, two decades later, as social history.

The workplace culture of today is no longer stratified by skill, as in the 20th century, but by status. A “core” of highly-skilled and salaried workers enjoys an unprecedented blurring of work and leisure time. They get on short-haul flights, flip open their laptops, do their expenses, make their powerpoint slides, switch to watching a movie, use the same mobile phone for work, leisure, love and life.

A bigger “peripheral” labour force works to strict times and targets: the care worker flitting between clients in 15 minute slots; the supermarket delivery driver, timed to the second; the fast-food server, required to perform not just physical work but what sociologists call “emotional labour” – you have to smile and mean it.

Across both groups the watchword is precarity. Want to fly a passenger jet? Then pay for your own training; form a one-person “company” to provide services to a budget airline so it can avoid the rules that apply to a contracted workforce.

At the other end of the scale, in hotel cleaning, you get conditions described – again anonymously – by the blogger Maid In London: a zero-hours contract, only £24 a week guaranteed. Seventeen rooms to clean in seven and a half hours, with an unpaid lunch break, workers required to provide most of their own uniform, and little supplied in the way of protective equipment. Fifty percent of new cleaners leave within two weeks because of the stress, says the blogger. Those who stay drink Red Bull for breakfast and are, she says, “in a constant state of motion and seemingly exhausted and agitated at the same time”.

It’s only from anonymous accounts like these – and the occasional foray of journalists undercover – that we get to understand the facts. At no point since the regularisation of employment law in the 1840s has the power imbalance between employer and worker been so extreme.

Wage stagnation tells less than half the story. For many, work is a world of stress, bullying, arbitrary and unappealable decisions, and – at the extreme – sexual harassment and casual racism.

The hidden impact is the hollowing out of what labour means. It was workers in the Soviet Union who coined the adage: “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us”, but in large sectors of modern capitalism that is the deal. To many young people, stuck in jobs with no career progression, no security and no pension, work’s status is diminished. It’s a tendency amplified by the free flow of information about our private lives on social media: few people write about their work in detail; their social and leisure time dominates their life stories. On many people’s Facebook page it is as if their work existed in a barely significant, parallel world.

With unions declining in size, power and – for many fragmented industries – even relevance, there is nobody to articulate the problems of the work world. No worker in one of these election photo-ops is allowed to express themselves freely; polite questions are the limit.

So here’s a suggestion for the politicians. Next time you put on a hi-vis vest, keep it on when you leave the factory. Take your tie off – and now try walking into a bank, or flagging down a taxi, or having an argument with somebody in authority. Or try all this in the apron of a hairdresser, or the T-shirt of a barista, or the overalls of a hand car-wash operative.

Through the slights, insults, cold shoulder and dismissive looks, you have to keep on smiling, for the modern workplace does not tolerate unhappy people. Now try keeping that smile going for eight hours. For complete realism, the next time you mess up – which we all do in our jobs – get your political adviser to stand in your personal space, and shout at you.

Finally, go to an ATM and withdraw the trifling amount of £48.75. That’s what Maid in London earns for cleaning 17 hotel rooms in a day. Now imagine doing this forever.

Paul Mason is economics editor of Channel 4 News. Follow him @paulmasonnews