Last in Line: On the Road and Out of Work... A Desperate Journey with Canada's Unemployed

Greg Ioannou was the past president of the Freelance Editors' Association of Canada and a partner in The Editorial Centre, Toronto.

Alan Mettrick, a journalist, spent two years researching this book by living the life of a down-and-outer in Western Canada at the height of the recession in the early 1980s. He took a variety of casual jobs: selling freezer-loads of meat, helping to clean up a vandalized motel, fighting a forest fire in a peat bog. He lived in rooming houses and hostels and, when he could not find work, he applied for various types of government assistance.

The value of the book is in the sympathetic portraits of the people he meets. Many of them are ordinary people trapped by the failures of our economic system; others live in abject poverty because of psychiatric problems or alcoholism. He also focuses on the lives of the welfare, hostel, and social workers trying to cope with the problems of the unemployed.

Although the idea is derived from Jack London and George Orwell, and despite the pedestrian writing, the subject matter is so compelling that this is one of those books that you really wish would be widely read. The wider its distribution, the more likely it is that the problems it addresses will be solved.