James Bloodworth is an English journalist and writer. He studied politics at Nottingham Trent University and completed a Masters in political journalism at City University in London, where he has lived since 2010. A former member of the Trotskyist group Alliance for Workers' Liberty, he edited the left-wing blog Left Foot Forward from 2013 until 2016. Bloodworth previously wrote a weekly column for the International Business Times and wrote for The Spectators Coffee House blog from 2013 to 2015. His work has also appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, and The Wall Street Journal. He writes regularly for the website UnHerd. Bloodworth is the author of The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working-Class Kids Still Get Working-Class Jobs which was published in 2016. Bloodworth's Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain was published in March 2018. To research the oppressive conditions faced by those working in low-paid and minimum-wage jobs, the author spent six months employed in such posts. This included periods working as a care worker in Blackpool, an Uber driver and in the UK packaging warehouse of Amazon. According to one review the book has been praised "across the political spectrum". In May 2019, Hired was longlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing. Hired was also chosen by The Times as its current affairs book of the year 2018. In September 2018, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted out a video in which Bloodworth drew on his book to criticize Amazon, as part of Sanders' push to introduce a bill that would charge large companies such as Amazon for the federal welfare programs that subsidize their low-wage workers. He also wrote a piece for The Daily Beast in which he repeated the Fox News claim that Cuba sent troops to Syria to help prop up the Assad regime, a claim which was denied by both the Cuban government and White House Press Secretary Joshua Earnest. James Bloodworth described Roger Scruton's book Fools, Frauds and Firebrands as "an impressively lucid take down of some of the most fashionable left-wing thinkers of the past 50 years".
