IWhen journalists visit Mansfield these days, they come for one thing: the clichés. They want the market town where 70% supported Brexit, the ‘red wall’ seat that in 2017 threw its Labor MP for a private school boy who called for the sterilization of the poor. They want coal mine brass bands, Nigel Farage’s beery grin and vox calls about stopping the boats. And they are not the only ones. For social scientists and think tankers, Mansfield and its ring of former mining villages are a petri dish of ‘left-behind’ England, of isolation, anger and impoverishment. They are part of that other England, which plays the same role in our politics as the corrections and clarifications column on a daily newspaper, listing stray accidents and outcries to reassure readers that the rest is true. Yes, there are losers in 1920s Britain – lots of losers – but the model works.
Even as the mines closed and the factories closed, Margaret Thatcher all but guaranteed that job growth was on the way. When no one came, Tony Blair promised recovery. Just outside Mansfield, the New Labor government poured £38 million of taxpayers’ money into an old coal mine to attract a buyer. After a company bought the site, the regional development agency cheered. It issued a press release promising that the new owner would “create up to 2,500 jobs – more than existed when (the) coal mine was operating at full capacity.”
The new owner was Sports Direct, and the Shirebrook site created some of the worst jobs in Britain. In 2015, locals called it ‘the gulag’; MPs judged that staff were “not treated like people”. Terrified of missing her shift, one employee gave birth in a warehouse toilet, cutting the umbilical cord with a box cutter.
It was smeared on the front pages and criticized in Westminster: it was the kind of scandal from which you would think no company could or should recover. But almost a decade later, Sports Direct billionaire Mike Ashley is even richerand the Shirebrook complex is thriving. I was standing outside as shifts changed just after 2pm and burly men ran past to clock in on time. To ensure safety on site, they carried small clear plastic handbags containing plastic boxes and bottles so that complete strangers could make out everything they ate and drank.
Out flowed those who had been there before dawn. The main warehouse in Shirebrook is the length of thirteen Olympic swimming pools back to back, and it took at least fifteen minutes for the entire crew to walk past the guards and across the small metal walkway. Perhaps only outside factories in China have I seen so many corporate employees at the same time. These people were black, brown, Eastern European, and they were talking and laughing under the gray sky, the first direct daylight they had had. I heard at most a few snatches of English; I caught a lot more Hindi and I thought it was Tamil.
These are people you rarely see or hear in the media. My field has spent the better part of the last decade composing sepia-toned portraits of the industrial working class, now safely shrunk and supposedly stripped of any residual leftism. Almost no time has been spent on the post-industrial working class: the warehouse workers, the couriers, the hospital porters and the cleaners. Politicians now treat the ‘white working class’ as an ethnic identity, while ministers engage in this define a ‘working person’”.
Maybe they should talk to Karolina Sobczak. In 2016, when MPs investigated Mike Ashley, she started working at Shirebrook. She had arrived in northern Poland from Gdynia to join her husband and after a year at Sports Direct she was doing other odd jobs. Everything to gain a foothold in Great Britain. In 2020, another huge warehouse opened: Amazon, just outside Mansfield. This location also benefited from tens of millions in public funding for the construction of the A-roads that facilitated freight transport. As the Common Wealth think tank notes in a report shared exclusively with this article: “Towns like Mansfield were not ‘left behind’ but were actively rebuilt through… enterprise zones, land sell-offs and financial benefits for large corporations, most of which offered only low-paid, precarious work.”
Karolina was one of the first employees in the new warehouse. The shifts were long and the work was repetitive, but she had done that before. The problems emerged elsewhere.
She started at Amazon with a few minor health issues, including back pain, but it was only mild and barely bothered her in her twenties. The ruthless handling of heavy boxes caused her back to worsen and her wrists to ache. Amazon’s internal communications talk a lot about inclusivity, and the corporate health team advised time and time again that she should hold off on the bulkier material for a while — but she reports that her managers said they couldn’t adjust the workload.
I have seen years of occupational health reports from Amazon’s consultants and, taken together, they document Karolina’s decline. At first, assessors describe her as “fit for work,” but later note that “she is in pain” and “uses a cane” to walk. She suffered panic attacks and there is evidence of ‘severe depression’ and ‘severe anxiety’. At the same time, Karolina says, NHS doctors asked her to take hours at Amazon or leave altogether. Her answer was always the same: she couldn’t afford to stop. Instead of taking time away from her workplace to go to the bathroom, which she says Amazon classes are “idle time,” Karolina got used to keeping it inside. Her body couldn’t always tell when she really needed to pee, so she would wet herself. This happened at work, where she had to inform the manager to go home and change. “That was the biggest humiliation,” she says.
This summer, Karolina’s doctor called her sick for weeks, during which she hardly left the house. When she returned, they said Amazon managers barely acknowledged her. Fourteen days later she went on leave. At home, she stabbed herself in the thigh and took every beta blocker she had. “I wanted to make my heart stop beating,” she says. An ambulance rushed her to the hospital opposite the warehouse. The following week she went back to work: she couldn’t afford not to.
I asked Amazon some detailed questions and received a statement that read in part: “The safety and well-being of our people is always our priority. Working in a fulfillment center is physical work that may not be suitable for everyone. But… if you want to work in a warehouse, you want to work at Amazon.”
Generations ago, even as miners did jobs that could and did kill them, governments admitted they were essential to Britain’s future. George Orwell famously admired their ‘noble bodies’. Such respect is not accorded to people like Karolina, even when they bag our Black Friday purchases.
More than a quarter of a century after Blair became Prime Minister, Britain once again has a Labor Prime Minister promising growth, jobs and billion-dollar investors. The same major commitments will almost certainly lead to the same disillusionment. Sacha Hihorst, who wrote the Common Wealth report based on her PhD research, notes that Mansfield residents will certainly complain about migration – but only for a minute or so: ‘The people they really hate are politicians.’
Karolina left Amazon last week after four years that took a heavy toll on her health. Her union, the GMB, is starting proceedings in court on her behalf. Now 31, she says: “I have the back of a 60-year-old.” Putting her Ford Focus in reverse requires both hands on the gear lever, and friends have to help her open water bottles.
In those same four years, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has seen his wealth grow by an estimated 49%. He is estimated to be worth $218 billion. What does Karolina think about the different path her life has taken from the tycoon she worked for? “Please don’t ask me that question,” she says. “I can’t think about it.”