Chronic pain and mental health: this is the brutal reality of Britain’s new working class | Aditya Chakraborty

If journalists visit Mansfield these days, they come for one thing: cliches. They want a market town where 70% backed Brexit, a “red wall” seat that lost its Labor MP in 2017 for a private school boy who wanted the poor killed. They want colliery brass bands, Nigel Farage’s beery grin and vox pops about stopping ships. And they are not alone. For sociologists and scientists, Mansfield and its former mining villages constitute the “left” of England, of isolation and anger and poverty. It’s part of the other England, playing the same role in our politics as the headlines and headlines in the daily paper, glossing over tragedies and worms to convince readers that the rest is true. Yes, there are losers in 2020s Britain – lots of losers – but the model works.

Even as the mines closed and factories closed, Margaret Thatcher was close to guaranteeing an increase in jobs. When no one came, Tony Blair promised to renew. Outside Mansfield, the New Labor government has plowed £38m of taxpayers’ money into an old coal mine to attract a buyer. After the company bought the land, the regional development agency was excited. It issued a press release promising the new owner “will create up to 2,500 jobs – more than existed at the time. [the] the colliery was fully operational”.

The new owner was Sports Direct, and its Shirebrook site created some of the worst jobs in Britain. In 2015, Locals called it “gulag”; The MPs ordered that workers are not “treated like human beings”. Afraid of losing her job, an employee gave birth in a warehouse toilet, severing the umbilical cord with a box cutter.

Published on the front pages and criticized in Westminster, it was the kind of scandal you’d think no business could, or should, recover from. However, nearly 10 years later, Sports Direct billionaire Mike Ashley is even richer, and the Shirebrook building is still growing. I stood outside as the shifts were changing just after 2pm and the energetic men came through to make it on time. In order to remove the security of the area, they carried small transparent plastic bags, containing plastic boxes and bottles, so that complete strangers could find something all that they may eat and drink.

They were people who had been in since before dawn. Shirebrook’s main reservoir is the length of 13 Olympic swimming pools that were completed, and it took at least a quarter of an hour for the entire transformation to pass the guards and cross the small metal bridge. It is probably only in foreign factories in China that I have seen so many company employees at the same time. These people were black, brown, Eastern European and they talked and laughed under the blue sky, the first direct light they had. At most, I heard a few words of English; I caught a lot of Hindi and what I thought was Tamil.

These are people you rarely see or hear about in the media. My business has spent most of the last decade creating sepia portraits of the industrial working class, now reduced and thought to be ruined with the remnants left behind. It hasn’t been a while for the industry’s back-office workers: warehouse workers, couriers, hospital janitors and cleaners. Politicians now regard “white workers” as racist, while ministers tie themselves in knots to define “the working man”.

Maybe they should talk to Karolina Sobczak. In 2016, when MPs were investigating Mike Ashley, he started work in Shirebrook. She had come from Gdynia in northern Poland to work with her husband and after a year at Sports Direct, she did some odd jobs. Anything you can find in Britain. Then in 2020, another large warehouse opened: Amazon, outside Mansfield. The area also benefited from tens of millions of public funds, to design A roads that facilitate the transportation of goods. As the Common Wealth thinktank notes, in a report shared exclusively with the paper: “Towns like Mansfield were not ‘left behind’ but were rehabilitated with … low-paid, insecure work. ”

Karolina was one of the first workers in the new warehouse. The shifts were long and the work was repetitive, but he had dealt with that before. Problems arose elsewhere.

He started Amazon with minor health conditions, among them back pain, but it was mild and nothing to worry about. The constant handling of heavy boxes made his back worse and he started to experience shooting pains down his arms. Amazon’s internal communications talk a lot about inclusion, ​​​​​​and its workplace health team has repeatedly advised that it should temporarily lay off more products – but reports that its managers we can’t change jobs.

I’ve seen years of career health reports from Amazon consultants and they all report Carolina’s decline. At first, critics describe him as “suitable for work”, but later notice that he is “suffering” and “using a cane” to walk. He was having panic attacks and there were notes of “severe depression” and “severe anxiety”. At the same time, Karolina says, NHS doctors were asking her to reduce hours at Amazon or leave altogether. His response was always the same: he couldn’t quit. Instead of taking time from her station to go to the loo, which she says Amazon classes are “downtime”, Karolina got used to it. Her body didn’t always know when it needed to urinate, so she went and wet herself. This happened at work, where he had to inform the manager in order to go home to change. He says: “That was a great humiliation.

This summer, Karolina’s doctor wrote to her that she had been sick for weeks in which she had just left home. When he returned, he says Amazon executives did not welcome him. After two weeks, he went on vacation. At home, he stabbed himself in the thigh and took every beta blocker he had. He says: “I wanted to stop my heart from beating. An ambulance rushed him to a hospital near the warehouse. He was still going back to work the following week: he couldn’t not.

I asked Amazon a number of detailed questions, and received a statement that read in part: “The safety and health of our people is our top priority. Working in a customer satisfaction center is a manual job might not be for everyone. But … if you want to work in a warehouse, you’ll want to work at Amazon.”

Generations ago, as miners carried out jobs that could and would kill them, governments recognized their importance to Britain’s future. George Orwell was greatly impressed by their “noble bodies”. No such respect is afforded to people like Karolina, even as they shop our Black Friday stores.

More than a quarter of a century after Blair became prime minister, Britain has another Labor prime minister promising growth and jobs and billions of investors. The same big commitment almost always leads to the same disappointment. Sacha Hihorst, who wrote the Common Wealth report based on his PhD research, notes that Mansfield residents will complain about the move – but that takes a minute or so: “The people who really hate it are the -politician.”

Karolina left Amazon last week after four years that took a toll on her life. His trade union, GMB, is launching court proceedings on his behalf. Now 31, he says: “I have the back of a 60-year-old.” Putting his Ford Focus into reverse requires both hands on the gearstick, and friends have to help him open water bottles.

In those four years, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, saw his wealth grow by 49%. He is estimated to be worth $218bn (£172bn). What does Karolina think about the different way her life has taken the rich man she worked for? He says: “Please don’t ask me that question. I can’t think about it.

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