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Avril John was nine years old when she heard a conversation in a train station that would remain in her memory. She and her family were on their way from Northumberland in the north of England to Rugeley, a small town in the Midlands, where a modern coal mine had just opened.
It was 1960 and her father was one of the many miners who moved to the area for work. They were met at Birmingham station by a man from the National Coal Board. “I will always remember how he said that to my father, I was only nine.” [the mine] had just opened and it was guaranteed to work for 100 years.”
Thirty years later the mine closed. In 2011, the American online retailer Amazon opened a warehouse the size of nine football fields on top of it. When John, then a 60-year-old, applied to work there, no one made the kind of promises that had been made to her father all those years ago: “At the job center it was stressed that it would be until Christmas, possibly Easter, and could be, perhaps, a steady job at the end of it. When I went to take my tests for the agency, it was stressed again: could be† None of her new colleagues should have been surprised when their jobs turned out not to be permanent, she says.
But people were surprised to begin with. In 2012, about a year after the warehouse opened, I went to Rugeley to learn about the impact of Amazon’s jobs in the 21st century on the old mining town. There was obvious symbolism in a place where the new economy was developing on top of the old one; the light-blue warehouse stretched out beside the sooty-brown towers of the dying power plant.
Photographer Ben Roberts and I met many people in those early days who were grateful for the new jobs in that warehouse, but many were angry and disappointed at their insecurity. Workers with 1p above the minimum wage were divided into two groups: bearers of “blue badges” and “green badges”.
The former were permanent Amazon employees and the latter were temporary staff provided by agencies that could one day earn a blue badge or be fired. The people of Rugeley had to learn a new working language, a language of “voting mechanisms” instead of unions, “employees” instead of workers, and where people were “released” instead of fired.
Last year, Roberts and I returned to Rugeley to see what had changed for Amazon and the city in the intervening decade. Amazon’s value by market cap has risen from about $100 billion to $1.5 trillion. The personal wealth of founder Jeff Bezos has increased from approximately $23 billion to $170 billion. In Rugeley, meanwhile, the last vestiges of the old coal economy have disappeared: the power station closed in 2016 and the cooling towers were destroyed in a controlled explosion last summer. After decades on the skyline, they crumpled like empty crisp packets and were gone in 10 seconds.
The anger towards Amazon, meanwhile, has subsided. In a sense, the company has become a better employer. But it feels like Amazon and Rugeley have learned to live side by side instead of living together. Their stories travel along different tracks at different speeds, their fates not intertwined in the way of old company towns. Whatever Rugeley’s future may be (and it doesn’t look bleak in the least), few in town see Amazon at its heart.
An alarm goes off when Roberts and I are at the front desk in the Amazon warehouse. We see ourselves on a CCTV screen, a red circle around us. We step further apart, the circles turn green and the alarm stops. Amazon has used the cameras to monitor social distancing between employees during the pandemic — just one of the ways computers are holding the whip in this workplace.
