When the Duke died, apparently the route of his funeral procession was filled with mournful and grateful miners and their families. But they didn’t even pay for it themselves they went cap in hand to their rich mates. The Duchess kindly used her social contacts and great organisational abilities to raise money for a school in the village. In Bestwood Village, it is noted that the socially progressive Duke and Duchess Beauclerk saw the poor condition of the miners’ families living in a corner of their land in the 1880s. The land owners, and those who owned the means of production, had complete control over the working class. What was happening then was extreme exploitation, capitalism at its most successful. Let me remind or even teach Bloomberg that this was not a good thing for the working class, it was not a hand up for the poor. In parts of Derbyshire and Lancashire, during the last industrial revolution in the UK, there were similar ‘mill towns’ where industrialist mill owners held all the means of production, all of the property, and the food.
#Amazon factory town full#
John Steinbeck in ‘Grapes of Wrath’ wrote about similar ‘company towns’ where fruit pickers lived in California – all rents and groceries were paid to the landowners or the mine owners who had full monopoly over the workers’ pay. Read more How Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft wage a domestic War on Terror, and make billions They all followed the same blueprint: rows of cheap, two-up-two-down workers’ cottages, usually a church, sometimes a school and, in the mining communities, always a pub and a grocery shop – all owned by the industrialist. The older ‘models’ were usually built by the mine owners and other industrialists. There are many ‘models’ all over Nottinghamshire where the mines once were.
Lawrence in his novel ‘Sons and Lovers’ – has what was called ‘a model village’. In my home county of Nottinghamshire, Bestwood Village – made famous by D.H. What a fantastic idea, Bloomberg and Amazon! No one has ever done that before! These are reached via glittering new highways that lead away from cities and the wealthy towards places where it’s cheaper to build, buy and rent housing. Apparently, “ the campaign against economic inequality has put a bullseye on cities” because local governments are being encouraged to raise minimum wages in the US and build more housing – what rotters! Raising wages and building houses is the real problem, according to Bloomberg, which is why cities have an overflow of ‘lower classes’.Īccording to Bloomberg, Amazon has the solution through new types of communities: burgeoning ‘factory towns’ built around Amazon warehouses. Have we really come full circle? Also on rt.com Social media recoils as Bloomberg praises Amazon’s warehouse-based exurban ‘factory towns’ as ‘the future of working class’īloomberg believes that Amazon (yes, Amazon) has the solution to the problem of the ‘lower class’.
Old books are full of those cheery commoners thanking landlords and industrialists for allowing them to live and work in poverty. “ Plentiful new jobs at higher wages in places with cheaper housing sounds like a solution to inequality,” investment adviser Conor Sen wrote in a piece for the news agency.īloomberg and Amazon are putting such a shine on this idea, it reminds me of those Victorian texts where the working class living on the master’s land would bow and doff their caps every time his carriage passed them on their way to a 14-hour shift in his mine or mill. Jeff Bezos, the billionaire spaceman, and his company are about to ‘lift the working class’ by creating new ‘factory towns,’ Bloomberg writes. © REUTERS/Carlos Jassoįollow RT on Amazon and its hyper-neoliberal cheerleaders are polishing turds again. Follow her on Twitter Sep, 2021 12:02 Get short URLĪn employee is seen at the new Amazon warehouse during its opening announcement on the outskirts of Mexico City, Mexico July 30, 2019. Dr McKenzie is the author of ‘Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain.’ She’s a political activist, writer and thinker. At 31, she went to the University of Nottingham and did an undergraduate degree in sociology.
She grew up in a coal-mining town in Nottinghamshire and became politicized through the 1984 miners’ strike with her family. No, Bloomberg, Amazon’s ‘factory towns’ will NOT solve inequality, they will be satanic mills for the working classĭr Lisa McKenzie is a working-class academic.
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