From behind her desk in Vision estate agents, Dawn Goodwin sucks the air in through her teeth at the mention of Amazon.
‘We all thought it was going to be the making of the town,’ she says. She expected an influx of people, including well-to-do managers, looking to buy or rent houses. But she hasn’t had any extra business.
People are cautious because they don’t know how long their agency jobs with Amazon will last, she says. One of her tenants got a job there but lost it again after she became ill halfway through a shift. She struggled to pay her rent for three months while she waited for her jobseeker’s benefits to be reinstated.
‘It’s leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouths,’ Goodwin says with a frown.
Elsewhere, Britain’s economists are also puzzling over why the economy remains moribund even though more and more people are in work. There are still about half a million fewer people working as full-time employees than there were before the 2008 crash, but the number of people in some sort of employment has surpassed the previous peak.
Economists think the rise in insecure temporary, self-employed and part-time work, while a testament to the British labour market’s flexibility, helps to explain why economic growth remains elusive.
Angi Cooney, who runs C Residential, the biggest estate agents in Rugeley, thinks the nature of employment is changing permanently, and people should stop pining for the past.
It’s ‘bloody great’ that a company like Amazon chose to come to ‘this little old place’, she says fiercely, looking as if she’d like to take the town by the shoulders and give it a shake. ‘People expect a job for life, but the world isn’t like that any more, is it?’
This is an abridged version of an article that originally appeared in the Financial Times.