TThe doldrums of the economic downturn have become common knowledge for everyone from the postman to the Prime Minister, but you wouldn’t expect that there would be people working on Canary Wharf who actually applaud the recession. Josie Cox went to track them down. Wanderson has lived a ten-minute walk away from Canary Wharf ever since moving to London in 2006. When asked how the financial crisis has affected him personally, a grin spreads across the Brazilian’s face: “not at all.”
The 31-year-old works as a waste collector on Canary Wharf five days a week. Although the credit squeeze has not left him personally cash-strapped, he admits that it has impacted his work.
“When big companies closed down, there was suddenly much less rubbish,” he explains in broken English, referring to September 2008, when hundreds of businesses in and around Canary Wharf -- like Lehman Brothers -- filed for bankruptcy in the face of the subprime mortgage crisis.
In the aftermath of mass job-slashing on the Wharf, which recently had a working population of close to 95,000, fewer people were around to buy lunch at the cafes and nearby Jubilee Place retail mall, just to throw away the leftovers on their way back to their office. Since September 2008 some 1.3 million people have been laid off in Britain as unemployment peaked at 7.9 percent in October 2009. Fewer people working in London means less waste, and therefore less work for street sweepers and bin men in the most populous city of the European Union.
DREADING A RETURN TO PROSPERITY
Almost 18 months on, Britain is recovering. Last month the government announced a revision of economic growth in the final quarter of 2009 to 0.3 percent from the initial estimate of 0.1 percent. Although analysts are warning that the market remains shaky, many are confident that easier times lie ahead. Not Wanderson though. Paid by the hour, and therefore financially unaffected by how many bags he ties up and disposes of daily, he knows that, as people return to their pre-crisis spending habits, pre-packed lunches will start flying off the shelves and their wrappers into his bins. “I always work the same hours, so I didn’t get affected by the crisis. I had less work and it was more relaxing, but my boss said summer will be busy again,” he explains. And he’s not the only one dreading a return to economic prosperity. On the other side of Canary Wharf, in the shadows of the colossal structures housing corporations like Barclays, Credit Suisse and HSBC, Marco goes about his everyday job of changing bags in dozens of bins strewn across what up until the 1950s was one of the world’s busiest docks. “Definitely a lot less rubbish than three years ago, but I think it’s increasing again,” the Romanian states with a frown. Since starting work, his economic indicator has always been the number of sandwich wrappers and free newspapers discarded by busy bankers and manager. “When people are rich, they are messy, when they are poor they are clean,” he cynically sums up, and has nothing but a chuckle in answer to my question of whether it would be good if the inverse were true.
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