Amazon HQ2: Seattle Lawmakers Warn NY On Labor, Changes

- 'We didn't respond fast enough': Seattle lawmakers warn New York over Amazon.- Council members urge NYers to demand concessions like labor standards before company gains foothold in city. The Guardian, 1/7/19. EXCERPTS:

Lisa Herbold and Teresa Mosqueda, members of Seattle’s city council, addressed a summit of activist groups fighting Amazon’s plan for a new campus in Long Island City, Queens. They told the New Yorkers that Amazon’s presence in the west coast city had driven up housing costs, that the company had ducked efforts to make them help pay to address the crisis, and that they should resist it.

The Seattle visitors urged their NY counterparts to learn from Seattle’s mistakes and demand concessions like labor standards before the company gains a foothold in the city. “You have the opportunity that Seattle didn’t,” she added. “We didn’t respond fast enough.” Amazon opted to split its vaunted HQ2 into two campuses, in New York and Arlington, Virginia, at the end of a nationwide competition. In Long Island City, the company plans to hire 25,000 employees making an average wage of $150,000...

In Seattle, Amazon occupied 20% of the city’s office space, the politicians said. They said New York could expect many of the well-paying jobs to go not to existing city residents, but to people who will move there.
A thousand people a week move to the Seattle region, with an influx of more than 115,000 since the beginning of the decade, Mosqueda said.

“The majority of the population that was living in Seattle who were low income, working families has been pushed out … to areas where they are still now having to commute one and two hours into their jobs,” she said. The less affluent have been pushed to areas south of the city, as housing costs have jumped – from 35% above the national average in 2012, to 113% above last year. The median cost of a home is $740,000, according to the lawmaker’s presentation.

“More families are getting pushed further and further out, and the demographics in Seattle are dramatically changing,” Mosqueda said. “It’s getting whiter, and it’s getting richer.”. . READ MORE

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/07/seattle-lawmakers-warn-new-york-city-about-amazon



Amazon warehouse workers and labor activists demonstrate at the Staten Island location.




A worker gathers items for delivery from the warehouse floor at Amazon's distribution center in Phoenix, AZ.