Good things can happen. But we are a long way from producing a united
worker's front.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/25/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Amazon Battles Seattle-and Loses
"Pay Your Fair Share" projection created by the Neighborhood Action
Coalition & Transit Riders Union to support the Seattle head tax appears in
this May 10 photo. (Flickr / Jennifer Durham, Backbone Campaign)(CC BY 2.0)
Sen. Bernie Sanders excoriated Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos in a
damning video tweet this week that zeroed in on Bezos' personal wealth and
his company's unfair economic advantages. It wasn't the first time Sanders
had targeted Amazon-three weeks earlier the nation's most popular
politician
highlighted how Amazon paid zero federal taxes in 2017.
The company is sensitive to such accusations and tweeted back defensively,
"We've created over 130K new full-time jobs in the last year alone. Good
jobs w/highly competitive pay & full benefits." What Amazon didn't mention
is that a significant percentage of its employees rely on food stamps, in a
trend reminiscent of Walmart. It also failed to mention that it fought
tooth
and nail against a modest tax bill to fund housing for the poor in Seattle,
where it is headquartered.
In fact, the Washington city's tax fight with Amazon is a critical lesson
for how cities around the country can take on corporate behemoths and win.
Amazon's presence in Seattle has resulted in an influx of highly paid tech
workers, which has in turn fueled gentrification, raised rents and
increased
homelessness. With Kshama Sawant, the fiery Socialist member of Seattle's
City Council, leading the battle, the council on May 14 unanimously passed
a
so-called "head-tax" on large corporations in the face of stiff opposition
from Amazon. The tax, which was originally proposed as $500 per employee
for
corporations making more than $20 million a year, was downgraded to $275
per
employee when the vote finally took place. The modest revenues will help
fund low-income housing and address homelessness.
The city is in crisis. A new report found that King County-where Seattle is
located-needs more than $400 million to address its housing crisis, and
revenues from the city's new head tax would address some of those needs.
County executives in 2015 had declared a "state of emergency" on the issue
of homelessness, a designation usually reserved for devastation from
natural
disasters.
Sawant, who burst onto the national political scene with her bold socialist
agenda, won her seat on Seattle's City Council by calling for three major
reforms, summed up by the slogans "$15 an Hour," "Tax the Rich" and "Rent
Control." Four years ago, Sawant fulfilled the first of her campaign
promises by leading the fight to win an increase in the minimum wage to $15
an hour. In an interview on "Rising Up With Sonali," she shared with me how
her second reform was achieved against massive opposition. "It was a
bitterly fought-for victory," she said of the "Amazon tax" as it became
known, "because we went up against the Democratic Party establishment, the
absolutely ferocious opposition of the Chamber of Commerce, of big
businesses like Starbucks and especially of Amazon."
The larger question, she added, is, "Who gets to occupy urban spaces in
America?" Indeed, as the technology sector has seen record growth, the
cities in which tech companies establish themselves-including Seattle, San
Francisco, Portland, Ore., Chicago and others-become playgrounds for the
wealthy new transplants who work the high-tech jobs. "The billionaire
class-[those] like Jeff Bezos-get to enrich themselves hand over fist,"
Sawant said, "while every square inch of this city gets privatized and gets
more and more expensive."
Despite Seattle's homelessness crisis, Amazon's opposition to the head tax
was ruthless. The corporation threatened to shut down construction sites
and
cut jobs. It echoed the familiar conservative refrain that tax increases
and
higher wages would slow growth and ruin the economy. "It's a threatening
message not just to Seattle but to every city in the world," Sawant said of
Amazon's hardball tactics. "The message Jeff Bezos is sending is that, 'if
working people in any city have the temerity to go against me and the
billionaire class, then we will threaten you with taking away jobs.' That
is
an attempted strike of capital."
Sawant shared with me that in the end the tax measure passed by the City
Council will generate a mere $50 million a year of the $410 million needed
to combat homelessness in King County (Seattle is the county's largest
city). Of that revenue, Amazon's share is a pittance-about $8 million.
Nothing about this tax would even remotely threaten the company's financial
profile. "This tax is like pocket change for the Amazon billionaires, and
especially for Jeff Bezos," Sawant said. Bezos could lose $8 million a year
personally and not even notice it.
Bezos' wealth is so obscene that in a recent interview he boasted about
having so much money that the only thing he could think of spending it on
was space travel. "[W]hat does money mean for you, being the first person
in
history who has a net worth of a three-digit amount of billions?" asked the
interviewer. Bezos responded, "The only way that I can see to deploy this
much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space
travel."
If Bezos has money to burn (literally), why did Amazon, one of the largest
companies in the world, oppose Seattle's modest head tax? The battle
between
corporate America and working people is an ideological one, and Sawant
captured the power dynamics between these two forces perfectly when she
told
me that "the interests of our movement and the interests of the billionaire
class are not in line. There is a fundamental antagonism between the two."
But the Democratic Party has for years been trying to convince Americans
that liberalism now means that "what is good for corporate America is good
for ordinary Americans." That logic has clearly not translated into
material
gains for Americans who have seen their livelihoods decimated. A new report
found that millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) may never
accumulate as much wealth as their parents did. What are these young
Americans to do with the fact that the stock market is booming while their
bank accounts are bottoming out?
Even though Amazon and its ilk managed to water down the Seattle city tax
to
nearly half the original amount, the movement that Sawant is leading can
count on the unanimous council vote as a major victory. After all, Amazon
is
on the hunt for a location for its new headquarters and has warehouse
locations all over the country. Instead of mayors and city councils falling
over themselves to lure Amazon to their city with tax breaks, perhaps
cities
ought to be wary of the problems of homelessness and rising rents that
Amazon's presence could bring.
What Seattle demonstrated to other cities is that it is possible to take on
a commercial giant, and, using the democratic process, squeeze taxes out of
it that benefit our cities and ordinary people. After all, Amazon takes
advantage of our publicly funded infrastructure to operate its business.
Despite Donald Trump's grumblings about Amazon, the president and his party
passed a tax reform bill last year that gifted Amazon a whopping $789
million in tax breaks-money that should have been part of our federal
treasury. All it would take is for ordinary Americans to push their local
city councils to replicate Seattle's efforts in city after city where
Amazon
plans to expand.
And if the company warns it would move elsewhere or cut jobs? Sawant
responded that while it is important to take such warnings seriously given
Amazon's power, "the only response is for working people in every city to
say, 'we're not going to accept your threats because the inevitable logic
of
your threats is a race to the bottom.' " Indeed, Amazon has so far not made
good on its promise to cut jobs in Seattle or stop construction on its
buildings. But it did issue a petulant statement sprinkled with words like
"apprehensive," "hostile" and "anti-business."
In the game of chicken between democracy and corporatism, Seattle
demonstrated that people power can prevail. According to Sawant, "The fact
that we had the nerve to go up against Amazon and win a tax in the face of
their extortionary threats, that represents that you can build a movement
and you can win."
Sonali Kolhatkar
