Here’s Why Community Organizations in NY are Celebrating Amazon Canceling its HQ2 Plans
By Deborah Axt and Jonathan Westin
In the aftermath of the news that grassroots community organizations like ours — in partnership with key unions and progressive elected officials — successfully blocked the proposed Amazon HQ2 deal, some people are asking us why we are celebrating. Here’s why.
The thousands of members we represent are immigrants and low-income and working-class New Yorkers of color. They live throughout Queens and the surrounding boroughs and beyond. They are families resisting landlord harassment and skyrocketing rents as gentrification forces build. They are delivering packages and food on bikes in blizzard conditions, in jobs where having your employer steal your wages is the norm. And yes, our members are lifting and packing under egregious conditions on Amazon’s warehouse floors, without union protections.
Our members are living the experience of visiting the local bodega, only to find it boarded up and replaced by a Starbucks where they can’t afford a cup of black coffee. They have lived the experience of having ICE agents show up at your door, tearing a spouse away from you and your children forever.
We fought back against these injustices long before Amazon’s HQ2 plan hit Long Island City. Our members have spent decades in the halls of government at the city, state and federal level, calling for real investment in public schools, public transit, workers’ rights enforcement, and truly affordable housing. To those raising budget concerns, we have answered with calls for progressive taxation — like expanding the Millionaire’s Tax and closing the carried interest loophole that lines the pockets of hedge fund billionaires — only to be rebuffed by Republicans and centrist Democrats. All while we watch those same powerful figures offer massive giveaways to multi-billionaire corporations, with zero public input and zero accountability to deliver on their shiny promises.
For our members, the Amazon deal brought all of these crises together.
Early rumors of Amazon’s plans to build a corporate campus in Queens had already triggered a predatory real estate buying spree. It was sure to get worse and displace masses of working-class people — our people. The idea that a trillion-dollar corporation would get tax breaks of more than $3 billion, including $500 million of direct capital expenditures, was of course also deeply offensive.
The nature of Amazon itself deepened our disgust. In addition to Amazon’s open admission that it would block its workers’ right to organize, this is a corporation that is decimating the retail sector, is notorious for killing off smaller businesses, and is again this year paying ZERO dollars in federal taxes.
Knowing this and watching them try to force our communities to fund and suffer from their empire building, while they claimed to “create” jobs, was too much to tolerate.
Our members were also horrified by our state rolling out the red carpet for a company selling facial recognition software to ICE. And they were appalled to learn that Amazon had bankrolled the campaign to defeat a progressive business tax in Seattle — a common sense tax made necessary in the first place by Amazon’s tax evasion and the massive gentrification their headquarters accelerated.
That is a bit of why this fight was an absolute imperative for us. And we won this battle in what will undoubtedly be a longer effort. We won — Amazon walked away, with no credible answers for our critiques — because we were right about their business model, and we told the truth.
The Amazon model depends on denying voice to workers and others impacted by their predatory practices. The Amazon model depends on sucking up the hard earned tax dollars of families, while the company itself pays zero dollars in federal taxes. It depends on forcing their empire building on the rest of us, overpowering democratic processes. The real Amazon model has long operated just outside of general public view — and Amazon could not stand to have the truth revealed. So they ran away, hoping to shut down the resistance.
In recent decades, powerful corporations like Amazon have pushed the idea that the only way to improve our lives is to pay billionaires and their corporations whatever they demand, in exchange for a few decent jobs. But those decent jobs are too few when our members, our communities are part of the much larger group facing brutal exploitation and the other horrible impacts of Amazon’s dominance.
At this moment in history, we simply cannot stand by and accept the long-standing rules of this “economic development” game that only benefits rich corporations.
Just last week, a Cuomo administration official revealed that $750 million in state funds for the Buffalo Billion project had yielded only 700 new jobs, while fueling corruption and waste.
But even more importantly, we believe that now is the moment to break out of this corrupt model altogether. Now is the time to build a new economy — one driven not by fear of what Jeff Bezos might decide to do next, but by a commitment to our neighbors and our neighborhoods.
The reality is that we are not powerless. We have built a city where we can duck into a local bakery or sit at the counter of a diner and meet people from every part of the world. We have built communities where families stand together in the face of Trump’s deportation machine targeting our neighbors. That city that we love is under attack from real estate moguls and e-commerce alike, but our victory in defeating Amazon’s latest empire-building move demonstrates that we are building something powerful together. And this is only the beginning.
Deborah Axt is the Co-Executive Director of Make the Road New York (@debaxt @MaketheRoadNY). Jonathan Westin is the Director of New York Communities for Change (@jwestin2 @nychange).
