Unlike its tech giant competitors in Facebook and Google, Amazon hasn’t pledged $1 billion to build housing in its hometown region. Amazon hasn’t even pledged $500 million like Microsoft did last year. What Amazon has done this year, though, is funnel $1.5 million into Seattle’s 2019 election. Given the options of being forced to the housing solutions table via a progressive Seattle City Council or to lavish charitable giving on the scale of its peers to ease public pressure, Amazon chose door number three: try to buy the Seattle City Council elections to preempt either option.
That massive donation prompted disgruntled Amazon workers, progressive candidates, and activists to rally today at the Amazon Spheres, the signature three-orb landmark of Amazon’s massive South Lake Union corporate headquarters. That campus houses most of Amazon’s 45,000 workers in Seattle–and is projected to continue to grow even more after all the HQ 2 hoopla.
On hand was Councilmember Kshama Sawant, who is up for reelection in District 3 and is Amazon’s number one target–as well as District 2 candidate Tammy Morales and District 4’s Shaun Scott. Both have also earned Amazon’s scorn for pushing progressive taxation and the city taking a firmer hand with the corporate behemoth–now valued at a trillion dollars.
The first councilmember on the docket, though, was Teresa Mosqueda. She and Sawant were the only two councilmembers to vote against repealing the employee hours tax that Amazon opposed and strong-armed the City into canceling by raising a stink and donating to a repeal effort, funding paid signature gatherers. Councilmember Mosqueda stressed that progressives on the city council still had work to do–work Amazon was trying to stop dead in its tracks.
“We’re here to send a message that here in Seattle we are fearless and we refuse to be intimidated,” Councilmember Mosqueda said. “We’re the city that stood up and passed $15 an hour in the face of intimidation and fear. And when businesses said they would have to shut down and the sky would fall, we proved that $15 an hour would work.”
“They’re afraid that we’re going to keep fighting for more union work,” Mosqueda said. “They’re afraid we’re going to keep fighting for a domestic workers bill of rights, which we just passed last year. They’re afraid of the hotel worker legislation we just passed again this year. They’re afraid of what we’re going to do next year, which is fight for all gig economy workers and all app-based workers to have the same rights as everyone deserves.”
“We won’t let our City Council be bought,” Councilmember Mosqueda said. “Seattle is not for sale.”
