Saikat Chakrabarti, the freshman congresswoman’s chief of staff, blamed Amazon for backing out when the going got tough after a range of community groups, labor organizations and activists pushed back on its plan to build a complex for 25,000 workers on the Queens waterfront.
Try, backed out when the demands became too outrageous.
Amazon thought they had negotiated a mutually beneficial deal. But, NYC was like Darth Vader in "The Empire Strikes Back", changing the deal and saying, "Pray that I do not alter it further."
Even now, AOC is so haughty as to say, "not opposed" to bringing it back.
Based on whats been said....the community groups wanted Amazon to agree to x-number of the 25,000 being home-grown residents (not the move-in’s), and they wanted a guarantee on minimum wage. That was more or less a ‘no-go’ for Amazon HR.
If I remember the episode of Wal-Mart trying to move into DC around six years ago, same script there. The city council wanted a promise that x-number of employees had to be actual DC residents, and guaranteed full-time labor.
It’s not like they (Amazon) have no place else to go.
From the end of the article:
“The freshman Democratic congresswoman, along with other local politicians, including New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson and New York State Sen. Michael Gianaris, highlighted the deal’s cost and the potentially negative impact of gentrification at a time when the city is dealing with a crumbling, underfunded subway system.
“Part of it has to do with tax breaks, but it’s not the whole story,” she told CBS News.
When asked by Bloomberg TV whether it was possible that they’d welcome Amazon back, Chakrabarti didn’t entirely close the door.
“If we can do it through a community process, if there’s a way for the community to actually engage and make their demands heard, that would have been the way to do that,” he told Bloomberg TV. “We welcome a process, we welcome having a community process, yes, but I don’t know where the talks are at this stage.”
However, when Amazon announced it was pulling out of New York on Feb. 14, the company said they were not planning to reopen the HQ2 process and would instead invest in Virginia and in Tennessee, adding: “There are a number of folks on the ground who oppose our presence. We don’t think there’s a path forward in terms of working with them over the long term.”
Having made it all about them and their demands, AOC is now the “blame face” for screwing up the Amazon NYC HQ2 deal. Amazon, along with a lot of disgruntled New Yorkers, is going to make sure she wears that label for a while.
2020 is like, next year. Think all the voters in her district that lost out on Amazon jobs will still be sore at her then?
One can only hope.