Amazon is coming to Fall River. The on-line giant announced last week that it will occupy a million-square-foot building that’s going to be built on the Fall River-Freetown line. The new warehouse, which in Amazon-speak carries the name “Fulfillment Center,” will join 50 or so similar facilities around the country.
So who among us can look forward to being fulfilled by the Fulfillment Center?
For starters, Amazon customers in Massachusetts, who can look forward to next-day delivery of their $600 premium foosball table with enamel screen-printed graphics or their Natura Bisse Oxygen Cream (immediately softens the most dehydrated skin, $88 for a 2.5 ounce jar).
Second, Amazon itself, which in addition to its profits gets more than $6 million in state and local tax breaks for choosing the Fall River site.
Third, Governor Charlie Baker, who’s pretty excited about it all (as is the predominantly Democratic Fall River area legislative delegation).
Anybody out there who’s not going to be so fulfilled?
Well, construction companies in Massachusetts, which lost out on the building contract. That went instead to a company from East Rutherford, N.J.
And the people who will be working in the new Fulfillment Center? Amazon is promising 500 full-time jobs at an average salary of $35,000. Which might well sound good to people in Fall River right now, where the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high. But that average salary will still leave a Fall River family of four about $25,000 short of what they need to live on (and 500 jobs is only half the number of jobs Amazon was promising Fall River a year ago).
Then there’s the issue of the working conditions at Amazon’s Fulfillment Centers. The Allentown, Pennsylvania, Morning Call newspaper has been covering the working conditions at Amazon’s nearby Lehigh Valley Fulfillment Center for the past five years. Anybody contemplating an Amazon job in Fall River and anybody who is unequivocally keen on Amazon’s arrival in the state might want to take a look at the Morning Call‘s stories about life in an Amazon warehouse: punishing productivity quotas that result in the firing of workers unable to meet them and injuries to many who try (keep in mind that workers must cover a warehouse that’s the size of 21 football fields); a management structure in which the real employer is not Amazon itself, but a temporary help agency called “Integrity Staffing Solutions,” which can take advantage of laws that limit its liability for unemployment insurance and can help reduce the risk of encroachment by labor unions through constant employee turnover; triple-digit temperatures in the warehouse during the summer (on this point, Amazon was at pains to say that it had arranged for paramedics to be in ambulances parked outside the warehouse to treat the severely dehydrated).
If you take another look at Governor Baker’s enthusiastic comments about Amazon’s arrival, you’ll notice that he’s very excited to help Amazon meet all its needs — and that the Massachusetts residents who will be working there are a mere afterthought:
“Our collaboration and partnership with Amazon is a good example of where the state has worked with, and will continue to work with, companies and help them meet their needs for everything from tax incentives to training new employees to permitting so that they can continue to grow in the Commonwealth.”
Points for honesty.
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(Cross-posted here.)
Our awful Governor is giving a rich corporation, Amazon, tax benefits. As a result, Amazon won’t need to pay their fair share of taxes to help Fall River’s school system educate its workers’ children. I guess both Charlie and Amazon want to have a good supply of poorly educated workers who can be employed at subsistence wages.
It would be far better if our state had a graduated income tax, and we raised more revenue. That way, we could put people to work repairing our transportation infrastructure AND we could improve our system of public education.
It’s really awful that Charlie Baker is our Governor, and nobody is calling him out for his actions that are destroying our state.
The breaks should not be based on job promises, but actual jobs created during the previous year. Also, even if a construction company is headquartered out of state they would still have to hire the actual labor locally, right?
Some perhaps, but certainly not all. There are loads of traveling construction crews, particularly for specialties. I’m not arguing what Amazon will do, but it doesn’t sound like a whole lot of livable wage paid union members will be on that construction site.
Why the heck does Amazon get a state a tax break for locating in Mass, if their facility must be anyway located in Mass for Mass deliveries?
You can also make MA deliveries from RI and NH.
We, as a state, need to step up and intervene, making sure these jobs are safe, and to stop Amazon from turning these jobs into constantly-rotating temporary hires that are clearly attempts to skirt state and federal employment law.
For years, Democrats have been campaigning on “Jobs and a Growing Economy” and that’s what we get. Low paying jobs and growth than is harvested by a small number of citizens.
We need to call out companies like Walmart and Amazon for what they are: corporate parasites who externalize their actual costs by paying substandard wages and expecting American taxpayers to make up the difference. Medicaid, food stamps, subsidized housing, and all the other government services that the working poor rely on to survive, all provided by us, the taxpayer. All this and more to insure that Amazon can turn a profit sufficient to make Jeff Bezos, who owns 18% of Amazon, the fifth richest man in the world.
If it weren’t in this state it would be over the line in Rhode Island. But if you want to see the operation google “amazon robotics” . It gives a glimpse into the future, of course if people didn’t use it, it wouldn’t exist. I am somewhat of a dinosaur (I’m getting my first cell phone next month) so I have never used amazon. I go to my local brick and mortar, have to use Wal Mart sometimes but use smaller shops whenever possible. I won’t even use the self scan when I have to go to Home Depot knowing it takes away the job of a cashier.
At Foxwoods robotic kiosks have replaced the order takers at the counter. It is inevitable but I feel I haven’t hastened the demise. Best thing to do is invest in UPS, at least till the bugs are worked out of the delivery drones.
In those days, the king owned the lion’s share of what produced wealth (Land) and other royals split up the remains. The peasants who actually worked the land and created the wealth owned little or nothing.
Today, company stock (not land) is where the wealth is produced and harvested.
One man owns 18% of Amazon and I’ll assume that a small number of Americans own controlling shares. The actual laborers might own a tiny percentage of stock in scattered 401k’s. This is not “freedom”, this is serfdom for the average American citizen. This is not what our founders had in mind.
We have become the same country that we fought a revolution to free ourselves from.
but don’t use amazon.
How about directing all the money we are wasting on corporate tax credits to a functioning T, more affordable housing and an equitable education system? There was a Commonwealth piece arguing that the affordable housing crunch will begin to cause hiring contractions down the road, as soon as five years time. Better transit and more transit hubs will spur commercial development and job creation around new spokes and hubs, and open up more gateway cities and stale suburbs to revitalization and development. Lastly, kids in Roxbury and Lawrence deserve the same employment opportunities as kids in Lexington and Sudbury.
Relying almost exclusively on property taxes hurts our economic competitiveness, our commitment to social equity, and keeps the real estate market exorbitantly high for “good” school districts. All three problems are linked and can be solved together in a way that spurs far more development and creates far more jobs than shoveling money out of the window to bribe already wealthy out of state companies to come here and hire a token number of Bay Staters for the tech sector equivalent of a McJob. We could do so much better.
… why you feel the need to get all fraught up and put forth a notion of Amazon as purveyor of superfluous luxury items. That’s a little fragile, when not actually spurious.
The last thing I purchased on Amazon was socks. Other Items I’ve purchased on Amazon: pens, notebooks, office supplies. I’ve never bothered with next-day delivery. I can wait. I usually do.
This isn’t a defense of Amazon, though, this is editing your point to something that can actually cut. Painting Amazon as some sorta Hammacher-Schlemmer slinger of big-boy toys isn’t on point: It actually detracts from your otherwise valid and valuable concerns. I’m not very thrilled that somebody is paid poorly to sort my socks and ship them to me, but it’s still better than a casino job.
What’s also unclear is the extent to which negotiations may have, to a degree, succeeded. Barring a position that says ANY tax cuts are too much, the very fact of negotiations between legislators local and statewide and Amazon is a point to consider… Amazon, it is said and you point out, was projecting 1,000 jobs a while back but has definitively scaled that back to 500 without giving a cause for the reduced numbers. To what extent did the company expect a greater generosity in tax incentives and, failing that in the possible face of local Fall River legislators with backbone, decide to scale back? We don’t actually have their beginning expectations. We only have the final numbers which, while large in sum, aren’t particularly generous when spread over 10 or 15 years… While I, personally, would prefer to tax Amazon more for the privilege of working the CommonWealth, I remain unconvinced that Fall River legislators simply got rolled by the Corp juggernaut.
My greatest concerns are employee working conditions. I don’t hear many good things about how Amazon has treated its workforce, and I think Jeff Bezos is as mercenary as they come… So, tax cuts and toy delivery aside, I’d like to see that, more than anything, addressed and I join you in full-throated cry for fairness and a work ethic, from the corporate overlords, that treats workers well.
State and local governments could insist that the new facility be a union shop. Our government officials could strengthen, rather than weaken, the ability of labor organizers to create whatever new organizational structures are needed.
A strong, healthy, and empowered union will, I submit, do a better job of negotiating for the needed working conditions, compensation packages, and so on than pretty much any government agency.
I’m pretty sure that if this facility were a union shop, exchanges like this would be far less necessary.
…but do governments in fact have the legal authority to insist that a private project be unionized, or is it framed as a condition for the tax breaks?
From the link in the thread-starter:
My comment intended the “Union shop” requirement as a prerequisite for any special treatment from any public authority.
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More power to you and them. If Pawtucket wants another sweat-shop, they’re welcome to it.
Rhode Island is not exactly a beacon of worker prosperity.
but we could have forced things for the $$$ that would have made union organizing much easier. For example, we could have banned Amazon from hiring a 3rd party company to manage the staff. Amazon does that to skirt employment law, including in ways that makes organizing nearly impossible. (One thing the ‘3rd party employer’ that staffs the plants does is make every job a temporary job, so the jobs are constantly rotated, preventing anyone from being able to organize).
Six million dollars in tax breaks for 500 workers is $12,000 per worker. That’s totally ridiculous, especially when you consider that there is no guarantee that Amazon will actually hire 500 people.