A lie for a lie and your soul for sale

[sovay]

Mayor Curtatone finally made a public decision I don't agree with, but he picked a doozy: "Somerville is preparing a regional proposal for Amazon's new headquarters." First of all, I have hated since the start of this process the very idea that Boston has to court Amazon, has to flatter the largest internet retailer on the globe into gracing our brick-and-mortar backwater with its $135 billion presence; Bezos' ego doesn't need the extra stroking. Second, I don't want Amazon in Boston: I don't want to become the Seattle of the East Coast or, God forbid, the San Francisco. I don't want to live in a company town. I especially don't want to live in a company town with Amazon's well-documented, exploitative employment practices. And I really, especially don't want to see Somerville, which is struggling enough with costs of living and gentrification and rents approaching asymptote, turn into an exploded shell of itself with the neutron star of Amazon at its core. When I feel less like a bomb went off in my head, I will try to write some less furious version of the above and send it to the city. I cannot see any way in which an Amazon "campus" in Somerville ends well, except for Amazon.

Comments

[phi]

I haven't gotten past spluttering fury myself. Especially that Curtatone had the chutzpah to say Amazon will bring "good jobs" to blue collar Somerville residents. Bull-fucking-shit. Amazon offered me $130K to work for them and I turned them down because my price for enduring 60-70 hours a week of constant abuse is at least an order of magnitude higher than that, thank you very much, and that's at the white-collar tech employee end of the spectrum. From everything I've read work conditions for physical labor are far worse. Augh. Still incoherent spluttering fury over here.

[sovay]

Amazon offered me $130K to work for them and I turned them down because my price for enduring 60-70 hours a week of constant abuse is at least an order of magnitude higher than that, thank you very much, and that's at the white-collar tech employee end of the spectrum.

That matches everything I've read. If you want to bring jobs into your city, why the hell would you seek them out from a company that has been repeatedly written up for abusive labor conditions? From a company that is actively anti-union? That makes no secret of its competition-discouraging practices—imagine what that'll do for local businesses? Even in the improbable best-case scenario where Amazon is a benevolent corporate behemoth and pays its people as much as they're worth, which it has heretofore shown no signs of doing, I can't see a good result for the people who live in this city and don't work for Amazon, so can't match the inevitably soaring costs of living. I can't see a good result for the city if Amazon decides one day that it's not getting the expected bang for its buck from Boston and pulls out all its money, like a one-company dot-com bubble. I can't see a good result if it decides that it's getting exactly what it wanted and stays, like a coalfield. I have had a near-migraine all day and I've still been shouting about this. It would be like an Olympic bid, only without even getting to watch the athletes.