But the public has had a short window to weigh in, and some key stakeholders – including the school district and the state teachers union – have remained on the sidelines. In recent months, four county and municipal boards have all unanimously approved the deal. Local officials have been positioning Niagara for the warehouse for two years, mostly in secret. The project will create “a lot of jobs for a lot of people,” Brown said. The Niagara Building Trades Council is supporting the deal despite the lack of a collective bargaining agreement, which the labor groups requested but Amazon was unwilling to provide, council president Paul Brown told New York Focus. “A deal that doesn’t at least require one of the largest, richest corporations in the world to pay for community benefits, livable wages, and to mitigate clear environmental impacts, is no deal at all,” a coalition of labor unions and corporate watchdogs wrote in a letter to the Niagara County Industrial Development Authority, signed by the independent Amazon Labor Union, the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 153, and five state and local corporate watchdog groups. Those taxpayer dollars would in large part be redirected from the revenue stream for the Niagara Wheatfield Central School District, which receives nearly half of its revenue from local property taxes.Ĭritics warn that the facility could cost more jobs in the community than it would create, as Amazon warehouses have done elsewhere by adversely affecting local retail industries, and would offer a lower wage than the vast majority of existing jobs in Niagara County. The tax breaks are part of an incentive package that the Niagara County Industrial Development Agency (IDA), tasked with promoting industrial development in the region, is offering Amazon to build a $550 million warehouse and create 300 temporary construction jobs and over 1,000 permanent warehouse jobs. "Amazon has become one of the principal allies and a strategic partner in the economic recovery and the fulfillment of objectives that have been laid out by the current administration to improve the level of well-being of Mexican families," the governor said.This article was published in partnership with the Albany Times Union.Īmazon is expected to clear a final hurdle this week to receive more than $124 million in tax breaks to build a warehouse in the town of Niagara in western New York, among the largest subsidies the company will have ever received. Alfredo Del Mazo Maza said Amazon's expansion would help counteract pandemic-driven economic fallout in the country, according to Mexico News Daily. Two fulfillment centers will go up in Monterrey and in Guadalajara, which are two of the largest metro areas in the country, and the company will have at least 27 delivery stations scattered across Mexico. It announced last year that it was spending $100 million on new warehouses in Mexico to improve delivery speeds. Amazon now has five fulfillment centers in the country, and Vano told Insider that the company had since created 15,000 jobs throughout Mexico. The report said "that some sort of employment displacement is taking place, or that the growth in warehousing jobs is too limited to spill over into broad-based employment gains for the overall local economy."Īmazon waded into the Mexican marketplace in 2015, a move that would help the company compete with its fellow e-commerce giant Walmart. The economists added that jobs needed to be high-paying for communities to see long-term economic growth.Īnd a report from the Economic Policy Institute in 2018 found that while there was a 30% increase in storage and warehouse jobs where a new Amazon warehouse went up, there wasn't always an overall increase in employment in the areas. Pay at Amazon's US warehouses starts at $15 an hour, and the company regularly touts what it says are competitive health-insurance and retirement benefits at its centers, including the Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse where employees voted not to unionize earlier this year.īut for some areas with new warehouses - such as in Davenport, Iowa - economists said Amazon's competitive wages could force local retailers to match that pay, which could lower employment rates since that limits how many people they can employ, the Quad-City Times reported. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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