Yes, that’s why I put in the bit about my job being secure.
Although given how hard it is to hire quality tech people in NYC already and the number of headhunters who contact me weekly, I can’t imagine having any difficulty.
Google’s still doubling their footprint in NYC and there’s been a lot of organic tech growth the past 5 years so I don’t think Amazon’s really that much of a game changer either way.
That’s a pretty high horse to sit on, but it being NYC, I would agree. If you said the same for some of the much smaller areas that were vying for the Amazon HQ, I would not agree. Even at half that number of jobs, that’s a big jump in local state taxes, sales taxes, economic spending and eventual local families that are brought to that area. Tons of companies get offered insane incentives due to that, and a smart location would write in clauses for some sort of payback on a deal renege.
As for politicians weighing in on it, they too need to look at that job number as something that will come back to bite them if things turn south for the economy as some forecasts are suggesting. It’s easy to say, “don’t give that greedy company and CEO any breaks.” It’s hard to say, “that’s a lot of people that will be able to keep food on the table, and also support other constituents that need to do the same.”
Sure, lots of spots offered even more incentives. But that it comes down to is the companies often, even usually, weasel out on them and are never held accountable. The politicians aren’t held accountable either. People just forget.
Look at Foxconn in Wisconsin. They’re openly breaking the rules of their agreement before they even break ground. And nobody’s taking those incentives away.
The Foxconn and Amazon deals were both bad in terms of incentives per promised employee. Those incentives were way higher than the norm in both cases I think. I work for a company that walked away from a deal because they got a better deal 3 years later. It was insane, but executives are pieces of shit sometimes, it is what it is. As far as I know there wasn’t any city or county payback but there were a whole host of vendors and leases that had to be paid big money to walk away from. Not to mention the job layoffs. I’m of the opinion we only got a pass becuase of two things:
- It was 2009, the economy tanked.
- We were one of many around the nation doing the same thing under the guise of closures to keep the business afloat.
Our specific deal was a downsizing of an office, conveniently to a new city that offered it’s own incentives for said downsized office.
I’m of the opinion this stuff happens so often it’s amazing any city or state would offer incentives at all, but they do so to compete with the other idiot cities and states.
What struck me is why New York City would offer those. It’s the largest city in the U.S. and double the size of its nearest competition. It has tons of jobs and tons of people. What kind of payola went on behind the scenes to get a deal like that?
NYC is extraordinarily expensive, so we have tons of incentives already in-place to make it more attractive. That’s normal. Amazon’s deal went far beyond that because they promised 25k jobs making $150k/year. If all of those jobs had materialized it would have been a good deal for NYC after a couple of years, no question.
Twitter Is Not The Real World Dept:
https://scri.siena.edu/2019/03/18/2-3-of-voters-say-amazon-cancelling-queens-hq-bad-for-ny/
2/3 voters don’t know what they’re talking about.
You are quite possibly right. But the assumptions I have seen that turning back Amazon was at best a wash politically, if not popular outright, appear to be unfounded.
It use to be the idea behind elected officials was that they could make informed decisions on topics the average voter has neither the time or interest to adequately understand.
You don’t say.
I wish there was a daily feed of Twitter Is Not The Real World facts so that I could read Twitter and not feel like I’m losing my damn mind.