the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Oct 28, 2013
Baltimore officials just announced that Amazon would build a warehouse on the old GM site. The company plans to hire about 1,000 people to work there, starting next year.
Of course, city officials are making a mighty attractive offer to Amazon and its landlord, Duke Realty–amounting to 43 million dollars in tax credits and loan deals.
As of last year, Amazon already had built warehouses all over the country, almost 90 of them. If every city and state were as generous as Maryland, offering 40 million dollars in incentives, the company would have gotten 3.6 billion dollars in these taxpayer-funded arrangements.
Amazon’s standard pay in the warehouses is $12 an hour, or about $24,000 for full-time workers. So even if other states and cities only gave half as much per job in tax breaks, they would still pay the wages of every worker at Amazon. And Amazon keeps all this income as profit!