Another thing he fails to mention is exactly what kind of jobs he's supposedly drawing to the state.For example, one of the "job creators" he was making hay with was the announcement that Amazon was building a distribution center in Kenosha. Like most of the businesses that are coming, it's because Walker is willing to give them our tax money by the drone payload while raising our taxes even further.
But just what kind of employer is Amazon?
Not a very good one at all:
Amazon has held off attempts at union organizing in the past. In 2000, for example, the Communication Workers of America started a campaign to unionize 400 customer service employees. But Amazon soon closed the call center where they worked as part of broader cuts following the Internet boom years. In other instances, the company gave managers anti-union material to hand out and warnings of how to spot union organizing by being on the lookout for hushed conversations.Hmmm, union busting, unsafe work conditions, low wages...yup, it's sounds like just the kind of company that would love the vulture capitalism that Walker has been grooming the state for.
Amazon’s workplace practices have come under fire in recent years. News outlets have detailed everything from the exhausting nature of warehouse work (employees can walk as much as 15 miles daily) to ambulances waiting outside a facility to collect workers who overheated because of a lack of air conditioning. Warehouse workers in Germany have walked out several times over wage issues. Some later traveled to Seattle to picket in front of Amazon’s headquarters.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Occupational Safety & Health Administration is investigating the death of a contractor at New Jersey package sorting facility owned by Amazon, but managed by Genco, a logistics firm. Amazon is also being sued in a number of states for failing to pay workers for time spent waiting in security lines before and after work.
Steve Tadelis, a professor of economics at University of California at Berkeley who focuses on e-commerce, said that unionization would make it more complicated for Amazon to fire workers, among other things. Higher labor costs could also narrow the company’s already thin profit margin. Although Amazon has a high-tech image, blue-collar employees do most of the work. Invariably, they earn much less than high-paid computer programmers.
“Even though the typical layperson on the street thinks Amazon belongs to the same group as Google, Facebook and Twitter, it’s more like Walmart without the bricks and mortar,” said Tadelis, citing another company that has successfully fought off labor organizers over the years.
Well, he did say he would create good jobs. He just never said that they would be good jobs.
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