From 8/2018
Data from states shows thousands of Amazon employees are on food stamps
Thousands of Amazon workers receive food stamps. Now Bernie Sanders wants the company to pay up.
The median Amazon worker received $28,446 last year. The company’s founder, Jeffrey P. Bezos, is the world’s wealthiest man, with a net worth of $157 billion.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will soon introduce legislation that would require large employers such as Amazon, Walmart and McDonald’s to fully cover the cost of food stamps, public housing, Medicaid and other federal assistance received by their employees. The goal, he says, is to force corporations to pay a living wage and curb about $150 billion in taxpayer dollars that go to funding federal assistance programs for low-wage workers each year.
The bill, which Sanders plans to introduce in the Senate on Sept. 5, would impose a 100 percent tax on government benefits received by workers at companies with 500 or more employees. For example, if an Amazon employee receives $300 in food stamps, Amazon would be taxed $300….
From 5/2018
Amazon to open giant warehouse in Tucson, plans to hire more than 1,500 people
Luring the company here began eight months ago and land at the Port of Tucson, 6701 S. Kolb Road, was identified as ideal, said Joe Snell, CEO of Sun Corridor Inc…..
The warehouse will be a one-story structure, about 60 feet high, with 64 loading docks, 398 tractor-trailer parking spaces and about 2,500 vehicle parking spaces.
Pima County spokesman Mark Evans said the county was able to do a design and plan review in one week for Amazon.
“We’re thrilled to see them choose the Port of Tucson, which is connected to the Sonoran Corridor that we’ve diligently been working to develop for the past five years,” Evans said…..
From 4/2017
MR SNELL: Ready? Well, thank you for taking the time on a – not a great day. (Laughter.) So we appreciate it. First, let me introduce who we are as a group. You can see by the card I represent Sun Corridor Incorporated, and really what we are in simplest terms is a CEO or a leadership-driven economic development group. And we serve an area really from Phoenix south to the Mexican border. It’s a diverse group. We’re made up of academic leaders from different universities – Arizona State University, University of Arizona – to government leaders from Pima County to the city of Tucson and many others, and then corporate chief executives throughout the region representing a variety of industries….
MR SNELL: So to repeat the question, you’re wondering if the – if locally we have an incentive or a program to help with H1B visas or something?
QUESTION: Yeah, yeah, like that, yeah.
MR SNELL: I don’t think we have a local program that’s —
MR MCCASKER: We depend on that a lot.
MR SNELL: Yeah, we depend on it.
MR MCCASKER: We have a lot of companies that recruit in Europe, in Asia. You’re right; it is harder, it takes longer. Security clearances take longer with our defense contractors, where you have to have a top-level security clearance. That’s taking sometimes now six to nine months, so the bureaucracy has slowed. But I think that’s true across the board, so it’s not any harder in Tucson than it is in LA or here for foreigners to access the country and then to get a visa to be gainfully employed. So we seem attractive to those foreign workers for a lot of reasons. So we have a large percentage of Muslim migrants that work in our community, a lot of Mexicans that work in our community, a lot of —