The idea of the company town is nothing new to Westerners. Our region was settled largely by people putting down roots where a mining, railroad, or logging company had set up shop. The modern company town, one would think, is a tech-fueled burg like San Francisco or Seattle, but recent elections highlight how dramatically these cities’ engagement with their biggest employers has changed.
Just a few weeks ago, it seemed that Seattle’s City Council was set to get a pro-business makeover. Seven of nine positions on the council were up for election, with only two incumbents on the ballot. The situation was ripe to remake a government body that last year waffled on whether to tax the big companies in town — chief among them, Amazon — to fund desperately needed homeless services. The council unanimously passed a tax in May 2018, called a “head tax” by many since it would have charged large employers $275 for each employee. But soon after, area businesses launched a referendum campaign. Amazon said it was “apprehensive about future growth in Seattle” because of the vote. The council, in an unprecedented move, repealed the tax after less than a month.
Money poured into this year’s city council race, including a $1.1 million donation from Amazon to the local chamber of commerce’s political action committee just weeks before election day, bringing the company’s total contributions to the race to nearly $1.5 million. Much hand-wringing about big corporate spending ensued — including from the likes of senators and presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — and when initial election results for the city council came rolling in, it seemed at least three of the chamber-backed candidates were winning, including, notably, Egan Orion, the challenger to socialist incumbent Kshama Sawant, whose campaign directly targeted Amazon.
After the announcement of Amazon’s contribution, for example, Sawant’s campaign sent an email to supporters: “Emergency! Amazon just dropped a $1 million bomb on our city elections, in a flagrant attempt to blow up Seattle’s democratic process.” It told supporters not to allow Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos “to buy this election.”
Once the late vote counts came in, though, Sawant had won. And just two of the candidates that received support from Amazon’s campaign windfall will take a seat on Seattle’s City Council next year. One of whom, Debora Juarez, received funding from both the chamber PAC and from labor unions.
So were these results a backlash to the company that’s often cited, for better or for worse, for its role in Seattle’s massive growth?
“It certainly seems that way,” said Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington who researches tech and American politics. “Amazon was already kind of the subtext of this election. Then the big donation made that text. It was a fantastic talking point for Sawant and others to be able to say, ‘Look, they’re trying to buy the election.’”
San Francisco faced a similar instance of anti-tech sentiment at the ballot box last year, when voters had the chance to weigh in on a proposition that would tax large businesses to pay for homeless services. (Sound familiar?) Some of tech’s biggest names came out against the measure. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey personally donated $75,000 to the “No on Prop C” campaign; Lyft, Stripe, and several venture capitalists also put money behind it. Voters, however, went against big tech (notably, Salesforce and its CEO, Marc Benioff, supported the measure) and the tax passed with 60 percent of the vote.
It might be tempting to associate these election losses for big companies as natural roles for anti-establishment cities like San Francisco and Seattle, but things haven’t always been this way.
Take, for example, Seattle’s early relationship with Boeing. In the 1940s, wartime demand for planes made Seattle essentially a one-industry town. But in 1949, with a federal contract ending and whispers that the Air Force might move others from Seattle to a Wichita, Kansas, plant, the chamber of commerce started a committee bent on keeping production in Washington. The group explicitly tied the fates of company and city by rallying local labor unions, veterans, government officials of both parties, and even newspapers “to Boeing’s defense,” according to a paper by Richard S. Kirkendall, historian and professor emeritus at the University of Washington. While that relationship has shifted over the years (especially in 2001, when Boeing moved its headquarters out of the Emerald City), it’s hard to imagine Seattle’s hallmark company of today — Amazon — enjoying such a cozy relationship with its citizens.
Consider that a sign of changing times — and a new breed of capitalism.
“The nature of jobs are different now in contrast to the golden age of Boeing,” O’Mara said. “When Seattle was ‘Jet City,’ [Boeing] was a massive blue collar employer, with thousands of unionized blue collar jobs that were secure and well-paying.”
Amazon, conversely, “has become a proxy nationally for a whole host of concerns and anxieties about what’s gone wrong [with capitalism],” O’Mara said. Namely that the income gap between executives and engineers in Amazon’s downtown skyscrapers and the folks who deliver its packages is enormous.
Further, Amazon lacks the political stranglehold other Western companies and industries have historically enjoyed. Just as Boeing used to run Seattle, it wasn’t so long ago a Montana politician’s career was determined by Anaconda Copper, and a Las Vegas politician was sure to cozy up to the casino magnates. But Seattle’s economy is diverse enough today that Amazon, which employs 50,000 in town, couldn’t sway this election.
If the tension playing out in recent elections is any indication, tech companies and the cities they call home don’t have much harmony in their future. The next battle may very well have to do with campaign finance. Seattle City Councilmember Lorena González has proposed capping contributions to PACs at $5,000 for companies with a percentage of foreign ownership — Amazon included.
“The reason we have honest elections is so that the people can be heard, so that elected officials like me are talking to you,” González said to a crowd of protesters on Amazon’s campus after the campaign donations were announced. “Not to the people on the top floor of these buildings.”
One reason for the tension could be that the relationship between big cities and tech companies is relatively new. “Tech grew rich and powerful for the first several decades in mostly suburban environments,” O’Mara, who wrote The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, said. And traits we think of as Western, like being anti-tax and ruggedly individualistic, may be hindering the relationship in cities with liberal voter bases.
“Some cities gave these companies special breaks and benefits to be there, and now we have these places born of the suburbs in the city, that have baked into their business model the idea that they pay as little in tax as possible,” O’Mara said.
For its part, Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener told the Associated Press that, despite the election results, the company is “looking forward to working with the new city council, which we believe will be considerably more open to constructive dialogue and making the decisions that need to be made in order for Seattle to be world-class city to live and do business.”
If that working relationship is going to get better, though, perhaps they’ll want to take another tack, said O’Mara. “The lesson here is that writing a big check is not necessarily going to effect the change you want to see,” she said. “That actually involves much more work.”
