Microsoft had the same stance with its employees during its anti-trust days.

I love it when the privileged class casually ponders the fate of the poors.

2 and it will be voted out, via citizen referendum, first, and then at the State Legislature...maybe even a court challenge. The head tax ain't gonna stick...the sands is shifting, all up and down the Left Coast....

2 and it will be voted out, via citizen referendum, first, and then at the State Legislature...maybe even a court challenge. The head tax ain't gonna stick...the sands is shifting, all up and down the Left Coast....

sorry don't know how the duplication transmission occurrence was facilitated...

Rock star Nat

Every tech company has this policy,you get "a talking to" but not really punished for breaking it. If you play it right you might get a high five from likeminded peers.

Now if you really want to get under our skin ask us if we have to deal with uneeded, duplicative and inefficient process at work. :) That's the job tax most really care about.

Plus most of us can't spell until we validate our code. E.g. "unneeded" and "like-minded".

8 The rich do all they can to control and oppress the poor and many of the poor work but don’t earn enough to pay the rent. We realize we are thought of as consumers not people. Too bad you haven’t noticed.

@3: They're not privileged, they just studied hard and are good at their jobs.

@12: Um, why would businesses think of the poor as consumers? Poor people, by definition, have little money to spend.

12 and 15 Do you really believe that?

Ho hum.

@15 So let's do everything we can to increase their numbers, yes? That'll sure be good for business!

I'd like all of our resident corporate shills to hop on over to Atlantic to check out the current number one trending article there. Here's a hand: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/

One particularly amazing nugget buried in this excellent article: a study done recently in Boston found that the average wealth of a white household in that city was about 246 K. The average wealth of a black household there? 8 dollars. Read that over a few times and then get back to us about how the poors just need to help themselves.

Hard to pull up them bootstraps when you haven't any boots.

"... the region needs 14,000 more units of affordable housing..."

The unions say who's gonna be building them?
They factored that in, didn't they.

A part of the problem is that 10's of thousands of engineers from all over the world (mostly male) who graduated in the top 3% of their high school class and top 10% at at top university are now moving here.

Should we punish them for their achievements?

We should punish them because they smell bad.

That's new car smell. Probably an unfamiliar scent. :)

I like Alex. The head tax as it stands isn't very good for anyone. Replace it with something serious.

Some businesses won't wait around, sure. It doesn't matter if they stay if everyone is priced out anyways, though. I pay taxes, I might as well have those taxes go toward something that's going to work. Retaining vestigial half-measures of plans which fell through is just insulting.

The Seattle Head Tax is guaranteed to fail.

We are going to fail in finding the resources to help the afflicted if the taxpayers expected to pay continue to see the profligate, unsuccessful, unaccounted spending ways of - oh, say, City of Seattle. I hope and trust people understand this. We will fail if future attempts to provide dumping grounds for our homeless and addicted are done in dity backroom deals as City of Bellevue tried to do earlier this year. What little TRUST our elected leadership has is being rapidly eroded by each succeeding news cycle.

On the positive side the early MOU between King County and City of Seattle is the first common-sense step we have seen in forever, if not longer. That MOU could and should be expanded to Pierce and Snohomish counties. A Boston model approach to this public disaster is available to us IF local leaders will agree to get out of their own way.

An inspired Seattle leadership would dump this turd and aggressevely pool the City resources with those of other minicipalities in the 3 County area to arrive at effective and sustainable help for our less fortunate citizens, neighbours, and youth. AIN'T nobody (who pays the bills) gonna' buy into Seattle City Council no more.

Uhmmm... the second guy's reason was entirely different from the first guys reason.

The first guy said, essentially 'a payroll tax would be better because the hours tax hits employers of low paid workers relatively harder and it might actually matter to them unlike the employer of highly paid workers for whom an effective 0.1% tax obviously is no big deal, so maybe that means things get tougher for those nearer the bottom;'. The second guy seemed to be thinking that 'in the long run, but without waiting around, all or some unspecified group of employers would be trying to figure out how to leave'.

They don't have 'similar reasons' at all.

I work at Amazon (and am not a PR rep or public spokesperson). Thanks for coming to talk to people. Campus is heavily targeted with aggressive paid canvassers, so if you approach a group of people and engage them with "hey buddy, can I ask you a question", you're almost certainly assumed as such; hence the cold shoulder. "Got a minute to talk to The Stranger?" might get you a different response. It would from me anyway.

I get the impression (rightly or wrongly) that Amazon is trying to soften its posture w.r.t. employees talking about their experiences publicly, but people don't know where the lines are.

People work hard and don't get what they deserve; a city that can only be enjoyed by tech workers is not a healthy one; and we have a widening gap in opportunities that is difficult to understand and close. I'm happy to pay more to help (obviously not everyone agrees). Alex's sentiment is pretty sensible. Also if the head tax affects business like grocers or other life essentials (?), it will have an adverse impact on cost of living and dilute the impact of the money gained. The appeal of the idea is its simplicity but the whole thing seems a bit sloppy.

Property access and cost of living are the apparent issue... shouldn't we do something direct with property tax to protect long-term residents? Shouldn't extra revenue from exploding property taxes be structurally directed at housing concerns or improving access for lower income residents? To protect "smaller" businesses, shouldn't the head tax be tiered like income tax? If the tax is related to the number of workers who live in the city, would that incentivize businesses to locate people outside and invest in commuter / remote work infrastructure?

This conflict is over a pittance. It's less than fifteen cents per hour of work. For low-wage work, we're talking about the difference between $15.00 and $15.14, or more like $30.00 and $30.14 with benefits and other costs of employing someone. For the average worker at the Amazon offices, we're talking about adding fourteen cents to the fifty to one hundred dollars it costs to employ that person for a hour. It's almost completely insignificant relative to existing cost of labor.

@21 we definitely should not punish our new friends the tech workers. We should use the government for the only purpose authorized by the holy bible. We should issue the tech workers girlfriends and as the profit Jordan Petersen decrees enforce monogamy so that none of them shoot up the city and drive out our corporate overloads. Everyone knows women b shoppin and virgins b shootin.

I am not against the head tax so much as I am against approving new taxes with no hard copy on where and when the money gets spent. I am not a fan of giving millions to the city to play around with as they may. Seattle is notorious for grubbing money from the citizens only to spend it on other things than what they promised.

I think this is a great idea. Truly enlightened.
Because what this does is provide yet One More Reason for companies to ship jobs overseas.
OUTSOURCING, BABY!!!!!!!!!
Let's make America poor, sick, and stupid, so we can compete on an equal basis with the rest of the world!

@30: Fear not, Woofy. That about which you claim to be against did not happen. When and where the money is to be spent is described in a spending plan, passed by City Council as a resolution accompanying the ordinance that created the tax.