How Amazon Helped Kill a Seattle Tax on Business

Seattle is one of the most progressive cities in the country. It’s the place where the Fight for $15 movement first gained traction, where the city council last year tried to levy a tax on the city’s richest residents, and where local government passed one of the country’s first secure scheduling ordinances to give shift workers more notice of when they’d be working. And now, Seattle businesses have had enough.

Less than a month after the Seattle City Council unanimously passed a “head tax” ordinance that would have levied a $275 per employee tax on Seattle businesses making more than $20 million a year, the same council voted to repeal that head tax Tuesday, in a 7-2 vote.

Council members say they changed their minds in the face of a well-funded and vicious campaign that sought to put a referendum on the November ballot to repeal the head tax, a campaign that they say also sought to flush progressives from office in Seattle. They say big companies like Amazon have held the city hostage by refusing to engage in a discussion about new revenue streams to fund affordable housing, and that though they might have quashed this effort, they have put forward no solutions for the city’s problems. Business leaders, meanwhile, say they’re fed up with a constant stream of taxes that have done little to solve Seattle’s growing homelessness crisis. “It's a little bit the straw that broke the