San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
WORKER BEES
Restless City: Behind-the-scenes labor, not “knowledge workers” is S.A.’s niche.
Amazon’s decision to open three new facilities in San Antonio — including a 1 million-square-foot fulfillment center on the East Side — and hire more than 1,500 workers was a nice coda to this accursed year.
Between March and April, mandatory coronavirus shutdowns incinerated nearly 110,000 jobs in the San Antonio metro area, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The longer view is only slightly less grim: We lost a net 34,100 jobs from January through November.
The e-commerce giant’s announcement Tuesday was a welcome break from the gloom.
Here’s what Mayor Ron Nirenberg had to say: “San Antonio’s diverse industries, skilled workforce and sustainable infrastructure make us resilient, and we are ready to support significant growth from tech-focused companies like Amazon.”
You can write off the first half of that sentence as rhetorical filler. For years now, technocrats have chattered incessantly — and fuzzily — about “resiliency.” It more or less means that a city can withstand big shocks, including pandemics. San Antonio was poor before the COVID-19 outbreak, and it’s much poorer now; if that counts as resilient, the concept is as meaningless as we’ve suspected all along.
But the second half of Nirenberg’s quote, about being “ready to support significant growth,” has substance.
It accurately describes San Antonio’s place in an economy that lavishly, excessively rewards tech — we’re a worker-bee city.
We don’t do much of the highpaying work, such as R&D and strategy development. That happens in cities like Seattle or Austin, which we learned two weeks ago will be the new home base of enterprise software maker Oracle Corp. Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, is moving there, too.
A lot of San Antonio labor is devoted to back-office tasks —
taking customers’ questions and complaints in call centers, processing bills, and warehousing and delivering the goods.
Amazon has gotten richer because of the pandemic. People are living much more of their lives online than they were a year ago, and that includes buying stuff.
For example, I needed pen cartridges last week. Instead of driving a mile or so to the nearest Office Depot, I hit up Amazon. An Amazon worker or two, maybe with the help of a robot, packaged and shipped my cartridges, and a driver delivered them to my house the next day.
These are the kind of jobs the company will be adding in San Antonio.
The wages will be OK. Amazon pays its workers a minimum of $15 an hour.
I have the math skills of a journalist. So I asked Google, which also has thrived during the pandemic, what somebody earning $15 an hour brings in over the course of a year. Google sent me to Convertunits.com. Its answer was: about $30,000, or more than $31,000 if the worker received two weeks of paid vacation.
A couple reference points, courtesy of the Census Bureau: The median income for male workers in San Antonio is $30,848 per year. Women make much less — a median of $22,757 per year — because they’re women and they continue to suffer
discrimination in the workplace.
That $15 an hour, or $30,000 per year, is Amazon’s baseline pay. Some of its new employees — we don’t know how many — will earn more.
These will be solid jobs, and some of them will go to San Antonians who were thrown out of work this year.
The day before the Amazon news broke, I direct-messaged
Richard Florida, an economics professor and head of the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, on Twitter. He’s the author of the 2002 book “The Rise of the Creative Class,” one of the sacred texts for urbanists.
Throughout the aughts, in speeches, panel discussions, TED Talks and opinion pieces, Florida promoted the idea that cities should work hard to attract young artists and professionals in tech, science, business and management — “knowledge workers.” The result was endless talk in minor-league cities around the country about hike-and-bike trails, coffee shops, more and better arts and entertainment offerings, downtown apartments and condos, etc.
The case Florida made was part of the intellectual foundation of San Antonio’s “Decade of Downtown,” then-Mayor Julián Castro’s costly push to lure more residents to the inner city.
The problem — which has become crystal-clear in the intervening years — is that the Smart Ones, namely the tech industry and its generals (such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos), have worsened income inequality in the U.S. They’re vastly increasing the gulf between the haves and have-nots.
Florida dealt with this fallout in his 2017 book “The New Urban Crisis,” a good primer on the fix we’re in.
With the Oracle and Musk news still in the air, I wanted to hear what Florida had to say about the post-COVID-19 prospects of a city like San Antonio, which lacks the worldly allure of a place like Austin.
He hasn’t backed off his original premise.
“Many of the things San Antonio has done to make it more attractive — from the RiverWalk to downtown — are the kinds of things that will pay dividends to attract talent in the future,” Florida said by email. “Remote workers cannot work in isolation. Human beings are social creatures. We require interaction. The community and the city will become more, not less, important post-pandemic.”
As far as San Antonio’s relationship to Austin, he noted that the two “have long been linked.”
“There are many people who love Austin,” Florida said. “But Austin has a different politics and is also becoming incredibly expensive. It is suffering from its own new urban crisis already, so what I would expect is spillover to benefit San Antonio in the short run. Cooperation and coordination and collaboration between the two and also Dallas and Houston are essential.”
By “spillover,” he meant companies, entrepreneurs and workers moving to San Antonio.
Maybe he’s right. But Austin’s been expensive for a long time now, and we have yet to see a tide of refugees from our sister city.
In an economy stacked against cities such as San Antonio, the greater likelihood is that we will remain a gigantic hive of worker bees for the foreseeable future.
Just remember: There’s no shame in that. The shame is that a handful of companies and metro areas get such an outsize share of the economic rewards.