Only half the jobs at Amazon‘s new headquarters in Long Island City and Washington, D.C., will be tech jobs, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
New York City officials made the announcement at a presentation for the Queens community board Tuesday night: Of the reported 25,000 jobs Amazon will bring to the city, 12,500 will be in tech. The rest will be “administrative jobs, custodial staff, HR, all those things,” said Eleni Bourinaris-Suarez, vice president of government and community relations at the Economic Development Corporation, which helped negotiate the deal with Amazon.
The same breakdown is expected for the Washington, D.C., location, the Journal reported.
Last week, Amazon announced the winners of a yearlong contest for its new headquarters, dubbed HQ2. Originally, one city was to be chosen for a site with 50,000 jobs, but the company decided to split the HQ in two, explaining that it could attract better tech talent that way.
New York City won a spot by offering Amazon $3 billion in city and state tax incentives and grants, contingent on the creation of at least 25,000 jobs. When announcing the Long Island City location last week, Amazon said the average annual salary at the site would be $150,000.
Much about the job breakdown is still unknown. An Amazon spokesperson told the Journal that the Long Island City location would “create jobs for people with all different backgrounds and skills.”
Bourinaris-Suarez made the community board presentation on Tuesday night along with Nate Bliss, senior vice president for development at the EDC. It was the first public presentation since the site was announced. The officials said details about jobs at the site were still not finalized but noted that Amazon recently committed to a $15 hourly minimum wage, which will become New York City’s minimum wage at the end of the year.
Several local officials had already voiced objections to the subsidies the city has promised Amazon, including Representative-elect Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. “We’ve been getting calls and outreach from Queens residents all day about this. The community’s response? Outrage,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on the day of the HQ2 announcement. “Amazon is a billion-dollar company. The idea that it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here.”
But Mayor Bill de Blasio believes Amazon’s move to New York will pay off. “There will be hassles, there will be challenges, but I think we can accommodate them,” de Blasio told reporters last week. “We will have to invest in infrastructure. I think it will be worth it.”
