Megawarehouse will have huge costs for Tacoma. The environment is just the start | Opinion

The South Tacoma megawarehouse would be disastrous to the health of the local population — and the workers inside may feel the brunt of it.

For anyone who hasn’t heard by now, in early 2023 the city of Tacoma quietly approved property-developer Bridge Industrial’s application to construct a 2.5 million-square-foot warehouse smack-dab in the middle of the neighborhood of South Tacoma. This area has the worst equity score in Tacoma and the Department of Ecology has already declared it to be an “overburdened community.” More than 120 organizations including the EPA, Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility and local unions have condemned the project for reasons ranging from racism to air pollution to labor rights.

Despite these warnings and intense grassroots pushback, the reckless permitting and construction of Bridge Industrials megawarehouse continues.’

As only a single example of how this warehouse would devastate the environment and local health outcomes, on April 16 the Department of Ecology issued a drought emergency declaration ahead of what is expected to be a hotter-than-usual summer. Most of Washington gets its water from streams resulting from seasonal glacial melt. But statewide snowpack is 68% of normal, and things are heating up earlier than usual. The emergency declaration applies statewide except in Seattle, Tacoma and Everett, because these areas have large underground reservoirs.

But a significant portion of the remaining aquifer-recharge area in Tacoma is about to be paved over to build Bridge Industrial’s warehouse.

Several labor unions have made formal statements opposing the megawarehouse, including Teamsters Local No. 28 and United Food and Commercial Workers Local 367 . In a 2022 letter to the principal planner for the city of Tacoma, the Joint Council of Teamsters No. 28 warned, “Under SEPA, the City should have more carefully studied the hydrological impacts of so much impervious surface bring places atop a sensitive aquifer, the potential impacts of particulate matter run-off from stormwater, and the settling of airborne particulates into vegetation and even bioswales.”

Although no less tangible, the majority of these environmental issues would be cumulative and play out on the scale of years or months. The most immediate impacts would be felt by those who end up working in the warehouse.

In 2021, 5.5% of warehouse workers were injured on the job — more than double the average injury rate across all industries at 2.7%. It is not yet clear what company would occupy the warehouse space, but the average employee turnover rate in the warehouse industry is 46.1%. At Amazon, it’s double that number — if not higher . If the occupant or occupants of the new warehouse space treat their employees poorly — an industry standard — they will eventually eat through their workforce pool, i.e. the South Tacoma working class.

Clearly, warehouse workers could use protections but the players in this industry are actively chipping away at those already in place.

One strategy involves building warehouses in areas without union protections and using contracted truckers to move products from a ship to a non-unionized warehouse, instead of employing the workers at union-controlled ports. The South Tacoma megawarehouse is another manifestation of this decades-long trend in the shipping industry called “containerization.” If this warehouse is being built in order to take power from unions, we cannot expect the workers inside to be treated well.

That is, if there even are workers. Warehouse labor (and just about every facet of our economy) is becoming increasingly automated as companies do everything in their power to minimize labor costs. At this point, insufficient automation technology is the only reason non-union warehouse jobs still exist — and it’s only a matter of time before technology catches up.

Based on existing research on warehouses all over the country, warehouse workers/robots would mostly be bringing packages to more affluent parts of the city. The wealth of those neighborhoods already comes at the expense of a 25-years lower life expectancy for South Tacomans, and we must wonder what this number would look like if this warehouse is built. As warehouse work quickly becomes automated , the South Tacoma warehouse would eventually become nothing but another environmental burden on this severely underprivileged community.

The working poor will destroy our bodies and homes to serve the rich until we wake up, unionize and seize control of the economy.

Things won’t get better until that happens — not working conditions, not health disparities, not climate change, not racism, and not the capitalist war machine ravaging the globe.

Andromeda is a Tacoma-based journalist and mathematician with a bent toward environmental justice and exposing corruption.