Welcome to the new Good Jobs First — a top-to-bottom redesign of our popular website! Our goal is to make our information easier to find, our databases easier to navigate and most important: documenting the many ways economic development subsidies and corporate misbehavior impact us all.
Our updated tagline gets to our dual mission of holding government and corporations accountable, and the ways our tools can be used in campaigns advocating economic development that works not for big business, but for you and me.
Are you new to economic development subsidies? Take a quick perusal of this website and come away with the basics – what they are, why they’re detrimental, how and when they’re used.
Been around this issue for years? We hope our redesign lets you get to the content you’ve grown to love and depend on even faster (especially if you’re a mobile user!).
Here are some of the other major changes:
- We’ve streamlined the landing pages for our popular databases chronicling corporate misconduct (Violation Tracker), which companies are getting government handouts (Subsidy Tracker) and how much revenue governments are foregoing to corporate tax abatements (Tax Break Tracker). They’re easier to get started, but all the advanced search capabilities are still there for power users.
- Our Violation Tracker now provides paid subscribers (more on that later) the name of the parent company at the time of the penalty (if different from the current parent) and a summary of the ownership changes over time.
- Amazon Tracker is now an interactive database, allowing you to search by region, state, subsidy type (was it for a warehouse or a Whole Foods?) and year.
- Our very popular Tax Increment Financing (TIF) content is now available directly from our home page (under “Resources”).
- Our publications are easy to search and sort by subject, year and geography.
- Our current projects are now clearly organized: Ending Amazon Giveaways, Protecting Public Education, Tax Abatement Disclosures (GASB 77), Racial Equity and Economic Development, and Shrinking Opportunity Zones.
- Our new state profiles provide a quick roundup of how your state has historically used subsidies, snapshots of your state’s most expensive programs, and other ways companies who operate in them benefit from public money.
- We’ve even included a little History for those who want to know how Good Jobs First came to be in the year of 1998.
There’s another big change involving our databases. Our powerful trackers are part of what make Good Jobs First so popular with journalists, activists, academics, policymakers, and others – no one else will tell you ExxonMobil’s penalty total since 2000 (it’s $2,220,466,598) or how much Amazon has gotten in public subsidies (at least $4,728,920,363).
As one European activist called it: “Violation Tracker is a global public good.”
Keep searching and reviewing all of our databases for free, and without even registering. But if you want to download records from Violation Tracker or Subsidy Tracker, you’ll need to become a paid subscriber. In addition to downloads and the new historical information on the parent company at the time of the violation, subscribers will have the ability to save searches.
Like all excellent services, our databases are extremely labor-intensive to deliver. We hope you’ll recognize the great deal we’re offering and support our incredible work.
Enjoy exploring our new website and as you do, please reach out and let us know what’s working and what could be better. We’re eager to hear from you.
Sincerely,
Greg LeRoy
Executive director and founder of Good Jobs First