#Amazon sets hiring marks — but local left killed NYC’s chance

Amazon is setting hiring records amid the pandemic — but New Yorkers are missing out, thanks to leftists like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Between January and October, the online retailer added 427,300 employees, reports The New York Times. That’s an average of about 1,400 a day — but since July the pace has been 2,800 new hires daily.

The company’s “hiring like mad,” marvels labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein. “No American company has hired so many workers so quickly.” Indeed, its growth this year blows away Walmart’s record hiring of 230,000 two decades ago.

Plus, Amazon offered $3,000 signing fees. And the pay itself isn’t bad: 85 percent of its 810,000 US workers get a minimum of $15 an hour. The retailer is now handing out $300 bonuses to full-timers as well.

New York City could sure use an employer like that right now, as the city faces 13.2 percent unemployment, almost twice the nation’s 6.9 percent rate. Yet radicals like AOC drove Amazon to ditch plans last year for a new headquarters in Queens — costing the city 25,000 jobs then, and who knows how many more during this unprecedented boom.

Major unions and far-left politicians united in venom against Gov. Cuomo’s deal to welcome the company. “A number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us,” Amazon noted dryly.

AOC cheered: “Dedicated, everyday New Yorkers & their neighbors defeated Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation and the power of the richest man in the world,” she crowed on Twitter.

Hmm: How many out-of-work New Yorkers would agree with her about that today?

It brings to mind the 2009 killing of the project for a mall at the long-vacant Kingsbridge Armory. The executioner, Bronx beep Rubén Diáz Jr., huffed that the idea that “any job is better than no job no longer applies.” That killed 1,200 job opportunities — and the armory’s still empty.

If New Yorkers don’t start rejecting this toxic political culture, the whole city will wind up vacant.