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Foxconn's Wisconsin Site Will No Longer Be a Factory for Smartphone Displays, Instead Focusing on R&D
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Corporate strategy that works every time. Society (Socialism) takes All the risks while business (Capitalism) takes All the profits. Love it when a plan comes together!
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The minimum wage in 1975 $9.80 adjusted for inflation today. In 1965 the minimum wage was $11.16 adjusted for inflation today. The numbers continue with this trend to today.
The numbers are just the inflation side as calculated using a matrix that does not really show the true costs for minimum wage earners. Businesses have had a cheap ride on American minimum wage workers for 50 plus years.
Manufacturing in the US will continue towards automation, fewer and more highly technical jobs, that will never return to the days of thousands of jobs paying middle income wages. The good news, with highly skilled robotics, more complex items could be built in the US cost effectively. The sad part, massive numbers of manufacturing jobs will not be needed.
[doublepost=1548896679][/doublepost]
The minimum wage in 1975 $9.80 adjusted for inflation today. In 1965 the minimum wage was $11.16 adjusted for inflation today. The numbers continue with this trend to today.
The numbers are just the inflation side as calculated using a matrix that does not really show the true costs for minimum wage earners. Businesses have had a cheap ride on American minimum wage workers for 50 plus years.
Manufacturing in the US will continue towards automation, fewer and more highly technical jobs, that will never return to the days of thousands of jobs paying middle income wages. The good news, with highly skilled robotics, more complex items could be built in the US cost effectively. The sad part, massive numbers of manufacturing jobs will not be needed.
The feeling is mutual.
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Not Racine, no. All the engineering schools are based in Madison and Milwaukee, (w/ a few scattered throughout the northwoods), and the good number of engineers they turn out typically either stay in that beltline, or leave the Midwest altogether. The universities do a pretty good job of keeping tabs on them. Racine & Kenosha were talked up as labor pools for an assembly plant. ...by politicians. Anyone in Industry in the last 30 years who’s been paying attention took one took and said Foxconn is full of it. Not only is it on the Illinois border and practically a handout to Chicago (to hear the Illinois governor outright thank us for the gift was funny), but who are you trying to kid about hiring tens of thousands of low paid laborers for repetitive assembly work in 2019? In the absolute joke of a town hall meeting held, representatives from Foxconn & our handsomest corrupt government stooges were asked if they could guarantee those jobs would not be replaced by robotics within 3 years. They said no they couldn’t. How about 6 months? No we can’t promise that. Well no kidding you can’t. What they got was a land grab, a tax dodge, and a fervor of anti-environmentalism for our crosseyed simpleton governor to try to appeal to blue collar factory workers in a depressed area around, amid his own dreams of the presidency. Not surprisingly, none of it worked. Now that a Dem, any Dem, replaced him, there was no way this was going to continue as planned. It never really was in the first place...
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Manufacturing jobs aren't going to be the problem going forward. The white collar folks are going to get their turn in the barrel, even as the fast food industry gets automated. If a robot can do knee or hip replacement surgery, don't need as many doctors. If a computer can make a correct diagnosis for cancer 90% of the time, why pay a doctor to get it right half the time. If a robot can do all of the legal research, fewer shysters are needed.
UBI is coming. A society based on consumer spending can't function if consumers don't have jobs.
Here's how this scam works. Now they need engineers. Can't find any local so they need more H1B Visas. Trump and politicians give them those Visas so the failure isn't even worse.
This drives down engineering salaries in the US and especially locally. They will be paying 40-60% the going rate for those engineers.
Foxconn gets huge tax breaks, USA facility that can hire lots of overseas talent cheap since they get overallocated H1Bs and those engineers want to come to USA.
Net - your local and national tax dollars pay for their facility and employees. To top it off, those employees won't actually spend enough locally to make up for it due to lower salaries, culture, and remittances back to their families out of USA.
Inside Wisconsin’s Disastrous $4.5 Billion Deal With Foxconn
A huge tax break was supposed to create a manufacturing paradise, but interviews with 49 people familiar with the project depict a chaotic operation unlikely to ever employ 13,000 workers.
A huge tax break was supposed to create a manufacturing paradise, but interviews with 49 people familiar with the project depict a chaotic operation unlikely to ever employ 13,000 workers.
People who had an ounce of sense said this is exactly what was going to happen.
The Verge is keeping an eye on this boondoggle
FOXCONN IS CONFUSING THE HELL OUT OF WISCONSIN
Then the announcements stopped.
In January, work at the Mount Pleasant factory came to a halt, and Foxconn officials began to publicly waffle about their plans. In the span of a single week, Woo said that the company wouldn’t build a factory, then that whatever Foxconn was building “cannot be simply described as a factory,” then, after a call with Trump, that Foxconn would build a factory after all.
Throughout its gyrations, Foxconn maintained that it would create 13,000 jobs, though what those 13,000 people would be doing shifted gradually from manufacturing to research into what Foxconn calls its “AI 8K+5G ecosystem.” Other than buzzwords for high-resolution screens and high-speed cell networks, what this ecosystem is has never been fully explained. In February, a Foxconn executive cheerfully likened the company’s vague, morphing plans to designing and building an airplane midflight.
Such statements have not been particularly reassuring to residents of Wisconsin, where state and local governments have already taken very concrete actions to prepare the way for what was supposed to be an enormous manufacturing facility. Taxpayers have already spent more than $300 million on roadwork, infrastructure, and land acquisition related to the project. In August, Moody’s downgraded Mount Pleasant’s credit rating over the extreme levels of debt it took on for the area’s $763 million incentive package, costs that have since grown closer to a billion, in part because it had to take out higher interest long-term loans after Foxconn’s plans changed. Dozens of residents have been relocated, some under threat of eminent domain.
FOXCONN IS CONFUSING THE HELL OUT OF WISCONSIN
Then the announcements stopped.
In January, work at the Mount Pleasant factory came to a halt, and Foxconn officials began to publicly waffle about their plans. In the span of a single week, Woo said that the company wouldn’t build a factory, then that whatever Foxconn was building “cannot be simply described as a factory,” then, after a call with Trump, that Foxconn would build a factory after all.
Throughout its gyrations, Foxconn maintained that it would create 13,000 jobs, though what those 13,000 people would be doing shifted gradually from manufacturing to research into what Foxconn calls its “AI 8K+5G ecosystem.” Other than buzzwords for high-resolution screens and high-speed cell networks, what this ecosystem is has never been fully explained. In February, a Foxconn executive cheerfully likened the company’s vague, morphing plans to designing and building an airplane midflight.
Such statements have not been particularly reassuring to residents of Wisconsin, where state and local governments have already taken very concrete actions to prepare the way for what was supposed to be an enormous manufacturing facility. Taxpayers have already spent more than $300 million on roadwork, infrastructure, and land acquisition related to the project. In August, Moody’s downgraded Mount Pleasant’s credit rating over the extreme levels of debt it took on for the area’s $763 million incentive package, costs that have since grown closer to a billion, in part because it had to take out higher interest long-term loans after Foxconn’s plans changed. Dozens of residents have been relocated, some under threat of eminent domain.
They're buying up office space in surrounding cities, claiming it's part of their "plan" for "AI, 8K & 5G", whatever the heck that is supposed to be, yet they're doing nothing with the space.
They just bought a building in Madison yet there is nothing in the pipeline to develop it.
If I still lived there I would be blowing a gasket.
They just bought a building in Madison yet there is nothing in the pipeline to develop it.
If I still lived there I would be blowing a gasket.