Remember Wisconsin’s hooking of a Foxconn plant? This dormant thread is suddenly interesting again because … it may not happen.
Foxconn is reconsidering plans to make advanced liquid crystal display panels at a $10 billion Wisconsin campus, and said it intends to hire mostly engineers and researchers rather than the manufacturing workforce the project originally promised.
Announced at a White House ceremony in 2017, the 20-million square foot campus marked the largest greenfield investment by a foreign-based company in U.S. history and was praised by President Donald Trump as proof of his ability to revive American manufacturing.
Foxconn, which received controversial state and local incentives for the project, initially planned to manufacture advanced large screen displays for TVs and other consumer and professional products at the facility, which is under construction. It later said it would build smaller LCD screens instead. [NBC News]
Which should be unsurprising. American labor is expensive. This is true in the absence of any other factors which would give Americans an unadulterated advantage, which is to say targeted tariffs are not the answer. Even astronomical taxes on the cheap shipping enabling cheap overseas labor to compete with expensive American labor may not be enough.
And, honestly, I have no idea what will be the answer that preserves high wages for American manufacturing employees, at least in the realm of the reasonable. Heck, even unreasonable is hard. The only one that comes to mind is a plague that kill all the non-American manufacturing employees, and that’s both repulsive and unlikely in the extreme.
So what is Foxconn considering?
“In terms of TV, we have no place in the U.S.,” he said in an interview. “We can’t compete.”
When it comes to manufacturing advanced screens for TVs, he added: “If a certain size of display has more supply, whether from China or Japan or Taiwan, we have to change, too.”
Rather than a focus on LCD manufacturing, Foxconn wants to create a “technology hub” in Wisconsin that would largely consist of research facilities along with packaging and assembly operations, Woo said. It would also produce specialized tech products for industrial, healthcare, and professional applications, he added.
Hello, knowledge workers. I doubt Foxconn‘ll ever make it to the project 13,000 workers. And that’s the real failure of the Scott Walker bribe. It’s not that it won’t recoup the bribe, because that’s not the goal – it’s great if you do, but Wisconsin’s real goal was to help the manufacturing sector. It appears this will be chalked up as another Walker failure, although he and his successors will kick dirt in the face of manufacturing employees as they wiggle around trying to take credit for getting a research campus, instead.
