Foxconn Eyes Wisconsin for New Plant

Megalith

Megalith

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The iPhone assembler is thinking about setting up shop in Wisconsin with a new plant that would employ thousands of people. Based on previous comments made by Foxconn CEO Terry Gou, the decision could hinge on how much low-cost land or power the state would ultimately provide. Another candidate for the plant includes Michigan, and possibly Pennsylvania. Are these coming equipped with suicide prevention nets, too?

“It would be great for Wisconsin for a lot of reasons,” said Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council, who noted that Wisconsin is already home to similar electronics manufacturers. “I am assuming Foxconn was attracted by the fact there’s already a skilled workforce here, and there’s a foundation to produce more such workers through the tech colleges and the other parts of the education system,” Still said. Foxconn was founded in 1974 and purchased Japan’s Sharp Corp. last year. It announced in January that it was considering investing $7 billion in a U.S. factory to produce display panels that would create as many as 50,000 jobs.
 
I can't see this going to well because are they really going to want to pay the wages ? They pay Chinese peanuts and basically enslave them. This sounds like a PR stunt to me....
 
Alot of wisconsin areas outside of the five counties around milwaukee are a good quality of living for a lower income. It is a win win for the area, i'm all for it. Probably will help foxconn's image here but destroy it in china where they live like 1800's lowells factories of the US.
 
I thought they use child labor at foxconn and have horrible conditions that lead to suicides.
Can't wait to see that happen in Wisconsin.
 
Verge said:
No, they don't lead to suicides.... because you can't commit suicide. They put nets up to catch people.
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There were suicides from people jumping before that put up the nets. but that only prevents suicide by gravity. There are many other ways to suicide.
 
Hypergreatthing said:
I thought they use child labor at foxconn and have horrible conditions that lead to suicides.
Can't wait to see that happen in Wisconsin.
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Conditions for the area are great, to them suicide is accepted, while in the states it has a stigma about it, this is a cultural thing. Suicide rates for the workers at Foxconn is significantly (many fold) lower than the rest of the country. The jobs at the plant are highly sought after, when they have a hiring day they have over a million people show up for a chance to get a job.
 
I have a hard time believing this would create thousands of jobs. I see this place being mostly automaniac. Hence why they are concerned about land a and power cost mostly. With people to handle the buissness end, maintance and oversight of operations. I could see a couple hundred at most. Even if they hire at minimal wages it would cost too much.
 
vegeta535 said:
I have a hard time believing this would create thousands of jobs. I see this place being mostly automaniac. Hence why they are concerned about land a and power cost mostly. With people to handle the buissness end, maintance and oversight of operations. I could see a couple hundred at most. Even if they hire at minimal wages it would cost too much.
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Considering the size of their other plants, a few thousand would mean mostly automation, assuming its anything like the others, that have almost a half million people at a single plant, most people refer to it as a City, it has it's own shops and stores, restaurants, housing etc etc all on site.
 
BlueFireIce said:
Considering the size of their other plants, a few thousand would mean mostly automation, assuming its anything like the others, that have almost a half million people at a single plant, most people refer to it as a City, it has it's own shops and stores, restaurants, housing etc etc all on site.
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I highly recommend watching "Manufactured Landscapes" it is difficult to wrap one's head around the scale of the factories in China; these film does a fantastic job. Here's the opening clip that is jaw dropping:

 
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I think we're going to see more and more of this type of factory set up here over time. Intellectual property rights, cost of wages (Mexican labor is mostly cheaper than Chinese labor now), cost and dependability of electric supply, huge commute times in China for workers... etc. When most of the factory is automated, the increased incidental costs become less important.
 
vegeta535 said:
I have a hard time believing this would create thousands of jobs. I see this place being mostly automaniac. Hence why they are concerned about land a and power cost mostly. With people to handle the buissness end, maintance and oversight of operations. I could see a couple hundred at most. Even if they hire at minimal wages it would cost too much.
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The "job creation" number of any company's press release is essentially BS. They do an old input-output model and try to gauge some sort of "net impact". Sure, it's okay to consider second-order job creation (e.g. new restaurants to service workers) as part of the contribution, but the baseline multipliers they use are so far off the mark that the numbers are meaningless.

My recommendation is to just mentally divide it by a factor of 5-10, then start from there. 10,000 jobs for a big-ish factory and co. isn't outlandish.
 
Hypergreatthing said:
There were suicides from people jumping before that put up the nets. but that only prevents suicide by gravity. There are many other ways to suicide.
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Building iPhones is 100% a stressful job. Adding that to the fact that most workers are young, impressionable kids away from home, with poor (if any) mental health services, and you're bound to end up with a few who want to end it for good.

It doesn't mean that this isn't a problem, but workers are free to come and go. As others have pointed out, Foxconn is a highly coveted employer because compared to the real sweatshops, they are clean, organized and pay good money.
 
Gweenz said:
WI resident here. This is undoubtedly a scheme to milk our idiot governor out of more WEDC money.
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Oh, you know it.

Curious where they're planning on building this thing. Hey, maybe they could take over the old GM plant in Janesville!
 
yyv_146 said:
Building iPhones is 100% a stressful job. Adding that to the fact that most workers are young, impressionable kids away from home, with poor (if any) mental health services, and you're bound to end up with a few who want to end it for good.

It doesn't mean that this isn't a problem, but workers are free to come and go. As others have pointed out, Foxconn is a highly coveted employer because compared to the real sweatshops, they are clean, organized and pay good money.
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I'm pretty sure they were locked in the factory, and they lived in the upper floors. They weren't jumping because they were angsty teens.
 
Parja said:
Oh, you know it.

Curious where they're planning on building this thing. Hey, maybe they could take over the old GM plant in Janesville!
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Right? There is zero chance of this happening, but that won't stop them from getting wined and dined on the taxpayer dollar. Maybe give them a loan they won't pay back.
 
In order to jump off a building you theoretically have to CLIMB atleast one flight of stairs, if not many, and we all know that morbidly obese line workers from the Midwest aren't physically capable of doing such arduous activity.
 
Wisconsin is pretty expensive for what it is, especially as it's cold as fuck half the year.
 
Useful idiots calling WI's governor an idiot...that's pretty funny. Our state income tax and property taxes are going DOWN again this year in WI. Ooooo that idiot! Our unemployment rate is the lowest in 17 years! MF'ing idiot!!! WI has had a budget SURPLUS for the first time in DECADES. The same budget which is going to give MORE funding to education. OMG, what an idiot! Exposing the UW system's 1 BILLION dollar slush fund and blocking tuition hikes again this year. Holy crap, what an idiot!!!!

But hey, we should have elected Barrett as Gov and things would be all better, right? What's that? I can't hear you over the gunfire and police sirens coming from the north side.


Come on in Foxconn! You can set up next to Amazon in Kenosha, IKEA in Franklin, or Janesville.


BP
 
SomeoneElse said:
I can't see this going to well because are they really going to want to pay the wages ? They pay Chinese peanuts and basically enslave them. This sounds like a PR stunt to me....
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If they get in to Wisconsin, they'll pay in beer and cheese.
 
Wouldn't mind if they put that factory near me. I love robotic manufacturing, programming and operating robots is great fun to me.
 
MavericK said:
Because despite all the rhetoric, most people know that the chances are slim to none.
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Jobs are already coming back. Some overseas tech companies are announcing building plants here.

It's far beyond the "rhetoric" now - its actually happening. That is what is so weird - we're talking about companies spending money to move operations here - money ALREADY spent right now in planning, location hunting, etc. Once a company is financially committed, they tend to follow through, and its no longer an issue of rumor, but when.

But I feel like because this kills off a political talking points narrative by proving how false it was, those who favored that narrative are more interested in sticking their head in the sand and claiming nothing will change, rather than seeing the parts moving, seeing the financial investments in bringing companies to the US being made, seeing the job growth that has already happened, and be happy about it.

Someone has to truly be sick in the head to be mad or in denial about jobs coming back to our home country (for those in the US).
 
Zion Halcyon said:
Jobs are already coming back. Some overseas tech companies are announcing building plants here.

It's far beyond the "rhetoric" now - its actually happening. That is what is so weird - we're talking about companies spending money to move operations here - money ALREADY spent right now in planning, location hunting, etc. Once a company is financially committed, they tend to follow through, and its no longer an issue of rumor, but when.

But I feel like because this kills off a political talking points narrative by proving how false it was, those who favored that narrative are more interested in sticking their head in the sand and claiming nothing will change, rather than seeing the parts moving, seeing the financial investments in bringing companies to the US being made, seeing the job growth that has already happened, and be happy about it.

Someone has to truly be sick in the head to be mad or in denial about jobs coming back to our home country (for those in the US).
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Do you have some links by chance? Seems like every other day there are reports about jobs leaving.
 
MavericK said:
Do you have some links by chance? Seems like every other day there are reports about jobs leaving.
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I don't have everything handy, and some of what I have heard has been word-of-mouth direct from manufacturing plant owners or workers themselves, but here are some primers, starting even before the current election:

http://business.salary.com/more-jobs-coming-back-to-us-from-overseas/
https://secure.marketwatch.com/stor...inally-outpaced-offshoring-in-2014-2015-05-01
https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-tiptoe-back-toward-made-in-the-u-s-a-1421206289
https://www.adp.com/spark/articles/hr2017-job-growth-patterns-from-2016-inform-2017s-outlook-9-1063
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/01/private-payrolls-grew-246k-in-january-vs-165k-est-adp.html
https://www.usatoday.com/story/mone...esses-added-booming-298000-jobs-feb/98872942/


Part of the issue, sadly, is you need to consider the source. The very tech giants we count on to do internet searches are also the number 1 advocates for shipping jobs overseas, so they can hire much cheaper H1B Visa workers. Therefore, they "taint" their search results by floating all the negative articles to the front page - however under further scrutiny, many of those articles end up either being opinion pieces or else are contradicted by more politically neutral reporting.

I wish I could find the articles, but I remember reading both AMD and Samsung (in addition to the Foxxconn link for this thread) were eyeing opening new manufacturing plants in the US. The stuff is out there, but you really have to work to find it (and I wouldn't be surprised if suddenly these articles became a lot easier to find if somehow hiring local became a more attractive option than H1B visas).
 
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