Foxconn Plant to Be Built in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin

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Foxconn representatives said that the company will build its $10 billion flat-panel TV plant in the Village of Mount Pleasant, ending weeks of speculation about the exact location: Mount Pleasant and Racine County have signed purchase options with property owners for 90 percent of the land needed for the massive industrial campus, and local officials are not ruling out the use of eminent domain to force out those who don't want to leave.

County and village officials also said Wednesday they've offered Foxconn a $764 million incentives package to move here, on top of up to $3 billion from state taxpayers. "This is a turning point in the history of Racine County, no doubt," County Executive Jonathan Delagrave said at the announcement at Gateway Technical College's Sturtevant campus. The initial plant will be located in an area bounded by Interstate 94 to the west, Highway KR to the south, Highway H to the east, and Braun Road to the north, according to a map provided by company officials.
 
Once again, article only about money. No reference to the vastly increased pollution to the area, farmland gone, people losing property by force, etc.

Hope the tax penalty and health risks are worth the low paying/mentally abusing jobs it will create.
 
Agreed. I am very local to this story and the environmental part bothers me more than anything. Exemptions have been proposed (or maybe already signed) to waive normal environmental safety standards in order to speed up the project. I don't know the ground water situation and it is several miles from Lake Michigan, but there are rivers and wetlands in the area. Also worth mentioning is the near $4 billion in incentives promised to Foxconn from the state and county which will take decades to pay back. And while Foxconn is a big player, who knows what will happen in 20 years with tech companies. In other words, not a safe bet. I'm interested to see how it will play out and how it will affect the area, but pretty pessimistic about it right now.
 
That_Sound_Guy said:
Once again, article only about money. No reference to the vastly increased pollution to the area, farmland gone, people losing property by force, etc.

Hope the tax penalty and health risks are worth the low paying/mentally abusing jobs it will create.
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What, the type of jobs and labor that we exploit in order to achieve our standard of living, with our expensive toys, trinkets, and expensive chips (which we froth over on this forum)? Whatever type of work goes on there, I kind of doubt it's anything near as bad as the bottom of the barrel labor cost jobs in the foreign countries that we rely on. If anything maybe this'll raise more awareness of just how crappy things are in general...
 
Hurray! Our wages have been artificially kept so low, and regulations so lax, that we're finally good enough to be chinese factory workers! And to think, Wisconsin will break even in 40 years! We make the best deals, believe me.
 
toddw said:
Hurray! Our wages have been artificially kept so low, and regulations so lax, that we're finally good enough to be chinese factory workers! And to think, Wisconsin will break even in 40 years! We make the best deals, believe me.
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I think the fiscal bureau said 25 or so years, but I still think it's a cagey deal. Foxconn isn't exactly a reputable company in this regard, they've broken plenty of promises. Then add in the fact that WEDC has an abysmal track record when it comes to holding businesses to task for their tax breaks and loan repayments. Next toss in all the other property tax breaks that Foxconn is getting, and the local government might end up in the red which the state will have to cover. Finally add in all that extra legal wrangling in the deal itself (more than just environmental stuff) and this looks to be like some drunken idiot gave away the farm.

Of course only time will tell, but an LCD plant? I'd feel better if it was a newer tech like an OLED plant. Still wouldn't have been comfortable with it, but at least that tech is new enough that Foxconn wouldn't be keen on abandoning it after a short write off period.
 
That_Sound_Guy said:
Once again, article only about money. No reference to the vastly increased pollution to the area, farmland gone, people losing property by force, etc.

Hope the tax penalty and health risks are worth the low paying/mentally abusing jobs it will create.
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if you turn on AM radio you will quickly be told it is "liberal hippy crap ruining our jobs"...

also the best part is when Caterpillar moved to milwaukee it was "liberals trying to ruin wisconsin by appeasing to big corporations..."... but if you mention foxconn and do not support it you are a turd.
 
Lol, eminent domains for businesses isn't how it was ever intended to be used. It was meant for public works like highways.
They should tell their government to go screw themselves.
 
That_Sound_Guy said:
Once again, article only about money. No reference to the vastly increased pollution to the area, farmland gone, people losing property by force, etc.

Hope the tax penalty and health risks are worth the low paying/mentally abusing jobs it will create.
Click to expand...

Yeah, you should be keeping that shit in China where it belongs rite?
 
A $10B plant won't create any high paying jobs. What have you guys been smoking?
 
That_Sound_Guy said:
Once again, article only about money. No reference to the vastly increased pollution to the area, farmland gone, people losing property by force, etc.

Hope the tax penalty and health risks are worth the low paying/mentally abusing jobs it will create.
Click to expand...

What increase in pollution? They have to follow all the same rules as everyone else.

I will agree with the problem with eminent domain, that power needs to be removed from government period.

Low paying? The Tax credits they get (which is almost the whole 3B) are dependent on number of jobs, all of which have to be over a given yearly salary. Also, if you don't want the job, don't take it, however I am sure there are a number of other people who would be more than willing to fill the positions than to be out of work.
 
BlueFireIce said:
Also, if you don't want the job, don't take it, however I am sure there are a number of other people who would be more than willing to fill the positions than to be out of work.
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You're aware Foxconn is the company that had to put up nets in it's factory to stop their workers from committing suicide, right?
 
GlacierNine said:
You're aware Foxconn is the company that had to put up nets in it's factory to stop their workers from committing suicide, right?
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Ah, this post again.

You do understand suicide there is an acceptable way to go right? It doesn't have the stigma it does here in the US, which is mostly from the prevalence of Christianity in most western countries. Also, workers at Foxconn have a several fold LOWER rate of suicide than the rest of the population. But lets just ignore facts and go for media hysteria.
 
That_Sound_Guy said:
Once again, article only about money. No reference to the vastly increased pollution to the area, farmland gone, people losing property by force, etc.

Hope the tax penalty and health risks are worth the low paying/mentally abusing jobs it will create.
Click to expand...
Look at who was voted for President. People want more low paying, low skill manufacturing jobs in this country rather than high paying high skill jobs.

I'm not afraid of China taking our jobs because the jobs they are taking I don't want.
 
dylanblada said:
Actually, they won't:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/busin...lant-environmental-issues-20170826-story.html


They won't have to do an assessment on the environmental impact of the area and may be allowed to dump into nearby wetlands etc.
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Yes, they will. I see you are basing this off of media hysteria again and not read the actual bill that was signed.

They are not "dumping" into wetlands, they MIGHT be filling in some wet lands depending on final lines of the property they end up with and in the bill they are required to replace the wetlands they fill in at a 2:1 ratio, meaning if they fill in one wetland, they have to create and preserve two wetlands of equal size.
 
Hope that Foxcon is around for the 25+ years this will take to have a net positive return on investment. I remember years ago when an earlier iteration of American Airlines was looking for a place to build a new maintenance center. The promise was thousands of high paying aircraft repair positions. Oklahoma bid over $200 million in incentives. A different state won the contest and got the plant. A few years later, AA declared bankruptcy and closed the plant. The 'winning' state was left with an empty building and no jobs.
 
All the people griping about "low paying jobs" must have forgotten the part where Wisconsin has an unemployment rate of 3.2%. Supply and demand, if they want to employ enough people to get their free government monies they're going to have to pay a competitive wage. You can only bus in so many FIBs before the fuel costs catch up with you.
 
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bigdogchris said:
I'm not afraid of China taking our jobs because the jobs they are taking I don't want.
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Well, I suppose if you don't want them then they're worthless then, aren't they?

All these people going on about it'll take years to pay back the subsidies and saying the jobs created are worthless might feel a little bit different if the money being "lost" was paying their mortgage. The money being spend by the factory is churn in the local economy. Why do you think China is so fricken cheap for labour. You think the Chinese government somehow attract these jobs to their countries because of their pleasant, business friendly disposition? Yeah, I'm sure the deal ain't great, but these jobs are back in America, and shit's been made there again. What makes me laugh I bet half the people complaining are the same people saying universal income is going to save all our arses when the robots come, but someone doing a job they think is beneath them for a wage is somehow a bad thing.

I don't live in the US, but I know for sure that if steel working jobs from China were being moved back to the UK then I wouldn't be moaning.
 
davethehedgehog said:
I don't live in the US, but I know for sure that if steel working jobs from China were being moved back to the UK then I wouldn't be moaning.
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This is heading to taking us back to the wonderful late 19th Century, where people would work 12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week for pay so low that factories had to basically create a cheap, crappy town right on their property to house thier slav...err workers, so they could spend what little money the get to feed themselves from an on-site store. Which is what lead workers to eventually go through a bloody period of strikes and attempts to form unions.

I'm sure people will say it won't happen, and it won't, like, next month or anything.. But the fact is for the past 45 years here in the US, the people on top have been getting vast increases above and beyond the rate of inflation in pay year by year, while workers pay remains relatively flat vs. inflation. All while they're being called lazy bastards, but actually producing nearly twice as much.
 
Corporatism fucks over our country again. Paid off politicians get the taxpayers to give gobs of cash to a foreign manufacturing company which will no doubt abandon the plant before the decades it will take to pay it off. A net negative that goes directly from taxpayers and into the pocket of a corporation's stockholders. This is a massive scam.
 
spinach_chin said:
Not every job can be "high pay and high skill". What's wrong with factory jobs?
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This is the one thing that I commend that one show "Dirty Jobs" for. It shows people doing rather dirty jobs, but at the same time those same folks could be enjoying what they're doing.
 
I live pretty close to where it's being built I would be interested in getting a job their maybe cutting the lawn or something.
I have no idea what type of waste is created by flat panel creation plus the area is close to rivers and lake Michigan is close by.
 
Dead Parrot said:
Hope that Foxcon is around for the 25+ years this will take to have a net positive return on investment. I remember years ago when an earlier iteration of American Airlines was looking for a place to build a new maintenance center. The promise was thousands of high paying aircraft repair positions. Oklahoma bid over $200 million in incentives. A different state won the contest and got the plant. A few years later, AA declared bankruptcy and closed the plant. The 'winning' state was left with an empty building and no jobs.
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Read the bill, it's in tax credits with a limited amount for each year, it will take 20 years for them to get all the tax credits. They are also limited by job count, they have to hit and maintain a given number of jobs over a given salary range to qualify. If they don't, they don't get the tax credits.

niconx said:
Corporatism fucks over our country again. Paid off politicians get the taxpayers to give gobs of cash to a foreign manufacturing company which will no doubt abandon the plant before the decades it will take to pay it off. A net negative that goes directly from taxpayers and into the pocket of a corporation's stockholders. This is a massive scam.
Click to expand...

Yay, more hate on jobs and business without any reading or understanding! The money is in the form of tax credits, and the bill has a 20 year spread. But hey, who reads anymore right?
 
GlacierNine said:
You're aware Foxconn is the company that had to put up nets in it's factory to stop their workers from committing suicide, right?
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You're aware that Foxconn has the poplutation of a city?? 930,000 employees and when the news came out in 2010 there was 14 jumpers that year.

I live near Toronto Canada and the TTC subway has just about 1 rail jumper a day and the population is almost 6 Mil , they also put up nets on the bloor viaduct becuase it is so popular.
 
wow, who would have thought that bringing jobs and some tech back to the states would get so many liberals and hippies up in arms... I'm sure none of you guys drive those evil polluting vehicles we see everywhere and don't heat your homes with anything besides solar. O yea, solar pollutes the shit out of the earth too, but don't let jobs and money and progress stand in the way of a good cry session
 
Vaulter98c said:
wow, who would have thought that bringing jobs and some tech back to the states would get so many liberals and hippies up in arms... I'm sure none of you guys drive those evil polluting vehicles we see everywhere and don't heat your homes with anything besides solar. O yea, solar pollutes the shit out of the earth too, but don't let jobs and money and progress stand in the way of a good cry session
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Liberals want you to need the government to sustain your lifestyle.

They need you to be subservient it keeps you docile and keeps the bad thoughts out.
 
Vaulter98c said:
wow, who would have thought that bringing jobs and some tech back to the states would get so many liberals and hippies up in arms... I'm sure none of you guys drive those evil polluting vehicles we see everywhere and don't heat your homes with anything besides solar. O yea, solar pollutes the shit out of the earth too, but don't let jobs and money and progress stand in the way of a good cry session
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Some folks here were expressing their opinion on the DEAL that was made. You used it as an opportunity to attack PEOPLE. Plus you got emotional while accusing it of others, good job.
 
BlueFireIce said:
Read the bill, it's in tax credits with a limited amount for each year, it will take 20 years for them to get all the tax credits. They are also limited by job count, they have to hit and maintain a given number of jobs over a given salary range to qualify. If they don't, they don't get the tax credits.



Yay, more hate on jobs and business without any reading or understanding! The money is in the form of tax credits, and the bill has a 20 year spread. But hey, who reads anymore right?
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Considering their labor practices in China I wouldn't believe a goddamn thing that Foxconn says, I wouldn't trust them in a deal that involves that much money.
 
niconx said:
Considering their labor practices in China I wouldn't believe a goddamn thing that Foxconn says, I wouldn't trust them in a deal that involves that much money.
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You don't have to, if they don't do it, they don't get the credits. They are not actually getting money, rather being allowed to keep the money they would be paying in taxes, as such, it is at the end of the year and the credit is given then, not before, if they fail to meet the requirements, they get nothing. A claw back was also put into place in the bill, so if Foxconn doesn't meet those over the whole term, the state can take back tax credits from the years before, leaving Foxconn with a HUGE tax liability.
 
BlueFireIce said:
Read the bill, it's in tax credits with a limited amount for each year, it will take 20 years for them to get all the tax credits. They are also limited by job count, they have to hit and maintain a given number of jobs over a given salary range to qualify. If they don't, they don't get the tax credits.



Yay, more hate on jobs and business without any reading or understanding! The money is in the form of tax credits, and the bill has a 20 year spread. But hey, who reads anymore right?
Click to expand...

Will the jobs created and the tax revenue outweigh the tax breaks they get though?
 
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