re: Remember that Foxconn deal to bring manufacturing jobs to Wisconsin?

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In the decades leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, which left unemployment in Racine at nearly twenty per cent, well-paying manufacturing jobs vanished in alarming numbers: the Horlick malted-milk factory, the Racine Steel Castings foundry, the Jacobsen lawnmower factory are all now boarded-up shells. Several thousand people once worked in Case’s massive tractor plant, in a city whose population peaked, in 1970, at ninety-five thousand. The plant was demolished in 2004. “We’ve lost more than fifteen thousand good manufacturing jobs in this area over the course of a generation,” Mason told me. He singled out free trade deals like NAFTA as “devastating” Racine. “Sometimes people use large national numbers and say, ‘Well, in the aggregate, these job losses are more due to automation,’ ” he said. “I can drive you around Racine and show you the empty spaces where factories used to be: none of them shut down because of automation. They shut down to go to Mexico, or China, or somewhere else.”

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For Mason, Foxconn represents a rare opportunity to revitalize his struggling home town. “We’re seeing incumbent companies raise wages in anticipation of Foxconn potentially attracting their employees away,” Mason said. “And they’re talking about over eleven thousand construction jobs just to build the Foxconn facility. That’s before you talk about the hundreds if not thousands of jobs needed to expand the interstate, the jobs that will be needed to put in all the water-utility infrastructure.”

Mason reiterated Foxconn’s promise that it will eventually create thirteen thousand “permanent” jobs in Wisconsin. But the company recently changed the type of factory it plans to build, downsizing to a highly automated plant that will only require three thousand employees, ninety per cent of them “knowledge workers,” such as engineers, programmers, and designers. Almost all of the assembly work will be done by robots. Gou, Foxconn’s chairman, has said he plans to replace eighty per cent of Foxconn’s global workforce with “Foxbots” in the next five to ten years. The company still says it will hire thirteen thousand employees in Wisconsin, but it has fallen short of similar promises in Brazil, India, and Pennsylvania, among other places. Foxconn has already replaced sixty thousand workers who were earning roughly $2.50 an hour in China. Even the expansion of I-94, which is being done to accommodate Foxconn (and being paid for by Wisconsin taxpayers) reflects Foxconn’s faith in automation: the company and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation have discussed dedicating lanes to self-driving cars and trucks. (In a statement, a company representative said, “Foxconn is fully committed to our investment of at least $10 billion in building our state-of-the-art Wisconsin Valley Science and Technology Park in Wisconsin and to meeting all contractual obligations with the relevant government agencies.”)

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