Foxconn tells Wisconsin it never promised to build an LCD factory | Hacker News Reader

Foxconn tells Wisconsin it never promised to build an LCD factory

theverge.com

>Documents obtained through a records request show Foxconn’s rationale: it doesn’t think it was specifically promising to build an LCD factory at all. According to a November 23rd letter to the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC), Foxconn does not think the factory specified in the contract, an enormous Generation 10.5 LCD fabrication facility, was actually a “material” part of the contract.

Come on, the contract specifies a large manufacturing plant. They build a tiny storage building instead. I'll buy it doesn't have to be an LCD factory, but it needs to be something with comparable jobs.

Good on Wisconsin for holding their feet to the fire. Too many of these corporate welfare packages end up being paid out even though the company keeps none of their promises.

HP got a bunch of corporate freebies to build a big facility in my city. The promise was that it would be a high salary corporate facility with highly paid sales and engineering.

They built their big subsidized building and it ended up being a glorified call center.

No, shame on Wisconsin. This entire fiasco is the result of self serving politicians doing dumb things to get a headline today while sticking their successors with the mess it causes while constituents foot the bill.

This was never about corporate welfare. Foxconn never planned to build a factory there, not seriously at least. This was an exercise in generating positive news cycles for republican lawmakers in exchange for goodwill in federal policy making - in other words, political corruption.

States keep falling for these corporate promises and waste billions of our tax dollars crafting these sweetheart deals.

I don't think the state fell for anything here. The Governor, state Republican party and President Trump were looking for something to call a win as far as job creation at the time. They didn't really care if there was actual job creation. It just need to seem like there would be so they could reap some short term political benefit.

This one seems unusually incompetent.

the dollop did one on scott walker that i listened to a little bit ago where they touch on how bad this deal was and also how much of a weirdo he is... https://allthingscomedy.com/podcasts/456---scott-walker---re...

The idea of Foxconn manufacturing anything in Wisconsin, let alone something so specific, never made much sense to me. Do touchscreens sound fancy and exciting to voters?

Why? Southeastern Wisconsin has a decent amount of manufacturing and Kenosha specifically used to be a car manufacturing powerhouse as well as beds. So I assume this is more of a comment on Foxconn not following through on their end of the bargain.

Foxconn’s model of business, industry, and logistics just don’t jive with the region, at least not intuitively to me. And of all things Foxconn could conceivably manufacture in the US, LCDs seem like the least economical option for them.

Well, we already manufactured in Wisconsin a lot of the stuff you need for an LCD panel. 3M Menominee makes the light diffuser (Vicuiti) film that a lot of the top end LCD makers used, Wisconsin up until 2008 had one of the top flex circuit facilities in the US ( 3M Eau Claire). TTMI in Chippewa Falls has one of the most advanced printed circuit board making facilities (built by Cray Research/SGI). I was no fan of the Foxconn plan. Wisconsin has enough smart people and know how to have done it themselves without a Taiwanese assembly shop. Pretty soon, making LCDs will be like making cheese. Just order the cheese making machines and go to work. If we don't have the smart people here (like Seymour Cray, Mark Andraesen etc) we get them from nearby states (Gene Amdahl, PhD UW Madison). Just call up Nikon, order the machines and go to work.

> Just call up Nikon, order the machines and go to work.

If it's that simple and straight-forward then in your opinion why hasn't this been done yet?

Jobs sound exciting? That's what the subsidy was predicated on, bringing high-paying factory work to the state.

I agree with Foxconn. I've worked in the public subsidy of private ventures sector (exactly in this sector.) It's entirely unreasonable for any company to expect that there would be any monitoring or enforcement of compliance to employment claims made when the subsidy was awarded. There was certainly none where I worked, and we gave away billions.

Okay they didn't promise, but did they have a contract?

Did you even read the lead paragraph? Now you can!

In October, Wisconsin denied Foxconn subsidies because it had failed to build the LCD factory specified in its contract with the state. As The Verge reported, it had created a building one-twentieth the size of the promised factory, taken out a permit to use it for storage, and failed to employ anywhere near the number of employees the contract called for. Nevertheless, Foxconn publicly objected “on numerous grounds” to Wisconsin’s denial of subsidies.

The title has been PRed - the legal contract being broken is worse than a hand-wavy sounding promise.

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