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.
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.
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.
