Walker Wants Taxpayers to Bring Foxconn Slave factory to Wisconsin

Life for an I Phone worker. Steve Jobs' source of wealth is these sisters and brothers. Read about this here.

US Tech industry and retail giants complicit in worker abuse and suicides in Asian factories.

Chinese workers are our allies.

by Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

Perhaps Trump can step in and help Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in his efforts to “Make America Great Again”

In the long time tradition of welfare capitalism, Walker’s plan to entice Taiwanese electronics corporation Foxconn to Wisconsin doesn’t seem so attractive after all. Foxconn is the company that was forced to build nets around worker dorms in its China plant due to a spate of suicides at the factory.  The conditions that workers have to endure at these factories can become unbearable and with no independent unions, workers have taken to all sorts of measures to improve conditions. They are humiliated and belittled in a form of psychological assault not unlike that used by the Nazi's. This is not socialism. Apple, Microsoft and other tech giants whose founders are revered innovative geniuses whose wealth was made through hard work and the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality have contracts with Foxconn.Tian Yu, a 17-year old girl who was severely injured after surviving a suicide attempt told her story of life in a Foxconn factory.*

According to a nonpartisan analysis of Walkers plan to bring Foxconn to Wisconsin it would be 25 years or more for the taxpayers of the state to break even with the incentives the company has been offered. 

Walker offered Foxconn state and local tax exemption for all construction materials the plant would require as well as offering the company $2.85 billion in tax credits linked to the number of jobs created. Beyond that, Walker, or more accurately, the Wisconsin taxpayer would exempt Foxconn from numerous environmental regulations and borrow $252 million to rebuild Interstate 94 which runs near the proposed site.

According to the analysis, Walkers generous offer of tax credits on behalf of the taxpayers of Wisconsin  would, “exceed potential increased tax revenues by $1.04 billion at the end of fiscal year 2032-33” Beyond that increased tax revenue would be about $115 annually and the “break even” point for the Wisconsin taxpayer would arrive around 2042.

This is standard practice for US capitalism and investors in ventures abroad or here at home, state aid. In Africa for example,  corporation builds a factory hires local labor at the cheapest possible price and builds a nice new road so that the material for production can be brought in without serious effort and the finished product containing the surplus value shipped out. The factory in Ethiopia comes to mind where Chinese investors built a road out to Djibouti in order for the factory owners to have access to a port.

There is some growth in the urban middle class and a few select individuals become rich. Workers and the poor in the urban centers continue to lose ground as prices for food and shelter rise due to this growing middle layer and the economy posts a positive growth rate for the year; until there’s a crash.

God bless free enterprise.

Imagine if headlines in the news from day in day out, pointed to this massive scam where big business is subsidized to the tune of billions of dollars at our expense.  In manufacturing, finance, health care, pharmaceuticals’, in all aspects of capital expenditure and accumulation, public/taxpayer funds are the basis for growth. Sports stadiums are a good example where the costs are social and profits private, the same with the drug industry.

Instead it is North Korea, Iran, immigrants, and a myriad of other issues that dominate the mass media.

Do we honestly think that Walker, who has a major global capitalist party with all its resources behind him isn’t aware of Foxconn’s brutal treatment of workers? Of course he is. WalMart, Apple, all the tech giants make their profits this way.  That’s capitalism.

The only way this can be rectified is for the major corporations to be taken under public ownership and management, run by workers in the industry and consumers. In this way a rational and socially efficient plan of production can be developed. An crucial part of the process is the building of an independent political party of the working class. Neither Democrats not Republicans will take this road.

Is it possible the mass media is biased?

*Please share this post and/or the link to the young Chinese worker's story about her experience in the Foxconn factory. It is important for US workers to read it.