2 Outcomes When Foreigners Buy Factories
HOLLAND, Mich. — Four years ago, a low-slung factory on the fringes of town here was stagnating and shedding workers. Then Siemens, the German industrial giant, bought the plant and folded it into a global enterprise. Today, the factory is shipping wastewater treatment equipment to Asia and the Middle East and employing twice as many workers.
“Globalization has been good for Holland,” said David J. Spyker, now vice president of a Siemens unit with operations around the world.
About 60 miles to the northeast, a Swedish multinational shut down what had been the largest refrigerator factory in the country, a sprawling complex along the Flat River in Greenville.
The company, Electrolux, sent production to Mexico, eliminating 2,700 jobs from a town of 8,000 people.
As foreign buyers descend upon the United States, capturing widening swaths of the industrial landscape and putting millions of Americans to work for new owners, these two cities offer sharply competing narratives for a nation still uneasy about being on the selling end of the global economy.
More than 200,000 Michigan residents worked for subsidiaries of foreign companies as of 2005, according to government data.
Yet in a state that has lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000, foreign investment has not been enough to compensate; indeed, it has sometimes exacerbated the erosion.
Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, a Democrat, was bitterly disappointed by Electrolux’s decision to abandon Greenville.
She had promised to persuade the company to stay, assembling a package of more than $120 million in state and local tax credits. The city offered to build a new plant. The local union agreed to give up as much as $33 million a year in wages.
“They said, ‘There is nothing you can do to compensate for the fact that we are able to pay $1.57 an hour in Mexico,’ ” Ms. Granholm recalled during a recent interview. “That’s when I started to say, ‘Nafta and Cafta have given us the shafta,’ ” she added, using the acronyms for the North American and Central American free trade agreements
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/07/bu...hp&oref=slogin
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Very interesting. Is that why Clinton and Obama want to get rid of or overhaul NAFTA?
There is also the other side that is not mentioned here.... American business people buy companies in Canada, and most certainly also in other countries.
Are they cry babies???
HOLLAND, Mich. — Four years ago, a low-slung factory on the fringes of town here was stagnating and shedding workers. Then Siemens, the German industrial giant, bought the plant and folded it into a global enterprise. Today, the factory is shipping wastewater treatment equipment to Asia and the Middle East and employing twice as many workers.
“Globalization has been good for Holland,” said David J. Spyker, now vice president of a Siemens unit with operations around the world.
About 60 miles to the northeast, a Swedish multinational shut down what had been the largest refrigerator factory in the country, a sprawling complex along the Flat River in Greenville.
The company, Electrolux, sent production to Mexico, eliminating 2,700 jobs from a town of 8,000 people.
As foreign buyers descend upon the United States, capturing widening swaths of the industrial landscape and putting millions of Americans to work for new owners, these two cities offer sharply competing narratives for a nation still uneasy about being on the selling end of the global economy.
More than 200,000 Michigan residents worked for subsidiaries of foreign companies as of 2005, according to government data.
Yet in a state that has lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000, foreign investment has not been enough to compensate; indeed, it has sometimes exacerbated the erosion.
Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, a Democrat, was bitterly disappointed by Electrolux’s decision to abandon Greenville.
She had promised to persuade the company to stay, assembling a package of more than $120 million in state and local tax credits. The city offered to build a new plant. The local union agreed to give up as much as $33 million a year in wages.
“They said, ‘There is nothing you can do to compensate for the fact that we are able to pay $1.57 an hour in Mexico,’ ” Ms. Granholm recalled during a recent interview. “That’s when I started to say, ‘Nafta and Cafta have given us the shafta,’ ” she added, using the acronyms for the North American and Central American free trade agreements
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/07/bu...hp&oref=slogin
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Very interesting. Is that why Clinton and Obama want to get rid of or overhaul NAFTA?
There is also the other side that is not mentioned here.... American business people buy companies in Canada, and most certainly also in other countries.
Are they cry babies???
