More on Borg Warner

The Mount Pleasant County Assessor calls the plant a dinosaur:

Mount Pleasant Township Assessor Deb Crosley predicts the BorgWarner factory will become a "dinosaur" after it's vacated.

"I can't see any other manufacturers coming in here wanting to buy a 1930s building," said Crosley, who has ridden through the factory in a golf cart. "They've done a lot of upgrades, but manufacturing is now run by robots and technology. I can't see it being utilized for anything other than storage and office space. My guess is it will become another ABB situation: sitting there not being utilized for anything."

Not that this comparison with ABB is shared:

"It's a very large facility," said Terry Murphy, vice president of the Muncie Delaware County Economic Development Alliance. "There are not many users who need in excess of 1 million square feet, so you have to look at subdividing and the economics of making it compatible."

The BorgWarner factory is a more typical manufacturing facility than the 740,000-square-foot, former Westinghouse/ABB large transformer factory, which features a 99-foot ceiling.

The first paragraph above and this following excerpt have something to teach us about today's manufacturing:

One drawback to older buildings is that they are energy inefficient, said Cortney Stover, a spokeswoman for the Indiana Finance Authority, which manages the state's brownfields program.

Crosley calls plants like BorgWarner "extinct."

Large plants meant large numbers of people being employed and large property tax payments filling local coffers. Large factories no longer exist. We will not see large segments of our population working at one factory. This makes life difficult for all. Think how easy government had it with dealing with large manufacturing companies like General Motors and Ford or U.S. Steel. Think how easy the workers had it working for those same companies. That kind of world ended a ways back.

I wrote that last paragraph not as an implied attack on unions as is so common here in Anderson. The world was much different 30-40 years ago when we thought the US was top of the heap, always would be and what was good for GM was good for the country. Hindsight is always 20/20 vision. Before anyone criticizes what was done back then needs to put themselves in the shoes of the people making decisions back then.

We do not have the luxury of a limited competition world. We live in a world where manufacturing requires automation and not a lot of bodies and those bodies need skills. Yes, the world of our father's changed and now what do we leave for our children?

We need to emphasize education and skills and flexibility in careers. We need to understand that competition means taking risks and being out on the cutting edge. We need the imagination to recognize new opportunities. We will need to work harder to stay in place.

Consider that about 1,200 are gone from Guide and we got 600 with Nestle. The Greensburg Honda factory will employ approximately 2000. I suggest these show the sizes of current manufacturing jobs: 600- 2000 per plant. That is a far cry from 20,000. To get the kind of manufacturing employment that covers 20,000 people, we need to more companies. (note, I am not even going to talk about wages and benefits differences because that is just too complicated for right now). I doubt that we - or any other place - can find enough manufacturing companies who want to open a plant in Anderson. So emphasizing factory work is not a long term benefit. We need a diversified economy.