Each facility will invest $100 million more in capital projects related to the venture and predictions suggest that could create hundreds, if not thousands of new jobs, including kitchen and wait staff, along with maintenance and security positions.Yippee-ki-yay! Too bad the writer of that article had no access to the New York Review of Books.
Today's edition published an essay, The Specter Haunting Your Office, dealing with layoffs, economic development and modern capitalism. About layoffs, the reviewer writes about some things that anyone in this area would know well with a bit of shock:
As well-paid blue-collar workers, union members, and, for the most part, males without college degrees, United's mechanics were out on a limb. But Uchitelle finds much the same pattern of downward mobility among women, white-collar workers, professionals, and executives. The "vast majority of laid-off workers never get back to where they were," he writes. Moreover, he finds, being laid off is a "fundamental in-the-bones blow to ego and self-worth." People are "cut loose from their moorings and rarely achieve in their next jobs a new and satisfactory sense of themselves."
No kidding, pal. Yet, business culture gives points for layoffs. Think about that as we talk about economic development in Indiana and in Anderson.
Reading further into the essay, I came upon this paragraph about economic development:
Reading further into the essay, I came upon this paragraph about economic development:
The economic development story goes back to the 1930s when a group of southern governors set out to capture some of the manufacturing business of the North by offering cheap capital on top of the traditional lure of cheap labor. In more recent decades, the practice has gone national, and the private sector has taken firm control. To work their will with job-hungry public officials, corporations now routinely deploy teams of lobbyists, site consultants, and other hirelings. The formula rarely fails: drop word of a planned expansion or relocation; create the illusion of a wide-ranging search; overstate the company's own investment and the number of jobs involved; hire fancy experts to talk about the economic ripple effects; walk off with huge subsidies and tax concessions.Oh, did not Indiana do just these things with the Toyota, Honda and Nestle plants hailed by the Herald-Bulletin as diversifying Indiana's economy? My only major quibble with that paragraph is that Indiana developed economic development schemes back in the Gas Boom days. Why else did Ball Corporation locate in Muncie? As for corporation's scamming government, the essay mentions our own United Air terminal in Indianapolis.
If you read my posts recent posts on economic development, you are aware that I am prejudiced against reliance on foreign investments. The Herald-Bulletin article described Anderson as being "...akin to Detroit’s southern campus..." where I would I say Anderson was Detroit's colony. Relying solely on foreign (that is, from outside of Madison County) investment puts us back into a colonial status. We must have a mix of local and foreign investment or we face repeating our history. Before anyone starts exulting foreign investment by big companies, consider the following from the New York Review of Books:
The success of this great effort can be measured in the remarkable fact that, despite the corporate scandals and the social damage that these authors explore; despite three decades of deregulation and privatization and tax-and-benefit-slashing with, as the clearest single result, the relentless rise of economic inequality to levels so extreme that since 2001 "the economy" has racked up five straight years of impressive growth without producing any measurable income gains for most Americans....
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