Did Scott Walker and Donald Trump escape the governor's race at Foxconn?

In September 2017, Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker signed a contract that would make his state the seat of Foxconn's first US factory, the largest electronic market maker in the world. The company, based in Taiwan and manufacturing products for Apple, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, among others, would build a 21.5 million square foot industrial campus, invest up to ten billion dollars in Wisconsin and would engage as many as thirteen thousand workers for an average salary of fifty-four thousand dollars a year. For Walker, whose approval fell in the mid-1930s after his failed presidency, this agreement was seen as a decisive asset for his re-election prospects. "The Foxconn initiative was something that could be a feature of Walker's re-election campaign," said Charles Franklin, professor and investigator at Marquette University Law School. "He could claim a major new presence in the manufacturing sector, a company that would also employ blue-collar workers in an area where blue-collar jobs are more scarce than before."

The idea of ​​building the plant in southeastern Wisconsin was born in April 2017, during a helicopter ride that President Donald Trump had accompanied with Reince Priebus from Wisconsin and Chief of Staff of Trump at the time. Flying over Kenosha, Priebus' hometown, they doubled the empty ground that once housed the American Motors Corporation factory. "Why are all these lands vacant?" Asked Trump, according to a story that Priebus allegedly gave to a Milwaukee television station. "This land should be used." When Terry Gou, president of Foxconn, came to the White House to discuss Foxconn's desire to build a plant in the United States, Trump suggested the site in Kenosha. It was not big enough, but the town of Mt. Pleasant, 15 miles to the north, pursued the company aggressively and was eventually selected by Foxconn in October 2017.

The project has evolved quickly. Last June, a groundbreaking ceremony was held in Mt. Pleasant to celebrate a political triumph for Trump and Walker. After laying a few earthen balls with a golden shovel, Trump called Foxconn's future campus "the eighth wonder of the world" and hinted that his promise to create well-paying manufacturing jobs could serve as a model for other Midwestern states. . like Wisconsin, played a crucial role in Trump's narrow victory at the constituency in the 2016 election. "I recommended Wisconsin, in this case," Trump said. "And I will recommend Ohio, I will recommend Pennsylvania and Iowa."

But as the public became aware of the soaring costs of these jobs, the Foxconn deal became a political responsibility for Walker, especially among voters living outside of Southeastern Wisconsin. These costs include grants to the company totaling more than $ 4.5 billion, the largest grant by any foreign company in US history. As Wisconsin already exempts manufacturing companies from paying taxes, Foxconn, which generated revenues of $ 158 billion last year, will receive a large portion of this grant in the form of direct cash payments from taxpayers. Depending on the number of jobs created, taxpayers will pay between two hundred and twenty thousand dollars and more than one million dollars per job. According to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, a non-partisan organization that provides economic analysis to the Wisconsin legislature, early citizens could see a return on their investment in Foxconn dating back to 2042.

Public skepticism about the Foxconn deal led to other costs. At Walker's request, Scott Pruitt, then head of the Environmental Protection Agency, rejected his staff's objections to giving most of southeastern Wisconsin an exemption from the smog-related limits. (Walker declined to respond to interview requests for this article.) The state legislature of Wisconsin passed a bill granting privileges to the Foxconn Special Courts; Unlike other parties, the company may make several adverse appeals in the same case and may even appeal an adverse ruling directly to the Conservative-controlled Supreme Court of Wisconsin. But few costs caused more outrage than the way Mount. The Village of Pleasant Board secured the 28,000 hectares of land needed to build the Foxconn campus.

To allow the development of Foxconn, which will also require many kilometers of new roads, the village council has bought properties, sometimes using the threat of a prominent estate to force reluctant landlords to sell at a price set by the village. Several weeks before the start of the work, the seven-member council went further. By a vote of 6-1, the council designated the entire area of ​​twenty-eight hundred acres "burned", which will allow Mt. Nice to issue bonds exempt from federal and state taxes and grant the village a wider use of the eminent domain to seize the ownership of the few remaining remains, a small group, although very visible, including the fight for rights of ownership embodies a more general disenchantment with the Foxconn deal.

The high cost of the agreement, estimated at nearly eighteen hundred dollars per household, has created a heavy burden for taxpayers and a political risk for Walker. After the announcement of the terms last year, Republican Governor of Ohio, John Kasich, said: "I will tell you one thing: it will not take us forty years to recover the investments we make. We do not buy agreements. According to polls, the majority of voters in Wisconsin never thought that the state got value for money. by Franklin at Marquette. His poll also consistently showed that the majority of voters thought that Foxconn would not help businesses in their area. "The governor's fortune is so tied to Foxconn's support," said Franklin. "When it was announced for the first time, it was considered in the short term as a major victory for Walker, which could consolidate his grip on the elections." Now, Foxconn is one of the main reasons why Walker has left behind his Democratic opponent, Tony Evers, Superintendent of Schools, in almost every poll since the August primaries.

Pleasant is a bourgeois suburb of Racine, a sandy industrial town on the shores of Lake Michigan, twenty kilometers south of Milwaukee. In the three months since construction began, parts of the city, home to about 26,000 people, have changed dramatically. Prairie View Drive marks one of the edges of Foxconn's first phase of construction. When I entered the street earlier this month, a black windshield fence was separating a vast dusty field from the empty houses of a new subdivision that was to be destroyed. All but one of the neighboring owners have agreed to settle: Kim Mahoney, her husband, Jim, and their thirteen-year-old daughter Reese are the latest victims.

When I arrived at the Mahoneys, Jim, a quality control inspector of medical devices, greeted me in the driveway. He wore a Brewers jacket and pointed to an empty space where a house had been demolished the previous week. "Nice house," he said, shaking his head. Jim drove me through the garage, following the "Stop Eminent Domain" sign that Kim had organized for a rally. The Mahoneys' impeccable home, with an area of ​​18,000 square feet, features a kitchen with dining area, a stone fireplace and a large corner sofa. with integrated cup holders. "We chose this floor plan because we like to receive it," Kim said. During a quick tour of the house, the couple stopped to look at the two Caterpillar excavators immersed in the ground a hundred yards beyond the window of Reese's room. "You get used to the noise," says Jim.

Kim, a forty-nine-year-old paralegal, grew up in the nearby town of Sturtevant and went to high school in Racine. She met Jim playing softball and after a few drinks on a St. Patrick's Day, he invited him. "The rest is history," Kim said. The couple lived in Racine for several years, but Jim needed more space. In 2008, a few years after the birth of Reese, they bought the acreage in which they currently live to a colleague of Kim's. The financial crisis slowed the sale of their old home and the construction of their new home, but in December 2016, a builder of modular homes in northern Wisconsin proceeded with the construction of their current home on two half-finishes.

A few months later, Mt. Pleasant Village Board has hired Alan Marcovitz, one of Wisconsin's leading lawyers in the field. The project, dubbed "the flying eagle," was kept secret. "I remember having a very critical meeting with the village council and saying," If you really want to come to that, you have to decide to go out there, "Marcovitz told me. "There are no minor efforts and no hope of success." Marcovitz hired a real estate firm in Kenosha to go door-to-door, offering large landowners $ 50,000 an acre, which was significantly higher. at the rate in effect for the land. in the zone. Some people refused to sell, said Marcovitz, but most did, and the village quickly surrendered 1700 acres.

At her kitchen table, Kim described a conversation she had on October 7, 2017, three days after Foxconn chose Mount. Pleasant, with Jim Machnik, a land acquisition consultant hired by village administrators. Machnik told Kim that the village was planning to acquire his home through an eminent domain intended for road projects. Kim asked what would be the new route. Machnik said to him: Four lanes with a divider, one hundred and twenty meters. "Our house is more than 500 meters away," she says. Machnik told her that she would not have access to the new road that the village would build. They'll just leave you on an island, remembers Kim. She told him that it was illegal, that the village should give him access to the road. Machnik then asked if she really wanted to continue living in her home, surrounded by a constant construction that would become a huge manufacturing facility. "We are not trying to obstruct your project," Kim said. "We are willing to sell our home to you. But you can not take it under an eminent domain. "(Machnik's spokesman said Machnik" does not remember exactly how the conversation took place, but did not think it would have been at this level of detail at the time of the conversation. time ").

A few days later, the Mahoneys received a letter from the village of Mt. It's nice that one can read: "You receive this letter because you own a parcel of land affected The letter indicated that the "Village Acquisitions" – in this case, the new Mahoney House – were subject to "Eminent Domain Procedures", and that "a specialist in relocation "would hold hands. It was signed by Claude Lois, director of the Foxconn project hired by Mt. Agréable.

Kim held out her hand to his political representatives, including his congressman, Speaker Paul Ryan. "His answer was: it's not a federal issue," Kim said. "And that I should contact the representatives of my state." That surprised her. In 2005, Ryan co-sponsored the Private Property Rights Protection Act, drafted in response to the Supreme Court's decision in Kelo v. City of New London. This decision allowed New London, Connecticut, to use an eminent domain to move to several locations as part of an economic development project. "When someone works for years to secure a home or establish a thriving family store or restaurant, the government forces them to abandon it so that a company can redevelop the land," he said. Is wrong, "Ryan said in a statement. The bill passed in House 376-38, but failed in the Senate. (Ryan also attended the opening ceremony of Foxconn's work at Mt. Pleasant.)

That same year, Wisconsin passed its own law in response to Kelo, co-sponsored by Leah Vukmir, now a nominee to the US Republican Senate. She banned the use of a prominent estate to seize property on behalf of a private company, with one exception: if the property was "destroyed." Kim believes that state law was drafted to protect new housing like hers … she defined burned goods as "harmful to public health, safety or welfare". However, the village council is based on a different law, which applies the designation of property that, among other things, "undermines or stops the healthy growth of the community. "

"From the beginning, the village has essentially written off residents," Kim said. "We are just on their way, we are a nuisance. And that's wrong, because they are not supposed to represent the interests of a wealthy foreign company. They are supposed to represent the interests of their constituents. "

Racine Mayor Cory Mason was a representative of the Democratic State when the Foxconn Agreement was presented to the legislature. Despite past battles with Walker over his attacks on the unions, Mason was one of three Democrats in the Assembly, all from southeastern Wisconsin, to have voted in favor of this deal. "It was a difficult vote," said Mason. "But I come back to why I ran for office, the reason I hear again and again knocking on doors: people are looking for economic security that stems from a good job in the classroom average. In the end, that's what Foxconn stands for me. "

In the decades leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, which left Racine's unemployment rate close to 20%, high-paying jobs in the manufacturing sector have disappeared: the Horlick malt mill, the Racine Steel smelter Castings, the Jacobsen lawn mower are all now embedded seashells. Thousands of people once worked in Case's huge tractors factory, a city whose population peaked in 1970 at 95,000 people. The factory was demolished in 2004. "In a generation we have lost more than fifteen thousand good jobs in the manufacturing industry," Mason told me. He distinguished free trade agreements as NAFTA as "devastating" root. "Sometimes people use large national numbers and say," Well, overall, these job losses are more due to automation, "he said. "I can take you to Racine and show you the empty spaces where the factories used to be: none of them were shut down because of automation. They closed to go to Mexico, China or elsewhere.

Foxconn represents for Mason a unique opportunity to revitalize his hometown in trouble. "We're finding that incumbents are increasing their salaries in anticipation of Foxconn's potential appeal to attract their employees," said Mason. "And we're talking about more than eleven thousand construction jobs just to build the Foxconn plant. Before talking about the hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs needed to develop the highway, the jobs needed to install all of the water supply infrastructure. "

Mason reiterated Foxconn's promise to create 13,000 "permanent" jobs in Wisconsin. But the company has recently changed the type of plant it plans to build from a highly automated factory requiring only 3,000 employees, 90% of which are "knowledge workers," such as engineers, programmers and engineers. designers. Almost all assembly work will be done by robots. Foxconn Chairman Gou said he plans to replace 80 percent of Foxconn's global workforce with "Foxbots" in the next five to ten years. The company still plans to hire 13,000 employees in Wisconsin, but it has not kept similar promises in Brazil, India and Pennsylvania, among others. Foxconn has already replaced sixty thousand workers who earned about $ 2.50 an hour in China. Even the extension of I-94, which is being adapted to Foxconn (and paid for by Wisconsin taxpayers), reflects Foxconn's confidence in automation: the Wisconsin company and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation have discussed the assignment of lanes to autonomous cars and trucks. (In a statement, a representative of the company said, "Foxconn is fully committed to investing at least $ 10 billion in the construction of our state-of-the-art science and technology park in the Wisconsin Valley, Wisconsin, and comply with all contractual obligations with relevant agencies, government agencies. ")

Foxconn's work practices in China gained international notoriety in 2010, when a Shenzhen factory began to commit suicide, mainly by jumping from a dormitory into a tower. Two years later, 150 workers from another Foxconn Chinese factory were on the roof of a factory building and threatened to commit suicide to protest the overwhelming working conditions. (In addition to increasing salaries, forcing employees to sign non-suicide agreements and to bring Buddhist monks to conduct prayer sessions on the factory site, Gou has installed safety nets around some factories to prevent workers from committing suicide.) Mason about Foxconn's record in China, he said: "They do not talk about changing labor laws or labor standards here. "

Although Foxconn is honoring its commitments to Wisconsin, many economists believe that it will always be a terrible investment for the state. In an editorial published on UrbanMilwaukee.com, William Holahan, professor emeritus at the Business School of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Charles Kroncke, former professor at the Business School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have calculated that if the Foxconn taxpayer grants were awarded to randomly selected entrepreneurs, the money generating more than 90,000 jobs. They note that the Foxconn plant will be about 20 kilometers from the Illinois border, so many employees will likely not be residents of Wisconsin. And, they argue, Foxconn's jobs can not be viewed as a net gain because the company's taxpayer subsidy is taking away billions of dollars from the public sector, where it could be used to repair deteriorating roads. from Wisconsin or to hire teachers. in rural schools with small numbers. Ninety million dollars from the state's transportation budget have been reallocated to road works in other parts of the state for the development of Foxconn.

If the economic impact of the Foxconn agreement remains uncertain, its political significance at the national and state levels is clearer. The deal strengthened Trump's close relationship with Governor Walker, who was an absolute "Never Trumpper" in the 2016 presidential campaign, even announcing he was abandoning the race to give way to a candidate who could stop Trump. . Now, Walker is reluctant to criticize the president, even when Trump has called for a boycott of Wisconsin's most iconic manufacturer, Harley-Davidson. Their link was visible at a rally in the small town of Mosinee in central Wisconsin in October. "He ran against me in the primary," said Trump, of Walker. "He was tough. He could be mean. Wow, but he was hard. He was smart. Trump continued, "I created it with an amazing company called Foxconn. Walker followed, praising Trump's role in leading the company in Wisconsin. (Walker declined to comment on this article.)

Regardless of the winner of the governorship Tuesday, the agreement with Foxconn will be extremely difficult to cancel. In an interview with Kenosha NewTony Evers criticized Walker's agreement with the company, calling it "a Hail Mary pass and a bad deal for Wisconsin". But, he added, "the contract has been signed, a law has been passed, and the dust is out of place", to point out, perhaps, that there is little political will to re-examine issues such as "wilting" the territory of the Mahoney and other residents, despite their many protests.

For Kim Mahoney, the issue has strengthened his resolve to keep fighting. She highlighted the pumpkin farm of the country of the giants of Creuziger, the last big concession. The four hundred-acre property has been part of the Creuziger family for ninety-two years, but the family was sentenced to leave office on October 8. (After the Crusaders disputed the move to the courts, the village withdrew the order, stating that he would no longer need land for a year.) "If they are allowed to do it, they can do it anytime, anytime, "Kim said. "The laws of Wisconsin and the laws on private property rights do not make sense. All they have to do is change the zoning and call it withered. During my last visit with the Mahoneys, the big Caterpillar machines were working closer to home than usual and the noise was louder. Jim and I were outside in his driveway. A bright orange-red sunset lit up the horizon, but it was hard to escape the sound. "It was very quiet here," said Jim.