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meIt was a hot June day in the small town of Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, and five golden shovels were ready for the opening ceremony. The middle shovel was for Donald Trump, alongside him were Terry Gou, founder and chairman of the board of directors of the Taiwanese group Foxconn, and other notables. Behind it hung a huge American flag, attached to two bulldozer arms stretched into the sky.
The ceremony was supposed to mark the start of a gigantic investment project just the way the American president liked it: Foxconn had promised to buy $ 10 billion in a factory here in the country’s battered rust belt, which has lost thousands and thousands. of jobs in the manufacturing industry during the last decades. , which manufactures LCD screens and employs 13,000 people.
Trump was in his element: This plant is “the eighth wonder of the world” and will be built 100 percent from “beautiful American concrete and beautiful American steel.” “We are restoring the industrial power of America,” he enthused, praising the Foxconn boss as “one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world.”
Destructive verdict on the mega project
That was in 2018, and since then there has been disillusionment surrounding the highly acclaimed megaproject. The original plans were revised very quickly, and now the question even arises as to what remains of the project. A budgeting authority in Wisconsin just passed the convicting verdict that the Mount Pleasant facility may be more suitable “for demonstration purposes” than for industrial display production.
The fate of the Foxconn plant sheds an unflattering light on Trump’s economic policy. The president has made strengthening manufacturing a top priority from the beginning, and he never tires of saying that thanks to him, more and more companies are “coming back” to the United States to build factories. The reality is much more differentiated. In fact, at least until the Corona crisis, the number of manufacturing jobs increased under Trump, but not to a much greater extent than in previous years when Barack Obama was still president.
There are fewer jobs today than when Trump took office due to the pandemic-induced recession. In rust belt states like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, which were decisive for Trump’s election, the number of industrial jobs even declined last year – that is, even before the crown crisis.
“Great day for American workers”
The Foxconn factory saga began just two days after Trump took office in January 2017. Terry Gou said at the time that he was considering setting up a display production facility in the United States. That made people sit up and take notice: He promised American jobs and the prestige of Foxconn; After all, the company is primarily known as Apple’s workbench in China, where it makes devices like the iPhone for the electronics giant. Six months later it was official.
Trump and Gou announced the billion dollar Wisconsin project together at the White House. “It’s a great day for American workers,” Trump said, celebrating the project as a personal triumph: “If he hadn’t been elected, he definitely wouldn’t spend $ 10 billion.” American history described.
Scott Walker, the then governor of Wisconsin and like Trump a Republican, was so enthusiastic that he started talking about a “Wisconn Valley” in his state, based on California’s tech stronghold, Silicon Valley. A subsidy package for Foxconn was immediately prepared, the value of which amounted to more than $ 4 billion.
