As Donald Trump brags about “jobs” deals like the one supposedly bringing Foxconn to Wisconsin, Bryce Covert takes a look at the reality of such deals in general ...
Incentive packages have tripled in size since 1990, as states feel increasing pressure to up the ante to attract jobs for their residents. Yet research has found that these packages rarely change companies’ behavior. One study found that companies receiving tax incentives wouldn’t have left the states that offered them anyway. On top of that, the tax breaks had no discernable impact on job creation or company expansion. [...]
Meanwhile, these packages don’t correlate with better economic performance. State tax regimes don’t have a substantial impact on economic activity. Rather, they represent a hefty giveaway from a state’s taxpayers to a large corporate entity.
… and the Foxconn deal in particular:
If Foxconn’s Wisconsin factory actually does create 13,000 jobs, the upper limit of what the company estimated, that would mean the state is spending $23,769 per job that will pay an average annual salary of $53,000. But so far the company has only actually committed to 3,000 jobs—which would mean Wisconsin shelling out a whopping $1 million per job.
Best deals ever! Winning!
● Speaking of which, black unemployment hits historic low. Should Trump get credit or are we getting played?
● When privatization means segregation: Setting the record straight on the history of school vouchers.
● Making sense of UAW's devastating loss in Mississippi.
● Wage theft victims have little chance of recouping pay in Illinois.
That’s not what labor advocates envisioned in 2010, when the state passed a bill meant to give employees a better chance of recouping stolen wages and to toughen penalties against the employers who stiff them.
The situation, however, has gone from bad to worse for the thousands of mostly low-wage workers who have filed roughly $50 million in wage claims with the state since the measure took full effect in 2014.
● Draper Valley Farms workers picket for better wages, sick leave. (For more like that, follow @blogwood on Twitter.)
● National Weather Service cancels its union contract.
● Trump threatens to strip away overtime pay.
● Emotion work at work:
Customer service representatives need to react calmly in the face of unreasonable rage. Department supervisors have to support new hires, sensitively correct their mistakes, and break the news when corporate announces layoffs. Pediatric intensive care nurses have to find the words to talk with the parents of dying children.
What makes some people thrive in these kinds of jobs while others burn out and leave? In part, it has to do with how they go about performing the emotional duties of their jobs. In 1983 when sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term emotional labor—describing jobs where workers have to adjust their own emotional affect to serve their customers—she suggested that they may use two different methods. They can simply fake the emotion, or they can use Stanislavski-style “deep acting,” making an effort to really experience the appropriate feeling.