There has been controversy over wage and benefits for contract workers in the City of Milwaukee's $20 million-for-1,200 jobs' deal with Milwaukee Tool, but the agreement looks pretty good by comparison to Walker's $3-billion-to-$4+ billion package of subsidies and taxpayer-provided amenities shoveled to Foxconn which Evers - despite GOP false and ridiculous monkey-wrenching - managed to knock down to about $80 million in tax credits for a promised 1,450 jobs.
Remember that the original Foxconn job promise was 13,000, and in 2019 the company seemed to suggest that its emphasis for the Wisconsin project would be less on blue-collar manufacturing or assembly positions and more on highly-skilled-and-paid engineers:
Foxconn's special assistant to the chairman, Louis Woo, on Wednesday told Reuters in an interview that the company may scale back or even shelve some of its plans in Wisconsin, citing steep costs over the difficulty of manufacturing televisions in the U.S.
Then on Friday afternoon, [Foxconn Chairman Terry] Gou, in a Facebook livestream broadcast, said that his company's focus in Wisconsin will turn from production to R&D, creating a technology hub there. "Foxconn plans to hire more than 10,000 engineers to do research and development," he said.
Of course, the reworked Foxconn deal does not recoup any of the hundreds of millions of dollars already spent for land acquisition, highway construction, water diversion piping and electrical line and substation construction for sprawl -
- into homesteads, farm and wetlands.
And neither the Foxconn or Milwaukee Tool deal addresses the persistent flow of money from the public sector to the private sector in the name of job creation, or the community vs. community competitions which stain the interconnected business, employment and natural environments all parties should be working to improve.
But this is the world we're living in, and it's good to see investment in the city than on highway-dependent exurban or rural acreage, so Milwaukee Tool looks better for people, budgets and the land than the Foxconn fiasco, explained in detail at this continuously updated archive maintained since June, 2017.