Essentially, Foxconn thought that the Wisconsin deal would work more typically as its deals in China went. Glad-hand the government officials, get sweetheart deals on land and investment, and as long as you're not totally incompetent in making use of it, they won't care what you do with it, even if you fail to live up to the original promises. It's not clear to me that Foxconn actually seriously considered producing LCD screens here given this light; the announcement would have been more to make Walker and other government officials ecstatic about the deal than an actual commitment to follow through. The fact that outrage towards the deal would lead to Walker losing reelection and his successor keeping a much closer eye on performance (or lack thereof) seems to me to have caught Foxconn completely off-guard.
I think there's another level going here in relation to internal Foxconn politics, but my recollection is too hazy to make a coherent explanation, and I don't want to make any false accusations here, so I won't go into any more detail.
https://www.theverge.com/21507966/foxconn-empty-factories-wi...
Meanwhile, people at large don't follow progress of these endeavors. Some journalists may but there's selection bias from the journalist and the news consumer as to what they ultimately see and stay informed of. These stunts are forgotten by most (myself included) in the daily scramble of things we have to keep track of and manage. Did it fail? Did it succeed? Do I even remember it or just the emotion it attributed to something else I actually do remember?
Ambiguity hiding in complexity of daily life lets people say and do a lot of things and get away with it. It's often far too difficult and time consuming to unravel the ambiguity and complexity to show if something succeded, failed, or to even have cognitive capacity to keep track of. The end result, as you point out, is political capital people walk away with. The emotional impression at the time is what was sold and stuck to most people. "MAGA", "bringing back manufacturering", links to nostalgic economic golden eras for many workers.
Think about it from Foxconn's perspective, if you got a sweetheart deal and the person who gave it to you got canned for it, are you going to follow thru and put in billions of your dollars on the assumption that you'll still get billions of government subsidies in return?
There was quite a controversy over the environmental impact of this plant. The "word on the street" is that LCD manufacturing is a dirty industry requiring a lot of water.
https://www.theverge.com/21507966/foxconn-empty-factories-wi...
My take it was probably mainly a political stunt, lcd was never really possible (slump + wages + supply issues) and then they didn't know what to do.
The alternate take is that the whole deal was made in bad faith and FoxConn was hoping to collect subsidies and line its pockets. This version of events has some precedent[1]. It's especially hard to believe that FoxConn didn't know about US labor when this same situation played out in Pennsylvania in 2013[2].
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/foxconns-history-of-broken...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/how-foxconns...
So that leaves either bad faith, or they are just abjectly incompetent. I can't really see any other options. Or, again, am I way off base?
Especially one that is a specialist in harvesting laborers from all corners of the world. I can only imagine selecting the right labor force has to be their main competences.
My smartphone will never be assembled in the US or Germany.
(No relation to the company, though I did once have a very nice chat with Todd Weaver).
And to the larger point: I agree completely that politicians opening their mouths about jobs (and also about anything else, IMO) is bad faith bullshit.
If you look from the outside, as a society we are using a lot of our best brains for very frivolous things. I wish for a more efficient way of using our minds!
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-foxconn-wisconsin-exclusi...
He said the company was still evaluating options for Wisconsin, but cited the steep cost of making advanced TV screens in the United States, where labor expenses are comparatively high.
“In terms of TV, we have no place in the U.S.,” he said in an interview. “We can’t compete.”
Foxconn has factories in Mexico, Chennai, Malaysia etc. which produce a significant amount of devices but I doubt a factory in US will take off. This article from 2012 about the Steve Jobs "These jobs are not coming back" remark is probably still true: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-an...
It's more plausible that any company will give the more acceptable, easily digestible explanation, rather than the real one.
But really it's the politicians who won, first by banging their chests for all the investments and jobs they created, now for getting an easy out. They can't be blamed for not seeing through any ploy because they can argue Foxconn obviously had good intentions sabotaged by "a misunderstanding" that couldn't have been caught.
It's very unlikely (by that I mean close to impossible) that Foxconn just "blundered", went through many rounds of negotiations, and started building, while genuinely not being aware that the US labor market is different from the Chinese one.
Large companies are unlikely to ever tell the truth about their motivations, but they're even less likely to when they were doing something manipulative and dishonest, as Foxconn was here.
They weren't some naive tiny company.
My personal impression is, that it got a lot worse since Covid, which I attribute to more people doing home office and/or having more free time. Any discussion forum that grows gets worse.
But both my impressions and the 2nd part might be wrong.
Huh! I hadn’t thought about it in such stark terms before, and I’d like to disagree, but there may be something in that.
Is that an original thought, or did you get it from somewhere? It sounds like something that should be an eponymous law.
It’s very visible on Reddit. Large subreddits have either very strict moderation, or they are low quality (I’m excepting picture subs here because they work differently)
I have observed that any comments criticizing anyone, regardless of wether they are justified or not seem to be recieved poorly on modern forums.
I believe this is due to an ongoing effort to make forums safe spaces, somehow honest critical thinking is no longer accepted in the current environment. Right or wrong, it is what it is.
So if You are really concerned with the fake points You are accumulating then just tow the line, get with the woke SJW movement or submit articles of interest to balance out the backlash from the mob....I probably better start looking for a good article :P
edit I should add that I believe that spreading that kind of message has geopolitical implications, and that groups might want to create that image for strategic reasons.