Wisconsin clears the way for Foxconn by bulldozing working peoples' homes and paying them pennies on the dollar

The nets work!

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I have an english minor ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But, seriously, my current job has a far lower accidental death rate than many others. I’m pretty happy to have it.

ESL?

Understandable then, but my point remains the same:

Having such a consistent rate of employee suicides to the point that nets are even a necessity is NOT a good thing, no matter that there are businesses in China with even larger numbers of employee suicides.

If you have a business where people regularly try to kill themselves while on the the job, you’re seriously doing something wrong.

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Seriously, they should kill themselves on their own time!

The aberration for Foxconn is that they have dorms so the employees basically live at the company. When they kill themselves it happens on company property instead of the privacy of their own home. It might be interesting to compare their suicide rates to military and university rates.

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That sounds like utter Hell on earth.

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And nothing new in history, either. The first wave of factory work was done by young women, who lived on the company grounds:

And in the later 19th century, corporations began to build company towns - where everything was owned by the mill - houses, stores, schools, etc - and everything the worker made went back into the company. It was primarily a means of controlling the working population as the labor movement was becoming more popular and widespread in the US (and Britain):

Weirdly enough, the little small town I grew up in used to be a mill village - they had long sold off all the properties to private investors (where we rented a house down the street from the HS and elementary school), but my grandmother worked at that plant (textile) when it was still a company town…

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The blight language is probably related to previously upheld standards like the Berman case rather than an attempt to lower the price. In most of the eminent domain fights I’ve seen blight is one of the few features defined nebulously enough to allow for land to be seized at all. My hometown was at the center of a nationally publicized eminent domain fight in 2003. In order to tear down a neighborhood they would have to declare it blighted. The standards were so broad almost every part of the city would have qualified. Eventually the outrage stopped it, but only after votes and and nasty political fight. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eminent-domain-being-abused/

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Newspeak for “wage slavery.”

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I am the author of the Belt Magazine piece which inspired this story and subsequent comments. As you would hope, readers have done much to clarify the specifics. However, one of the premises of this BB story is that the municipality plans to take property at a pittance. Actually, the assessors hired by the municipality are charged with working from fair market assessments. These valuations are based on valuations prior to announcement of the project, per state law. However, many homeowners have not received these offers, even as the eminent domain process grinds into effect. These homeowners are worried that they will not get sufficient money to rebuild a similar house on similar property since real estate has spiked in the wake of the Foxconn project. Others may indeed be holding out – and it is the possibility of holdouts which worries the municipality, since they’ve promised Foxconn the land.

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Indeed. That’s what it was. They of course pitched it as a favor for the workers, and these became ubiquitous enough to where in some places there was little choice. It was also about destroying the growing labor movement.

Oh, but I’ve been reading this book about how workers turned the concept of wages on it’s head and made it into a positive thing, as they had previous rejected the idea of wages as an ideal, but came to embrace wages as a key to carving out a good consumerist life.

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leaving the former owners of the homes with massive mortgage debt

Wait - how does one have mortgage on a house one no longer owns?

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Late stage capitalism?

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If the government that’s taking your land doesn’t pay you the full amount of your mortgage on a house you’re paying off, you still have to pay off the balance of that mortgage to the bank they bailed out after 2008.

And if they are paying pennies on the dollar since they managed to classify your property as a blight, that’s going to be a lot of mortgage that is sticking to you like poo.

Time to find a corpse you can stage as your own in a fire – preferably a house fire, wink wink – and create a new identity using info skimmed from the Equifax breach.

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What a shithole. Why should we let legislators and administrators from that place live in the US?

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Much like the “well regulated militia,” the phrase “public use” has been rendered meaningless.

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Here he is!

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I think you missed my second paragraph, where I compared the before-nets situation to Racine county … still 10x better. In more recent years, the rate has gone to 0.2/100k, which is 69x better than Racine.

I think you’re surprised that people with jobs commit suicide. That’s never going to be a non-zero number. It’s amazing that, out of 1 million employees, only 2 commit suicide.

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Speaking up which, just when is this citizen uprising against tyranny supposed to happen?

Some people seem to go into a “Second Amendment solution” snit for the slightest things, but when homes are being seized for transparently corrupt reasons … crickets.

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Ha, that one never gets old. So inept!

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didn’t know Pfizer was a Casino. Man I should really start paying more attention to in the pipeline

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