I saw this note in today’s Espresso from The Economist, “France’s finance minister pledged to save jobs under threat at General Electric’s plant in the country’s north-east. The American industrial conglomerate, which made a loss of $23bn last year, had said it would cut around 1,000 jobs. Earlier this year GE paid France a €50m ($56m) fine for failing to create jobs after it took over Alstom’s energy business.”
Meanwhile in the US, officials are taking a second look at the results of Foxconn’s supposed multi-billion dollar investments. Politicians made great PR hay in 2017 with the announcement of a large investment in Wisconsin. Two years down the road, maybe the investment may not be so large and the employment a few thousand shy.
Governments can preach and give breaks and whatever, but market forces and bad management mean much more than governments for success. Take Alstom, for example. Perhaps there is French pride involved, but GE discovered that that particular acquisition was not all that it hoped for. One of a string of GE missteps. The French government can fine all it wants, but job creation depends upon good management and proper economic tailwinds.
I recently reported on the “success” of re-shoring manufacturing jobs, as the Reshoring Initiative would have it. Most likely it’s a result of financial analysts taking a closer look at supposed savings from only low wages discovering that other costs, such as logistics, insurance, loss of intellectual property, longer lead times, inability to quickly respond to changing markets all combined to make manufacturing offshore unappealing.
Most of the ills of manufacturing society I read about have a common root cause—less than competent management. I don’t see any quick fixes for that! And it won’t come from government fines generated by disappointment at lack of political gain.
