Posted on 07/15/2008 12:12:30 PM PDT by Freedom_Is_Good
Chattanooga Chosen For $1 Billion Volkswagen Plant Plant At Enterprise South To Have 2,000 Jobs posted July 15, 2008
Volkswagen AG has chosen Chattanooga for its new $1 billion U.S. plant, the European carmaker announced today.
(Excerpt) Read more at chattanoogan.com ...
Bad idea.
No one will buy a $1 Billion Volkswagen.
Whatever happened to the VW plant in Pennsylvania? I remember they closed it down some years ago. But don’t remember why, and didn’t know they were looking to locate another plant here in America.
Probably non union (low cost, low hassle) too, as are many of the car plants in the US South.
Hey, you only have to sell one.
gee, an auto maker puts a new plant in a right to work state-”who’d have thunk it”
LOL, both of you!
Pardon me, boy.....is that the Chattanooga Beetle?
Farfeg-nooga
The South shall rise again! Ironically the unionists in 1865 brought Dixie down and now becasue of unions industry is coming on down to Dixie. Check out Mobile, South Carolina, Texas, et al.
Hope you saved your Confederate money - for the south IS rising again.
I guess a low dollar on the exchange rate has its benefits if you are Volkswagen.
Fahrvergnügen!!
“... The Chattanooga plant will begin production of
a mid-size sedan in early 2011. ...”
Would that be the Jetta or the Passat?
And if it ain’t the TDI, don’t bother.
No, no, no! What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Tell the Germans we don’t want any part of outsourced jobs!
It better have a ton of cup holders for that much money!
Just for reference, Alabama offered VW $120 Million in ***cash*** plus another $80 Million in tax breaks to give VW the incentive to build that plant in Huntsville rather than in Chatanooga.
Hats off to TN for offering more, though. 2,000 new jobs were at stake.
Alabama valued our offer to VW at $100,000 per job, and with our low taxes that would take some consider amount of time to have made it back.
But TN trumped us.
PA has a good bit of the union mentality plus all the incentives had expired so VW bailed.
They will get cheaper labor in the South, and had several states competing over who could come up with the biggest bribe to create jobs and get the sponsoring politicians reelected.
All the crap about ‘great workforce’ is feel good fluff. Fact is if the workers were that good anywhere, companies wouldn’t need incentives to relocate, and would be fighting to put their plant in any specific place. Some states are worse than others, and Kia turned down $1 Billion (with a B) from Mississippi and took $250M from Georgia instead.
From Wikipedia:
Volkswagen of America operated an assembly plant in the borough from 1978 to 1988.[3] The facility built the Volkswagen Rabbit, Rabbit truck, Golf, and Jetta. Originally built as a Chrysler factory in the 1960’s, the unfinished building was well suited for the purpose of building cars. With the downturn of VW’s sales in the USA, as well as unfavorable currency exchange rates, the plant was closed in 1988 after building a few 1989 model year cars. The facility was subsequently sold to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and remained dormant for a few years.
In 1990, Sony announced it would begin operations at the former VW site manufacturing televisions.[4] The facility employed more than 3,000 people in the late 1990s, however that number has dwindled to just 250 in 2007.[5]
****
Guess that whole “closed-shop, forced-union” thing didn’t work out well for VW or Sony.
The skilled jobs (design / engineering) are still in Germany. The assembly-bots are here in America because US workers are cheaper than German labor, transportation costs are reduced by making stuff here, the dollar is in the dumper, which makes things cheaper still and politicians will pay over $100K of taxpayers money to subsidize each ‘good job’
Gee.... Hard to believe that they did not want to locate their plant in Detroit.
“Guess that whole “closed-shop, forced-union” thing didn’t work out well for VW or Sony.”
That and the incentives (payoffs, bribes, whatever you’d like to call them) from the state of PA expired. All the promises and politicians have long since left town.
As for the jobs themselves, they use extensive psych screening to weed out all but the obedient worker-bee ‘team players’ Many will go and pull that big D lever for the next 40 years hoping for another state-sponsored deal for some company to accept a few hundred mill for employing the erstwhile unemployable.
So they didn’t choose Michigan. Surprise, surprise!
Tennessee has no state income tax, last I heard. Wonder how that played into the equation.
You’re correct “NO” income tax just sales tax. Now it looks like the democRats will be taking aways our IRS sales tax deduction very soon.
As well they should. Keep the unions out at all costs.
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