Soon, the office began to fill with people who had nothing to do. Recruiters were told to hit the number but given little in the way of job descriptions. Months after the 2018 groundbreaking, the company was racing to hire the 260 people needed to receive the first tranche of payments from the lucrative subsidy package passed by then-Gov. And a recurring cycle of new recruits joined the project, eager to help it succeed, only to become trapped in a mirage. Residents were pushed from their homes under threat of eminent domain and dozens of houses bulldozed to clear property Foxconn doesn’t know what to do with. State and local governments spent at least $400 million, largely on land and infrastructure Foxconn will likely never need. But for Foxconn, the show went on - for two years, the company, aided by the vocal support of the Wisconsin GOP, worked to maintain an illusion of progress in front of a business venture that never made economic sense. It’s not unusual for either the Trump administration or Foxconn to make announcements that prove hollow. Many have since been laid off.įoxconn did not return repeated requests for comment. Foxconn failed at that objective, too: last week, Wisconsin rejected the company’s subsidy application and found it had employed only 281 people eligible under the contract at the end of 2019. In September, Foxconn received a permit to change its intended use from manufacturing to storage.Įven the handful of jobs the company claims to have created are less than real: many of them held by people with nothing to do, hired so the company could reach the number required for it to get tax subsidy payments from Wisconsin. The building Foxconn calls an LCD factory - about 1/20th the size of the original plan - is little more than an empty shell. Interviews with 19 employees and dozens of others involved with the project, as well as thousands of pages of public documents, reveal a project that has defaulted on almost every promise. Neither did the factory, the tech campus, nor the thousands of jobs. They listened to the cries of co-workers trapped in the elevators that often broke, noted the water that occasionally leaked from the ceiling, and wondered when the building would be transformed into the gleaming North American headquarters an executive had promised. Maybe Foxconn was just moving too fast to be bothered with such details, they thought, as they brought their laptops from home and scavenged pencils left behind by the building’s previous tenants. “One of the largest companies in the world, and you have to bring your own pencil,” an employee recalls wondering. Which is why new recruits arriving at the 1960s office building Foxconn had purchased in downtown Milwaukee were surprised to discover they had to provide their own office supplies. In June, President Donald Trump had broken ground on an LCD factory he called “the eighth wonder of the world.” The scale of the promise was indeed enormous: a $10 billion investment from the Taiwanese electronics giant, a 20 million-square-foot manufacturing complex, and, most importantly, 13,000 jobs. Presenting an animation I created for my college games design course! Made as an introductory trailer for Gef, a mongoose I chose as a character in my hypothetical cryptid/urban legend fighting game!Īfter hearing this song, I became fascinated with the tale of Gef the Talking Mongoose, so getting to base part of a project on him was a nice surprise/coincidence and very fun!Įxcluding the sketch and concepts, this animation is around 42 hours of work, and consists of around 400 frames! I believe.HOPES WERE HIGH among the employees who joined Foxconn’s Wisconsin project in the summer of 2018.
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