David Michael Miller
If you’re one of the one thousand workers about to lose a job at Oscar Mayer, congratulations. You’re now officially a political billiard ball.
Last week it was reported that officials at Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s largest, oldest and most hidebound business lobby, got wind that Oscar’s parent company might close a plant in Wisconsin, though not the one in Madison. When folks at the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, Wisconsin’s most useless and quite possibly corrupt quasi-public economic development agency, heard about this they asked WMC if they should contact the company. WMC said there was nothing to see there.
Now Madison Mayor Paul Soglin has attacked both the WMC and the WEDC for not knowing in advance that Kraft-Heinz was getting ready to shutter its Madison plant and so not trying to do anything to stop it.
This is all ridiculous.
For one thing if Soglin could just feel this coming in his bones, as he claims, then why didn’t he bother to inform anybody at the WEDC? And if he went to meet with Oscar Mayer officials to try to confirm his hunch, as he said he did, why wasn’t he successful? Maybe it’s because the decision was already made and they weren’t going to tell anybody in advance, not the mayor, not the WEDC and not even their pals at the WMC.
The political posturing on all this is without a point for the workers or for Wisconsin’s and Madison’s economic future. The decision won’t be reversed, and it almost certainly couldn’t have been headed off by state or local efforts even if officials knew it was coming. This appears to be a straightforward business decision that had to do with changes in the industry and the configuration of the aging plant here.
The useful questions now are about how the workers can be transitioned into new jobs and, even more fundamentally, how the state and local economy can be better positioned in the future. Real economic development in these parts would recognize and protect the natural advantages that the Midwest has in climate change security and in water resources. It would resist big pubic handouts to corporations and instead invest in public education at all levels and in transportation and other infrastructure.
The finger-pointing between the mayor and the WEDC and WMC does a disservice to the workers about to lose their jobs, and it is a side show that distracts from the serious discussion we should be having about how to leverage our natural and cultural assets here in the Midwest.
