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back to article Dell cuts North-Carolina plant despite $280m sweetener

Dell has settled a long-running dispute over a $280m incentives package to open shop in North Carolina by shutting the facility and cutting 905 jobs to control costs. Dell announced Wednesday it will close its disputed desktop computer manufacturing plant near Winston-Salem, North Carolina, by the end of January. The news …

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  1. Sureo
    Flame

    Lucky North Carolina residents

    Where I live the government doles out big bucks to various enterprises with no strings attached. We regularly get screwed over, and the pols just shrug and look for the next eager recipient with big promises of jobs. Taxpayers money = nobody's money.

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  2. James Foreman

    We don't need no steenkin titles

    The plant will be ended? Is that anything like being closed?

    I've never suffered the denizens of the warranty department at Dell, so perhaps others can make acerbic comments about educating North Carolinans in schools to repair Dells, but I suppose this is just one example of a larger trend in the US; I was reading the other day of Toyota designing entire curricula for local high schools based on kaizen...

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    ¤#!"%"¤&"¤% title

    WEll the 800 workers will be glad once those 250 million is put to good use when divided out amongst them.... After all that was what the money was ment to do in the first place wasn't it? to help those people.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    @james

    "I've never suffered the denizens of the warranty department at Dell"

    I'm in the UK and going through the process now with a broken piece of DELL kit. I have to say, the support people have been great. Ok, they Scottish, but I forgiven them , service is working. I can understand them, they know their stuff, they are helpful.

    Now if DELL could bring their awful sales operations in India back to the UK I might even be at the point I where I could recommend DELL.

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  5. Zap
    Unhappy

    US still has a lot to learn

    I think this is a mistake for all concerned, especially those idiots who sued. Every EU country can get EU aid for building a new factory in poor economic areas and while we have to be careful of the terms that might allow abuse of the system, they are generally a good thing.

    If we don't have such incentives, corporations such as Dell will simply create their plants in the far east which will result in a loss of jobs, skills and the social costs that go with it.

    For 1500 employees the straight cost is 186.6k per individual but there are state savings to be made to education, taxes paid by those workers, improvements to the local economy by the disposable income of those employees.

    In addition to this, there is business provided to suppliers of Dell and the fact that Dell would likely expand in an area where is already has a factory for logistical reasons.

    Dell can now choose an EU location who are more open minded or they can go to the far east and choose bottom line costs.

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  6. John Owens

    I think the point is

    That the companies take the money but it doesn't really effect their decisions so why pay it.

    The reason why they don't setup in India or somewhere else in the developing world is that the people who buy their equipment live in the west. If we continue to demand local support and sales centers and actually use those companies committed to staying locally then that will be a far greater incentive and far better for our economy in the longer term.

    Offcourse people are greedy and selfish (just like big business) and too many don't support local business or even multi-nationals that use local people when they can get a cheaper service.

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    NCICL director Robert Orr is ignorant

    --- North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law, the non-profit that spearheaded the Dell incentive lawsuit, also issued a statement saying the plant closure illustrates a "stark and painful example of the folly of the incentives game" played by state and local governments.

    So, now we know the stupid company organization

    --- "No matter how big the incentive package, operational decisions by businesses headquartered out-of-state will be driven by corporate financial considerations and not by any sense of loyalty to the community being left behind," wrote NCICL director Robert Orr.

    I guess this Robert Orr did not see NCR Corporation move their corporate headquarters from Dayton, OH to Duluth, GA. The location of the company is not the issue - a company can change locations of a HQ at any time!

    Besides this, it does not matter where the company is HQ'ed at. If the community is a major share holder, there is a sence of loyalty to that shareholder. If the community is not a major shareholder, there is little sence of resposibility.

    A company is legally responsible to their share holders. If a community is putting a company at risk of violating their feduciary responsibilities to the shareholders, the community is being immoral and is asking the company to break the law.

    A community can not morally ask any company to hurt their shareholders. Shareholders are very often a signinficant portion of the life savings of retired people or people saving for retirement. A community should never suck money from the segments of society most vulnerable, those people who are retired, and call it "loyalty".

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