North country wants to believe jobs are coming to GM plant
The president of D’Arcinoff Group in Washington, D.C., recently said he didn’t want to get the north country all excited about his company’s plan to bring an estimated 12,000 jobs to the region. http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090616/NEWS05/306169973
Too late. This is a place where we get all excited when Taco Bell announces plans to hire two part-time burrito slingers to man a restaurant it wants to open in a combination gas station/car wash/pizzeria/donut shop/convenience and gift store. Michael C. Darcy is talking about retooling the General Motors plant in Massena and employing thousands in wind turbine production. We are all excited.
Truth to tell, if Mr. Darcy had told us a little more when he gave a scant outline of his plans to newspapers and television stations across the north country, we might all be number-oneing ourselves right now. But all we know is that really big number – 12,000 jobs.
The last big number we got all excited about around here was $108 million. That’s how much a group called Northway Island Associates announced a few years ago that it would spend on developing a speedway and resort complex a few miles south of Massena. The resort was going to pump $168 million annually into the region’s economy. It was going to create some 3,500 jobs. It took a wrong turn and wound up on a dead-end called Pipe Dream Avenue.
We’d like to think Mr. Darcy isn’t taking us on the same ride. Retrofitting an abandoned auto plant is not the same as a scheme to build a racetrack in the middle of a cornfield and tell us people will come. Other wind turbine companies are already up and running in old plants across the nation. It’s Mr. Darcy’s estimates that are troubling.
A wind turbine manufacturer recently retrofitted an auto plant in Iowa and boasts that it employs 150 there. A company that calls itself the second-largest producer of wind turbines in the world took over a former U.S. Steel plant in Pennsylvania and employs 300. At a Web site listing wind turbine manufacturers that either took over empty plants or built new, not one of them lists having more than 750 workers at any of the sites.
If half the jobs Mr. Darcy estimates his company will bring to the region end up at the Massena GM plant, that’s 6,000 workers ... in a plant that in its heyday had 2,000. Maybe that’s possible. A union official who used to work at the plant said, “five or six thousand at our plant sounds pretty crowded to me.” It sounds sort of like we’re heading down Pipe Dream Avenue to me.
We are suckers in the north country when it comes to people telling us they have jobs for us. Deep down we probably know that jobs don’t come here, they leave here in very big numbers. But we want to believe. Mr. Darcy shouldn’t worry about us getting all excited. That’s what we’ve learned to do. It feels good ... at least for a while.
