5 ms·
"The exodus was triggered, in part, by inroads the labor movement was making among blue-collar employees in cities" There are definitely places that want to gi
by ryhamz 10y ago
"The exodus was triggered, in part, by inroads the labor movement was making among blue-collar employees in cities"
There are definitely places that want to give employees less leverage by being the only employer in the area, at least for their given field.
e.g. If you don't like your job at Epic in Wisconsin, you're more likely to be looking at relocation.
Meanwhile, I have contacts 10 minutes down the street by foot.
- WalterBright 10y ago> There are definitely places that want to give employees less leverage by being the only employer in the area, at least for their given field. I'd like to see the evidence for this determining a business location.
- R_haterade 10y agoIt often ends up being more of a moat for an existing location. I live surrounded one such moat--the closest thing to a rust-belt city in the midsouth. I'd have to move 1.5 hours to find another job in my field, and I'd still be commuting another 30 minutes or so.
- WalterBright 10y agoI can see it winding up being that way, but I'm not convinced that any business picked a location for such a reason. For one thing, it would be hard to convince workers to move there. Businesses do pick locations based on availability of workers, not lack of them.
- Spooky23 10y agoIt was a key part of IBM's business model. Mainframes in Poughkeepsie and Binghamton, NY, semiconductors in Fishkill & Burlington, AS/400 in Minnesota, x86 in RTP.
- WalterBright 10y agoCan I ask for some more direct evidence - like an interview with a decision maker, some memos, sworn testimony, a copy of an official IBM strategy paper, a history of IBM by a respected historian? Sorry for being a bit demanding here, but I hear an awful lot of things about business that are accepted wisdom, but upon digging deeper find there is no basis in fact for them.
- Spooky23 10y agoI'd suggest doing some research if you're curious. There's plenty of historical material about IBM out there. GE is another great example who even built housing for the management at remote plant and as they moved across the country, military style.
- WalterBright 10y agoExistence of a plant in a remote location is not evidence for a particular motivation. If you've got evidence, I'd really like to see it.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoThe evidence up to the point was that, for cost cutting and knowledge sharing, it's better for people to be closer together with consolidation of common stuff. Spooky just pointed out they had teams for each of their markets in different locations. That's unusually isolated and just by what area they compete in. Why would they go out of their way to do that? I'm also interested in seeing more specific evidence but initial data suggest IBM avoided obvious, cost-effective choice for isolating teams by market segment in expensive ways. That already looks bad somehow.
- WalterBright 10y ago> That already looks bad somehow. It's a big leap to go from suspecting nefarious motives to "definitely". It could be anything from lower cost of land and living expenses to executives thought it would be a good place to raise kids. Or it could be that IBM thought it would try a "Skunk Works" type operation that was deliberately cut off from the rest of the company - a setup made famous by Kelly Johnson at Lockheed.