4 ms·

What is evil about this?

• hosay123 12y ago
  Perhaps it would be better to ask an employee who 8 months ago may have started a family on the strength of a loud endorsement to move manufacturing back home. What's the real harm? Just a few empty promises, no laws broken and a mere 700 dashed spirits, but it's all worthwhile in pursuit of the dream - whatever it happens to be this quarter.
  • DannyBee 12y ago
    So they should do what the army does, and spend billions to produce tanks that end up somewhere in the desert because the army doesn't want them, and it may cause some job loss?
    • hosay123 12y ago
      Of course not, that wouldn't be good business, but we're not concerned with that here. The parent comment asks what is evil about it, which is to ask whether it is moral to spend millions on an advertising campaign that implies job security, and less than a year later turn those same jobs into a fire sale. There is a huge continuum of possibilities for how the Motorola sale should play out, but when the reality is an extremely profitable corporation pulling the rug from under 700 low wage contractors with minimal notice, despite explicitly claiming the contrary less than a year previous, just setting fire to the building and walking away somehow strikes me as a particularly immoral outcome.
      • tptacek 12y ago
        So they should instead do what?
        • spinchange 12y ago
          It's too late to do anything about it now, but I also think it was in kind of in bad faith for Google management to play up this whole Motorola enterprise as "bringing back tech manufacturing jobs to the U.S." and Texas specifically with big press events replete with politicians and all of that stuff. Business is business and perhaps folks who were encouraged by that kind of dog-and-pony show are rubes anyhow, but it feels very "un-Googly" for them to have gone that route PR-wise if they weren't seriously committed to it and it's pretty clear they weren't.
          • tptacek 12y ago
            If Google had done nothing, would those jobs likely have remained in the US? If not, what is the complaint here?
            • spinchange 12y ago
              The complaint is simply that Google repeatedly and intentionally signaled a big public commitment to creating tech manufacturing jobs and selling American-made cell phones and this couldn't have been their actual intention. There's nothing else to do or say, really. Rightly or wrongly Google has an image of being different than most politicians and corporations and so that's why people are disappointed. I get why they did what they did, I just don't think they needed the political, PR head fake.
              • tptacek 12y ago
                Isn't the obvious interpretation of what happened here that Google wanted to create tech manufacturing jobs in the US, spent an enormous amount of money trying to create tech manufacturing jobs in the US, and simply failed? And, that being the case, it's very relevant to ask "what would have happened had Google not tried to do this?". From what I can tell, the answer is "those people who are losing their jobs due to this plant closure would have lost those jobs earlier."
                • spinchange 12y ago
  • TruthSayr 12y ago
    Maybe you should take it up with your local government.