New York Times – by Jesse Barron
The news spread around Huntsville, Ala., in the winter of 2014. Remington, the country’s oldest gun maker, had decided to expand from its historic home in upstate New York to a gigantic former Chrysler factory near the airport. Workers at the new plant, the company said, would earn a minimum average of $19.50 an hour assembling shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles and AR-15-style semiautomatics. The city’s mayor wrote in a newspaper column that he was thrilled that Remington’s quest for a new factory space had ended in Huntsville. He calculated the typical annual salary as $42,500.
Huntsville is a boomtown in the Southern mold. The unemployment rate is lower than the country’s, and educated workers are in high demand. Southwest of downtown, in a facility that synthesized chemical weapons during World War II, the Army maintains a major research center and garrison. Orbiting the Army base are military and aerospace contractors: Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Car companies from Japan, an electronics manufacturer from Korea and many other concerns churn out goods for the domestic market. “Cutting taxes and simplifying regulations makes America the place to invest!” President Trump tweeted in January 2018; he was talking about Huntsville.
Since 1993, when the state gave Mercedes-Benz $253 million to build its first American auto plant in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama has refashioned itself as a kind of foundry for the rest of the country and the world, first courting automakers and then becoming an all-purpose workshop and technology hub. Airbus produces A320 jetliners; Toyota makes engines for Rav4s and Tundras; Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s “spacefaring” company, recently broke ground on a rocket-engine plant. These companies are drawn here partly by the benefits that Trump cited, but most forcefully by the generous tax-incentive packages doled out by officials in Montgomery, the state capital, in concert with pro-business mayors.
Huntsvillians take pride in their economy, and when a new company comes to town, good will cascades toward it. In early 2015, wearing a shirt and hat from Remington could even score you the best table at a restaurant. In the display cases at Larry’s Pistol and Pawn, Huntsville’s most respected gun shop, managers made room for Remington pistols stamped with “Huntsville, AL”: It was a point of pride to carry a weapon made in-state. “Locked and Loaded,” ran the headline in The Huntsville Times, for an article describing how the factory would ultimately create more than 1,800 jobs.
Doors opened in spring 2015. News from the inside was scarce, but this was more or less to be expected. Workers in the gun industry endure a special kind of scrutiny, like metal detectors at the exits and visits to their homes from A.T.F. agents looking for weapons that have gone missing. When Remington forbade employees to speak to outsiders about their jobs or fired a person who removed a smartphone from his pocket in the vicinity of the line, the explanation was assumed to be that the company was protecting its secrets, including the pace of its production. “Those assault rifles,” one employee told me, “they couldn’t make them fast enough.” That year, Remington earned $191 million in gross profit on $809 million of revenue.
Read the rest here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remington-guns-jobs-huntsville.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab
“These companies are drawn here partly by the benefits that Trump cited, but most forcefully by the generous tax-incentive packages doled out by officials in Montgomery, the state capital, in concert with pro-business mayors.”
“Since 1993, when the state gave Mercedes-Benz $253 million to build its first American auto plant in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama has refashioned itself as a kind of foundry for the rest of the country and the world, first courting automakers and then becoming an all-purpose workshop and technology hub. Airbus produces A320 jetliners;”
Incredible isnt it? I mean here is American mayors giving away millions of dollars to attract offshore corporations, at the same time letting foreigners infiltrate to take the jobs away from American Nationals. So they are giving away our wealth from one pocket and giving jobs to the enemy from the other pocket. American Nationals, for the most part left standing naked with nothing! What has been accomplished here?
Foreign billionaires get rich, American Nationals go broke
As far as Remington going broke? Easy to understand really, nobody had any money to buy the fkg guns!
AS FAR AS RIFLES GO, SAVAGE HAS THEM BEAT HANDS DOWN………………..