Carmaker driving job growth in the US
Chinese electric automaker brings employment and opportunities to workers in California’s high desert
LOS ANGELES — “I started out on the line just a year ago as an hourly worker, same as everybody else,” said Kris Esposito, the newly minted production manager of the bus chassis section of China’s new BYD electric bus factory in Lancaster, California.
“But BYD rewards you for hard work and using your initiative. The opportunities for advancement here are excellent,” he told Xinhua News Agency in an interview recently.
Esposito, a young thirtysomething father of two, had heard that a Chinese electric vehicle company, BYD, was opening a factory in California to manufacture electric buses and was hiring hundreds of people in the Lancaster area.
In an exclusive interview with Xinhua recently, Lancaster’s Mayor R. Rex Parris, revealed, “We were facing the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. But since BYD chose to build their plant in Lancaster, we have 100 percent employment. That was a lifesaver to our community.”
After Esposito applied and landed a base-level assemblyline position at BYD, he left his job as a security consultant traveling the globe on assignment, to move to the high desert in Antelope Valley with his homemaker wife to set down roots for his growing family.
“I’ll feel blessed. My wife doesn’t have to work, and gets to stay at home to take care of our 3-year-old son and 9-month-old daughter instead of having to put them in day care,” Esposito told Xinhua.