High-tech plant, low-tech jobs

Thousands of positions in Foxconn factory won’t require special skills

“It’s not untrue that this is a real high-tech place. It is a real high-tech place. But there’s also going to be a substantial amount of the stuff that is pretty nuts and bolts.”

Bob O’Brien, a display industry consultant and former director of market intelligence and strategy for Foxconn partner Corning Glass Technologies

Much of the discussion about the impact on Wisconsin of Foxconn Technology Group’s planned $10 billion electronics factory has cited the company’s advanced manufacturing processes and its need for skilled workers, and not without reason.

Foxconn will produce ultra-high-definition flat screens equipped to process the lightning-fast 5G internet connections that are expected to be rolled out in the next few years. No such plants exist in the U.S.

But there’s another aspect of the 22-million-squarefoot manufacturing complex planned for Racine County that has received relatively little attention: It will employ thousands of people who will arrive at its gates with no special skills and no more education than a high school diploma — and at wages well above the average for such workers.

That picture emerges in interviews with industry observers and with a key Foxconn executive, and in documents connected to the project.

Parts of Foxconn’s manufacturing campus will be “as high-tech as anything in the world,” said Bob O’Brien, a display industry consultant and former director of market intelligence and strategy for Foxconn partner Corning Glass Technologies.

“But you’re also going to have a portion that is basic

assembly work,” said O’Brien, president and co-founder of Display Supply Chain Consultants LLC. “Ultimately, you’ve got to put the finished TV into a box.

“It’s not untrue that this is a real high-tech place. It is a real high-tech place,” he said, speaking of the mammoth plant that is to begin rising in Mount Pleasant soon.

“But there’s also going to be a substantial amount of the stuff that is pretty nuts and bolts.”

Others familiar with LCD production agreed.

Former display-industry analyst Paul Semenza said it would be fair to assume that if Foxconn hits its 13,000jobs target, thousands of those jobs will be filled by people without specific skill sets.

“The workers who are making the panels themselves, it is a mix of highskilled and low-skilled,” said Semenza, who now is director of commercialization for NextFlex, an industry-government-academia consortium that seeks to advance U.S. manufacturing of flexible electronics.

“But the idea is to set it up so that you don’t have to be a PhD to make the panels — that you can have a number of different workers with some modicum of training but who are not necessarily highly skilled specialists,” Semenza said.

Alan Brawn, meanwhile, said a good deal of the work at the Foxconn plant probably would involve the electronics equivalent of an automobile assembly line.

The factory certainly will require many knowledge workers, he said.

“But here’s the other thing that’s often missed in the discussion,” he said. “I’m kind of surprised that it’s not often brought up, to be honest with you — and that is that there are a great number of jobs where it’s repetitive in nature.”

Brawn, principal with Californiabased Brawn Consulting, is wellregarded in the world of digital signage, which includes displays that use LCD panels such as those Foxconn will produce.

Brawn said it’s likely that many of the production processes used by Foxconn will not require workers with extensive education.

“Think about it this way,” he said. “You have to receive raw materials. After you receive them you’ve got to take the raw materials and you’ve got to put them into machines. The machines are going to take maintenance.

“Once a machine kicks out the panel, there has to be somebody there who’s going to look at quality control and test the output. “

And then they’re going to have to put them on pallets and then they’re going to have to ship them.

“Now that’s way too simplistic, but that’s what it is.”

In May 2017, when Foxconn still was vetting sites and hadn’t even settled on Wisconsin, company consultant Ernst & Young presented expected employment figures in a memo to the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. At the time, according to the memo, Foxconn estimated it would hire 15,395 people — more than the 13,000 now planned.

Of the 15,395 employees, some 64 percent were expected to be high school graduates or above who would be machine operators and workers who handled assembly, product testing and packing, the memo said.

Another 21 percent of employees were expected to be technicians with vocational school backgrounds or above.

The rest, about 14 percent, were described as engineers with bachelor’s degrees or above.

In an interview in late March, Louis Woo, special assistant to Foxconn Chairman and CEO Terry Gou, said the company’s plans regarding the educational background of its Wisconsin workforce had shifted “quite dramatically” since the Ernst & Young memo.

“If you ask me now today, I would imagine probably just flip it — that’s one-third would be more like assembly line workers, but two-thirds would be the knowledge workers,” Woo said.

A WEDC staff report prepared last October roughly supports that description.

According to the report, about 27 percent of the 13,000 employees are expected to be engineers and 28 percent technicians, with just under 7 percent in business-support roles such as finance, human resources and information technology.

The remaining 4,995 employees — 38 percent — would be hourly “operators,” the report said.

Living wages

Woo’s description, meanwhile, suggests that more than 4,000 of the Foxconn employees would be assemblyline type workers.

But in either case, it figures to be a large number of jobs for people with limited skills and education — and at relatively good wages.

According to the WEDC staff report, the 4,995 “operator” jobs will pay an average of $23.02 an hour — about $47,900 a year.

That’s well above the pay typically received by the 250,000 adults 25 and older in Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha counties with no more than a high school diploma. Median earnings for those people range from $27,290 in Milwaukee County to $32,036 in Racine County, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The “significantly large pool” of jobs at lower skill levels Foxconn will provide is an advantage for southeastern Wisconsin, said Tim Sheehy, president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce.

“We’ve gone to so many places where rungs on the bottom of the ladder have disappeared, they’re snapped, or their broken, so it’s very hard to get a toehold in an economy that’s constantly upskilling the jobs,” Sheehy said.

Foxconn, he said, represents an opportunity to re-instill a bit of the manufacturing job base that once defined the region — but with a twist. The production jobs at Foxconn are a floor to build upon, not a floor to rest on, Sheehy said.

“The folks that are going to get hired are going to come into work in the most automated, sophisticated manufacturing facility that’ll be here, and they’re going to have to become lifelong learners,” he said.

And that’s a change from Wisconsin’s blue-collar heyday.

“If you take this job at Foxconn, it’s going to evolve in less than your lifetime,” Sheehy said.

“And it’s not like going to work at A.O. Smith making car frames and being the second or third generation to do it.”