The small town of Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin has found itself torn apart by a deal to build a Foxconn manufacturing plant — and now it looks like the company might not even deliver the jobs that it promised.
The Wall Street Journal reports that contractors working for Foxconn have “bulldozed about 75 homes in Mount Pleasant and cleared hundreds of farmland acres” in preparation for the construction of the factory in the town.
However, the town still hasn’t even seen Foxconn’s building plans for the factory and contractors have not been regularly visiting the site of the proposed plant in recent weeks. This lack of progress has left residents in the town angry and anxious — particularly those people who have had their land seized to build the plant.
“At some point we’re talking about things that are just imaginary,” Nick Demske, a commissioner in Racine County, tells the Journal of the proposed Foxconn plant. “We’re pretending.”
The Foxconn deal was backed by President Donald Trump in 2017 and was hyped as a key part of his plan to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Since then, however, the project has been beset by numerous setbacks, and Foxconn has hinted in recent months that it will primarily be hiring white-collar works at its Wisconsin facility instead of blue-collar workers to manufacture LCD screens.