Prometheus 6   

Who ya gonna call?

The last sentence of the article sums up the problem neatly. Multinational corporations, with their ability to shift from one national economy to another, become independent of all of them. They become a force that nations must respond to rather than the citizen of any nation. They outgrow even the nation of their birth, the head of empire, the USofA.

SYRACUSE, Oct. 6 -- The name of a cooling company has been inseparable from this frost-belt city since the Depression, when city leaders scraped together $250,000 and tax incentives to lure the inventor of the air-conditioner, Willis H. Carrier, and his business from Newark. The deal worked, and the Carrier Corporation became a mainstay of a community whose best-known landmark is the Carrier Dome, the home arena for the Syracuse University Orangemen.

On Monday, the company confirmed rumors that those ties would loosen, announcing that it would close the two manufacturing plants at its East Syracuse site, laying off 1,200 workers and moving those operations to Asia and the South. The company will keep 1,600 jobs here, mainly in research and development, but the decision means that Carrier will no longer make any products in Syracuse, where manufacturing has long been a key part of its identity.

The company's decision was forced by simple business realities, said a company spokesman, Jonathan Shaw. The East Syracuse plants produced two types of products: compressor parts and refrigeration units for containers used in shipping.

More than 80 percent of the container manufacturers who buy Carrier's refrigeration units are in Asia, Mr. Shaw said in a telephone interview. "It doesn't make any sense to ship a product 6,000 miles when you have a plant in the same hemisphere," he said. So Carrier plans to make the refrigeration units at a plant in Singapore.

As for the compressor parts, sales have fallen by half over the last five years as technology has changed, so it made sense to consolidate manufacturing at plants in China and Stone Mountain, Ga.

The company is negotiating severance packages for the workers who will be laid off, Mr. Shaw said, and will offer tuition reimbursement for any employee who wants to go back to school.[P6: I would like to note the tuition thing is a pretty reasonable gesture]

The prospects for the workers are grim, however, local business and union leaders said. Manufacturing jobs are prized because they are unionized and pay well. An average factory worker at Carrier could make $19 an hour. Those who have been laid off are unlikely to find work in another factory, the local leaders said, and the key growth areas in the upstate economy now are in service jobs, in areas like education and health care.

"It's not as if you can go from a job on a production line into working in health care," said Richard Dietz, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in Buffalo.

…Carrier was one of those rare employers whose business and beneficence were woven into the fabric of the community. It was not unusual for families to have three generations of men working in the factory at once.

Carrier was bought in 1979 by the United Technologies Corporation, a conglomerate that includes Pratt & Whitney jet engines, Otis elevators and Chubb security systems. Many workers traced the end of the family atmosphere to that year, when Carrier's world headquarters moved from Syracuse to Farmington, Conn.

…Representative Walsh met with United Technologies' chief executive, George David, over lunch to try to change his mind. Mr. Walsh said city, state and federal officials proposed an array of tax incentives and cost-saving measures, but Mr. David came prepared with flip charts and a presentation on the company's growing cost of business and declining market share. He explained that the company could make units three times cheaper in Asia, Mr. Walsh said.

At best, the incentives might be able to narrow the margin to two-and-a-half times, but not much more, Mr. Walsh said. So "I tried to appeal to his sense of citizenship, community."

But Mr. David was apparently not swayed. Gov. George E. Pataki also met with Mr. David last week in a final attempt to persuade the company to stay.

"I just got a clear impression that he wasn't interested in that," Mr. Walsh said. "They're making strategic global decisions that are beyond our ability to impact."