Does the car-workers’ strike threaten America’s industrial boom?
STANTON, TENNESSEE, looks like a place from a bygone age. The town hall quaintly resembles a 1960s grocery store. Next door is a cannery, where townsfolk use communal stoves to make soups and peach preserve for winter. For much of its history, Stanton’s main source of income has been cotton farming, which was so depressed, many smallholders upped sticks and left.
Yet amid the cotton fields something remarkable is taking shape. Ford, one of America’s three big carmakers, is setting up the biggest industrial complex in its history, including an electric-vehicle (EV) plant, a battery factory and a base for its suppliers, with an investment of $5.6bn. A year after it broke ground thousands of acres have been covered with concrete and steel. Construction workers in high-vis jackets stomp into Suga’s Diner, the only food joint in the 400-person town, for lunches of fried chicken and catfish. When Ford announced the project in 2021, the diner had a sign lamenting a shortage of chicken. Now a help-wanted sign points to a shortage of staff. “We are rushed off our feet,” says Lesa “Suga” Tard, the owner.
It is a similar story in De Soto, Kansas. Its industrial activity was abruptly cut short decades ago when an army munitions factory was mothballed. In April construction began on a $4bn Panasonic battery factory, the largest investment in the state’s history. Driving to the 9,000-acre site in his pickup truck, Rick Walker, the mayor, points out diggers turning a country road into a four-lane highway, counts the cranes—nine of them—helping erect the factory’s second storey, and talks optimistically about a giant solar farm due to be built nearby.
2023-09-24 10:09:51
Post from www.economist.com
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