Mailgirl story set in lookalike of Foxconn mega con job in Wisconsin

[LupusDei]

Okay, I stole this from politics board, so please be warned and careful, but...

If you read the whole thing in the link (it's huge, but good read and funny in grotesque way) in a mindset of world building for a mailgirl story, it's priceless.

Foxconn plant "she" was so thrilled about turned out to be the exact absolute disaster I precited it would be.

Sure, it would need some light changes, like the project as a whole at least a little bit more successful, but at least as byzantine, and need names changed... with is unfortunate because Mount Pleasant for a totally torturous nonfunctional manufacturing park is on a level you simply can't make up.

Just a few qoutes...

“Imagine being in a job where you don’t really know if it’s real or not. Or you know it’s not real, but you don’t know it’s not real. It’s a constant thing you’re doing in your head day after day,” said one employee, who returned to the rented building Trump had spoken at, where workers had been assembling TVs, only to find the line shut down and the lights dimmed a couple of weeks after the photo op was over. “I think all of us were on the verge of a major breakdown.”

It was just the beginning. Foxconn would spend the next two years jumping from idea to idea — fish farms, exporting ice cream, storing boats — in an increasingly surreal search for some way to generate money from a doomed project. Frequent leadership changes, a reluctance to spend money, and a domineering corporate culture would create an atmosphere employees described as toxic.

Wisconsinites who attended the company’s enormous hiring events fared little better. Especially during the late 2018 hiring spree, these events could have what employees describe as a “speed-dating”-like atmosphere, with applicants offered jobs on the spot and given 24 hours to accept. The problem was that the Wisconsin project never had a conventional budget: everything from printing business cards to hiring people had to be sent back to Taiwan for approval, a process that could last months and which often ended in a denial.

...

According to the company’s subsidy application, it employed 580 people at the end of 2019. Sixty percent were hired in the final two months.

The layoffs began with the new year.

Foxconn was setting up a small circuit board manufacturing line, used a worker’s immigration status as leverage in demanding overtime work, an event also corroborated by screenshots of employee correspondence. “He was yelling, ‘you’re an H1B, I’m an EB2, if you don’t work hard enough, if you don’t work overtime, I can get you back to Mainland China anytime,’” said an employee familiar with the incident.

This steadfast rejection of reality is where the Foxconn debacle stands apart from other development projects that fall short of their hype. The company’s desperate quest to maintain appearances caused it to fail repeatedly and in ways more destructive than mere ordinary failure would have been: local businesses were strung along, civil servants spent years figuring out what the company is doing, residents were removed from land the company didn’t need, and again and again recruits were lured in by the vision of a grand manufacturing renaissance in Wisconsin.

That vision got Gou regular access to the White House during a trade war and gave Trump a groundbreaking and almost a ribbon-cutting, too. But maintaining the mirage required a culture of secrecy.