Dell Closes Ireland Plant; 2nd Largest Employer

Wide Angle writes in with a PBS report on tough economic news from Ireland: Dell announced that it will relocate its manufacturing plant in Limerick, Ireland to Lodz, Poland. "Dell's announcement... is a severe blow to the Irish economy, which has been hit hard and fast by the global economic crisis. Dell is Ireland's second-largest corporate employer and the country's largest exporter. Nineteen hundred shift workers will lose their jobs. ...Dell's closing is not a result of the economic downturn, but of a pattern all too familiar in the United States — corporations' perennial search for cheaper labor. Since 2000 several companies, such as Procter & Gamble, Intel, Gateway, and NEC Electronics, have moved manufacturing jobs from Ireland to China, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. When Poland joined the European Union in 2004, it became an attractive place for companies to set up manufacturing plants. ... However, Ireland has managed to maintain and attract... 'knowledge-intensive jobs.' Google's European headquarters are based in Dublin, and Facebook announced late last year that they would locate their international headquarters there. But the overall economic picture for Ireland is bleak."

Comments

willingness to relocate

[bugs2squash]

Perhaps Eire should have factored in that companies agile and willing enough to relocate once to Ireland would likely be sufficiently agile and willing to move to follow the sun again.

Re:willingness to relocate

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone in Eire with half a brain knew this was coming anyway...
Those relatively low tech manufacturing jobs were only ever going to be useful as a means of bootstrapping ourselves into a properly high tech economy.
Not sure the government knew this, but everyone smart working in tech did.

Re:willingness to relocate

[spun]

This is what happens when capital and goods can freely cross borders but people can't. Capital will simply chase poverty in a never ending circle around the globe. When one poor, desperate country starts to get wealthy, corporations will simply move to the next one, and let the first slip back into poverty.

That's fine

[Chrisq]

That's fine as long as you have a job to pay for it. If all the manufacturing and knowledge based jobs end up in the cheaper locations then can the Western Economies keep going. I know that many economists say that it is the beginning of the service economy, and we can all be rich in the west by buying and providing services for each other but I am rather skeptical. If a whole country consists of PR teams, lawyers, restaurant owners and so on can they really "generate" enough money to be able to buy their "real" things from cheap overseas sources?

Re:That's fine

[bugs2squash]

I guess one of the criticisms leveled at geeks is that they think they know everything...

So in that spirit, here's my "expert" analysis of world economic matters !

Isn't manufacturing computers just a service ? If you were Martha Stuart, you'd just get up early and grind-up the sand from the beach yourself to make your own CPU.

To my mind there's scant economic difference between a janatorial service and a manufacturing "service".

Furthermore; a janitor's job has to remain local and the janitor must be retained to keep the place sparkly, as opposed to a one-time manufacturing process for a durable item.

Janitors are an extremely high-value service, that's why so many of us have a personal computer built for us but don't have our houses cleaned for us.

Good for Poland

[exhilaration]

Poland has very high unemployment rate, one of the highest in Europe, and is also one of the poorest countries in Europe.

I realize that this sucks for Ireland but Poland is in far worse shape and needs the jobs just as badly if not more.

Re:I don't care who slaps together my inspiron

[MightyMartian]

Having spent over an hour and a half on the phone with Dell Canada on Monday just to get a quote (and a quote for twenty computers I might add), I'd say there is such a thing as "too cheap".