Dell PC's may soon be a moot point. Dell announced today they are closing their Winston-Salem PC manufacturing facility by the end of the year. 900+ employees will be laid off.
Dell opened the plant about 5 years ago after being granted hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives from the State of North Carolina (a decision that was extremely controversial) as well as somewhere in the neighborhood of 37 million in incentives, basically extorted, from Forsythe County and the City of Winston-Salem to locate there. Dell said from the beginning they were going to build the manufacturing facility in the Triad area (a rough geographic area encompassing 3 counties and the cities of Greensboro, High Point, and Winston-Salem, but were quite coy about just where in the Triad. The then Governor (the now under investigation for a bunch of stuff Mike Easley. though nothing about the Dell deal has come under investigation) called the legislature back for a special 2 day session to pressure them to grant the historically high incentives. Once those were granted, Dell toyed with the county and city governments of the Triad to extort as much as possible to decide where to land.
Seems the desktop business has given way to laptops and those very small laptops (I forget what they are called) that are mostly geared toward internet access rather than applications.) All the laptops are produced overseas, at considerable better profit margins. This because of a combination of labor costs and shipping costs. Light laptops cost a lot less to ship overseas than does the components of a desktop. While the recession has probably had some effect, this is mostly DELL missing changes in market trends from desktops to laptops.
These jobs were not high wage jobs by USA standards. The higher paying positions at this Dell plant would have paid something like $12.00 per hour
Dell promises to pay back the incentives received from the County and City governments. It remains to be seen if they will pay back any of the State tax dollars. The incentives were spread out over 15 years, so not all of the huge incentives offered have been paid out.
Forsythe Co. commissioners are trying to put a positive spin on their misjudgement by talking about what a nice manufacturing facility was built and saying that another manufacturer is certain to want to move in after Dell leaves. The Triad area, where Winston-Salem is located, has lost 10,000 manufacturing jobs over the last 20 years. The region had lots of textile and furniture manufacturers, and all those jobs have been lost as the manufacturers moved their production lines overseas, mostly to southeast Asia, and some of the textiles south of the border to Mexico and Central America.
The current unemployment rate in Forsythe Co. is just over 11%. It is about to go up.