From "In These Times"
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Mississippi Lavishes $1.3 Billion in Subsidies on Nissan as Workers Get the Shaft
Thirteen years after Japan-based automaker Nissan chose the small, impoverished community of Canton, Miss., as the site of a new auto-assembly plant, a just-released study shows that the company is failing to deliver on its promise of high-wage job creation in Mississippi-while at the same time draining the state of revenue used to pay for a massive package of subsidies.
According to a study released on Friday by the Washington, D.C.-based research group Good Jobs First, the citizens of Mississippi-which ranks dead last among U.S. states in median household income-are bestowing an estimated $1.33 billion in subsidies on Nissan over a 30-year period for the privilege of hosting the factory.
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According to the incentive package to which Mississippi and Nissan agreed in 2000 and modified as Nissan added more jobs, Nissan jobs were to start at a minimum of 125 percent of the state or county average-whichever was lower-before rising to 150 percent of the average in the surrounding county.
But "[s]tate auditor reports did not address the issue of wage rates," the Good Job First report notes critically. With no monitoring, Nissan's wages initially started at $13.25 an hour for the first two years of employment as preliminary work at the plant began in 2001, only slightly above the state average of $12.64 or the Madison county average of $12.88.
Pay for full-time workers has stagnated at around $22 an hour over the past five years, although Nissan is promising an increase later this year. However, the overall wage average is pulled down by the large contingent of part-timers making $9.25 to $12 an hour. These workers, hired from temporary agencies rather than Nissan itself, now comprise 35 percent to 40 percent of the Canton workforce, according to worker estimates.
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