No-tell Dell minces words in Winston
No offense to our good neighbors to the west.
But who’s charge in Winston-Salem anyway: the City Council or Dell?
If that seems a harsh assessment, you should have seen council members’ abject eagerness to sing the computer maker’s praises at Monday’s long-awaited Finance Committee meeting in Winston.
Dell executives were supposed to be there to explain to the council and the public why they had been so unwilling to release employment figures that were critical to meeting state and city incentives guidelines.
I’m not sure they needed to come.
Council members were more than eager to speak for them.
Dell’s vice president for operations in North America, Frank Miller, was pleasant enough. But he didn’t even say, in plain English, how many employees the struggling computer maker had laid off at the Forsyth County plant.
Dell employed 1,400 workers in January, he said. Now it employs 1,140.
You do the math.
Other than that, neither Miller nor the rest of the Dell contingent, which took almost three rows of chairs in a small, second-floor meeting room at City Hall, said much else.
They made no commitments to keeping the Forsyth plant open long term.
They could convert the plant from desktop production to laptops, where the higher demand is now. But they have no plans at this point to do that.
Most importantly, they made no commitments to be any more open to the public than they have been, despite the $280 million incentives they negotiated with Winston-Salem, Forsyth County and the state in hardball discussions that demanded everything from free dry cleaning to free gas to free golf.
Also, a Dell official made a fairly unconvincing argument that Dell would not release employment figures for individual plants because it created a competitive disadvantage ... something having to do with “triangulation,” he explained.
Finally, Dell has established a rehire program, company officials said. In the event that business improves, workers would be called back, they said.
A current Dell worker and a former one at the session seemed skeptical.
To be fair, it is hard for a city council to talk tough when good jobs are so hard to come by.
But Winston-Salem and Forsyth County have paid Dell a combined $22.2 million in incentives.
A little fortitude would have been helpful. And appropriate.
What’s more, Dell had stonewalled city leaders, the media and the public on the size of its workforce after three rounds of layoffs over the past seven months. And it had done so with no small degree of arrogance.
Two hundred eighty million bucks ought to be worth an ounce or two of outrage by somebody around here.
“Perhaps the communication could be more frequent to your community partners,” Finance Committee Chairwoman Wanda Merschel said, politely.
That’s tellin’ ’em.
Make no mistake, Dell is a major catch for the state and the Triad.
But that doesn’t mean it is above accountability to taxpayers, who have feathered the company’s nest with lavish tax breaks.
Computer sales may be down, but Dell’s smugness is not.
Comments (1)
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Perhaps this blog post and your Wednesday editorial will change some minds among our elected officials in the long run. But for the time being, the fact is that Dell is living up to its contract with Winston-Salem and that's all it has to do. Put differently, however lavish Dell's tax breaks were, the company does not have to throw open its books. It is in fact above the taxpayer accountability that you desire.
But fair enough: you wish it were different. And it could be, if cities and counties were to push for inclusion of such disclosures in their incentive contracts.
However, that might not work. It's hardly unusual for companies to withhold proprietary information, and this is reflected even in the practices of government statistical bureaus. If there are three or fewer "establishments" (a plant is an establishment for these purposes) in a given industry in a given county, statistical bureaus like the Employment Security Commission won't publish employment levels for that industry and county. This can be frustrating for researchers like me, but we've learned to deal with our frustrations. So while this concern for privacy is unconvincing to you, it's standard practice that even governments recognize.
Posted on May 13, 2009 10:08 PM