The economic reactionism of Eileen McNamara
Boston Globe’s metro-columnist Eileen McNamara is liked by many for her supposedly passionate “little man on the street” approach to news. I dislike her columns because they rarely make much sense, and her work today is a good example.
In “Jobs don’t negate losses” Ms. McNamara blasts Massachusetts politicians for throwing subsidized land, tax-breaks and infrastructure money at pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. The deal might bring as many as 500 jobs to Devens, with an average salary of $60,000.
Such economic development deals are to some extent a deal with the Devil, figuratively speaking. There’s usually nothing government can do if the benefiting company reneges on its promises, especially if the headcount comes up short. Are you going to slam a company for bringing 300 well-paying jobs instead of the projected 500? Probably not. While people with a preference for market economy should be wary of economic development deals, they should also be pragmatic about them. If Massachusetts wants to sell itself as a player in the pharma/bio-tech/life-sciences industries, it had better make sure it has some companies that can back up that claim to fame.
What’s bothering Ms. McNamara is that the State is not putting up a similar effort to save a doomed Gillette packaging plant in the same industrial park. You’d think she’d be able to figure it out on her own:
The Gillette workers, most of them Hispanic immigrants working without benefits, make an average of $8 an hour
That’s less than the new minimum-wage law that’s been passed by the state Senate. Why the government would want to invest in minimum-wage jobs is a mystery to me, but I suppose Ms. McNamara, not normally known as somebody who cares much for jobs at the lower end of the wage spectrum (in fact, I recall her dismissing jobs creation during the Cellucci era as being mostly low-wage jobs at CVS*), has some reason to believe such a policy would be helpful to Massachusetts economy and tax payers.
After lamenting the lack of effort to keep the soon-to-be minimum wage jobs at Gillette, McNamara lashes out at… previously failed efforts to keep jobs in the state:
Corporate tax breaks are an old, failed idea in Massachusetts. Fidelity reaped huge tax benefits in the 1990s from the state’s effort to retain jobs in the mutual funds industry. Fidelity announced last January that it is moving 1,500 of its 12,800 jobs out of state by 2008. Those jobs are going to Rhode Island, which — surprise! — offered them tax incentives to relocate.
But she gets an A for passion.
(For a more successful use of infrastructure money to retain a high-profile employer, think New England Patriots and, as it happens, Gillette Stadium. I dare say the state got its money’s worth in that deal.)
In spite of having detailed the vast difference in worker compensation between Gillette’s packaging plant and Bristol-Myers Squib’s fermentation plant, Ms. McNamara paints them as being pretty much tit-for-tat:
The promise of a job for someone to bottle rheumatoid arthritis medication does not negate the loss of a job for someone who has spent years packing electric razors. This is not a sane approach to economic development; it’s corporate blackmail.
Perhaps it’s a woman thing. The girls at Boston Herald’s editorial page also believe that minimum-wage jobs are the engine of our state’s economy (I kid you not).
This isn’t blackmail, this is a matter of Bristol-Myers Squib being in a position where it can defer some of its investment risk to the state that will benefit the most from it. It is also a reminder that, in spite of what pro-immigrationists claim, America needs new jobs more than it needs new workers.
*Update: I think I’m talking about a 1998 column in which she took Paul Cellucci to task for job growth during the Weld era.
