Kia opens doors in west Georgia training center

[DainBramaged]

WEST POINT --Bulldozers are everywhere in this west Georgia community, hauling away huge piles of the region's rich red clay.

Apartment buildings, restaurants and hotels are sprouting up in what had been lazy hay fields, thanks in large part to the arrival of Kia Motors Corp. The South Korean company opened a sleek new training facility here Tuesday and will begin churning out economy cars when the main assembly plant opens in 2009.

The nation may be teetering on the brink of recession. But this rural region along the Alabama border - struggling since area textile mills shut down in the 1970s - is experiencing an economic boom.

"We have developers just coming out of the woodwork," Jane Fryer, president of the LaGrange-Troup County Chamber of Commerce. "The impact for this region is enormous."

Gov. Sonny Perdue personally courted Kia for years before the company agreed in 2006 to make Georgia home to its first United States plant. As he cut a ceremonial ribbon to mark the opening of the training facility Tuesday, Perdue called the planned $1.2 billion Kia auto assembly plant "the single largest economic development project in state history."

But landing Kia didn't come cheap. State and local officials promised Kia hundreds of millions of dollars in tax cuts and incentives to lure the company to Georgia.

Economists predict the investment will be worth it. Five Kia suppliers have also agreed to relocate to the area, bringing with them another 2,500 jobs. The economic impact to Georgia is projected at about $4 billion per year, according to a Georgia Tech study commissioned by the Georgia Department of Economic Development.

And the hiring comes at a good time. The state's unemployment rate just ticked up to 5.3 percent, slightly above the national average. In a sign of the times,

43,000 people applied for the 2,500 jobs at the Kia plant.

http://www.macon.com/102/story/304487.html

Too bad we can't build a manufacturing plant in Korea to make American automobiles, and get hundreds of millions in tax concessions. Oh, and KIA doesn't plan to let the UAW in either.

I wonder if Governor Sonny Boy has plans to work for KIA after politics???? Inquiring minds want to know.

[Rick Myers]

1. Kias made in Georgia?

How soon till Kia is running in NASCAR???

(kidding!)

(really...)

[nosmokes]

2. Of course KIA doesn't plan on allowing the UAW in. Neither does the Gov!

You can bet there was a deal on that in some backroom someplace. They'll put the rednecks to work at the plant for $15 -$20 an hour w/ benefits and the folks at the suppliers plants will work for less and probably w/o bennies but still at far higher wages than they've ever seen before. and that's more money than most of them ever had any chance of earning in that area. They'll be damn grateful to get it and even if the UAW were try and organise they'd be beat before they started. Unions aren't trusted in the deep south. They carry a kind of yankee smell to them and folks in those parts ain't total sure but what the devil might not have some role to play in that whole union thing.It is kinda communist ain't it? And besides, the man in the big house up on the hill he's done tole us we oughtn't shoulda make no trouble for the Japs...

[madrchsod]

3. koreans...

otherwise you are dead on...

[DainBramaged]

5. The saddest part to the whole article, and the most ironic

are the 45000 people applying for the few jobs they have available. It will give them a shitty attitude towards the work force KNOWING they can just replace anyone for the smallest reason.

If that doesn't send a message to the world, I don't know what else would.


I had some experience with Samsung (Korean electronics) during the Nineties. When everyone (I worked for Sanyo at the time, and you wonder why I am so pro-Union now) else would be rewarding their employees for record sales and looking to expand their business, they would fire their entire staff and then rehire new employees for much less. This cycle would go on every two or three years. And they had people in HR who would go along with this in spite of the hypocrisy and crappy products they then sold. It go so that when headhunters came a knocking, my friends would just tell them no and stay where they were. To this day, none of the people I once knew work for them but still work for other Asian manufacturers.

[madrchsod]

4. i bet the plants in korea are unionized....

those guys and gals paid for their union with buckets of their blood just like our fathers/mothers and grandfathers/grandmothers did many years ago...