Scott Walker’s job creation chief defends outsourcing of WI jobs

Last week Reed Hall, the CEO of Gov. Scott Walker’s

The Walker campaign launched a new ad Wednesday attacking Burke’s record on outsourcing during her time as a Trek Bicycle executive.

In a release about the ad, Friends of Scott Walker Spokesperson Tom Evenson writes: “How can the voters trust someone like Mary Burke to help them create jobs when her own company shipped Wisconsin jobs overseas?”

But a few short hours later, Gov. Walker’s top economic official defended the practice of outsourcing.

“We are in a global marketplace and some companies, to be successful financially, need to outsource,” said Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation CEO Reed Hall.

Hall was responding to questions about a 27 News story from last week, which showed at least two companies that received tax credits from WEDC later outsourced Wisconsin jobs to foreign countries.

The fact that Reed Hall feels it’s appropriate to defend companies that outsourced jobs from Wisconsin to foreign countries after those companies received Wisconsin taxpayer dollars to create jobs in our state is stunning, but it seems to me to be demonstrative of just how much of a farce Gov. Scott Walker’s “Open for Business” mantra really is.

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4 thoughts on “Scott Walker’s job creation chief defends outsourcing of WI jobs

  1. One unofficial source I’ve read claimed that outsourcing to China was a global marketing stratagem by Trek to be competitive in serving the large number of Chinese who use bicycles as their main means of transportation.

    By the way, for me WEDC stands for “Walker’s Economic Disaster Con-job.”

  2. Doubtless the only way to sell bikes in China was to make them there – other WI manufacturers dealt with the same thing. The WEDC ineptness is the real story. No reason you can’t structure tax subsidies to grow jobs here. If Burke wins, I hope she just junks the WEDC and starts fresh.

  3. Don’t they manufacture Harley-Davidson cycles in China? I seem to remember pictures of Walker riding a Harley during his “mission” to China. Also, doesn’t WEDC have an office in China? How much does that cost us? Has it paid off?

  4. And as only a few non-MSM reporters have pointed out, there is quite a difference between a privately held company spending THEIR OWN MONEY to import parts made off-shore and privately held corporations having the benefit of state TAX PAYER money (I believe money in the form of tax breaks)to off-shore work that should rightly be going to pay WI residents and provide jobs in the state.

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