Texas Gets Windmills, Pennsylvania Gets Layoffs

I was clearly a little too quick to be happy about the resolution of the Texas windmill situation, figuring as I had that the US wind industry was growing about as quickly as it could and so the promise of a thousand new jobs adding to it in the near future was a decent outcome. Even if they were still buying the motors and turbine blades from China. Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, Spanish-owned windmill manufacturer, Gamesa, has had to lay off 141 employees at a turbine factory because of a drop off in orders.

Pennsylvania, as you may know, isn't doing so well economically. The governor laid off 319 state workers just before Thanksgiving, and expects more layoffs to come. The state's cities are economically strangled by a legislature that keeps a death grip on their taxing authority, gradually cutting off budgets for essential services that attract new businesses and are attractive to workers. Here in Philadelphia, where I live, the mayor was worried this year that trash pickup would have to be cut to every two weeks - does that sound like a city on its way up?

So why can't this wind farm in Texas use turbines from Pennsylvania?

Or Michigan, because, along with nine other states not including Pennsylvania, they're on the verge of a total fiscal meltdown. Or Virginia, where they're seeing a surge in day laborers drawn from the ranks of the recently employed and steeply increasing college costs to make up for statewide budget shortfalls. Really, you can look anywhere in the US and find people who'd be glad to be put to work.

It is unusual to get concessions out of large business enterprises that they aren't contractually obligated to hand over. They don't even usually have a sense of moral obligation (via) to meet the sorts of legally agreed terms that ordinary debtors and consumers usually feel too much guilt to back out of when they're disadvantageous. So in that, I still do hold that getting some promise of jobs out of the Texas windmill project is better than nothing.

However, it wouldn't hold a candle to keeping these jobs in Pennsylvania, in an industry that's poised to cut production costs and expand market share. One thing neither the states, nor the country, needs right now is more long-term unemployed workers draining their family savings and sometimes permanently losing their former standard of living.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future