Laws Needed to Regulate Plant Closings
This post was written by a friend who prefers to remain anonymous. It is a response to an article that appeared in the Wausau Daily Herald, which may be found at the following address.
A year from now, the workers who created the value of Wausau Paper will still be collecting unemployment (if they are lucky) and trying to hang onto their homes if not their savings. Gradually many of their neighbors will lump them in with the "takers" who populate their imaginations and upon whom they place blame for the sinking value of their homes, the stagnation of their incomes, their unacceptably high taxes and their high cost of health care. It does not seem to occur to anyone to ask what responsibility the stockholders have in knocking down an entire community --- again. Why is it acceptable for investors to walk away after stripping out everything of value? To add insult to injury, the communities involved will be left with abandoned plants we politely refer to as "brownfields." They got the color right when they made up that Orwellian term.
Last week it was a Los Angeles hedge fund shutting down Golden Guernsey Dairy; this week it's to be Wausau Paper; not so long ago it was NewPage being ground up in acts of "creative destruction," and in between the list is too long to include here. Pretty soon that fabled 47% is going to look more like 77%.
At some point, individuals must learn to behave with the same resolve shown by ruthless hedge fund managers and the stockholders who employ them. Many of our grandparents figured this out about 100 years ago and acted accordingly.
The dirty little secret in many of these business assassinations is that the enterprises were in fact making a tidy profit; just not enough to satisfy the greedheads running the show. Maybe we need a law that employees be given first right of refusal to buy the assets (free of most liabilities because they have usually been artificially inflated) in any bankruptcy or shutdown, with the value being set by a neutral third party. Employee owned businesses have the potential to be more competitive in the marketplace because they are not frittering away their cash paying bonuses and bloated salaries to a few at the top. All pension assets should be returned to the employees in cash or in kind before any other creditor is paid in a liquidation. In many cases, this would provide sufficient capital investment to purchase the plant and equipment. The state should take over the land, leasing it for a minimal amount for a period of time until the new owners can buy it, while the new owners continue to pay for public services in the form of a PILOT.
Many will say that such laws would cause businesses to leave Wisconsin for greener pastures. Really? What does that say about the expectations of these businesses? Why are we spending our tax dollars to prop up or attract people without morals, ethics, or scruples to our state? Unlike vultures, which generally feed only on carrion, these operators are predators who take down the living. We don't need them to rebuild prosperity in Wisconsin.
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