Quote:
Originally Posted by yantosh22
You seemed to have completely missed that they also laid off this number of people in the Raleigh area when they bought another related company and promptly got rid of most of the employees there. Furthermore, they have announced another 15% general layoff.
I already explained why above.
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It is a little disingenuous to equate the number of jobs cut by Merck’s purchase of Inspire to the number of jobs added by Merck in the 7 years since their incentive deal was announced, just as it is to say that jobs added here are simply cut from somewhere else.
Inspire was already laying off employees before they were bought out due to set backs in products they were developing – “Inspire slashes 65 jobs, drops failed CF drug in restructuring” -
Inspire slashes 65 jobs, drops failed CF drug in restructuring - FierceBiotech. This link also shows they were in dire straights for at least the previous 2 years, so it may have been these jobs were not long for the Raleigh area anyway.
As for Merck, an opportunity came up, which is unrelated to their existing operations in NC, and they took it. Even if Merck were keeping tally of jobs gained by the purchase versus those needed to be cut in NC to even it out, they are behind - “Inspire has 175 employees, including about 60 in Raleigh, while Merck's North Carolina workforce amounts to about 1,000, housed at two separate sites.” -
Merck plans to shutter Inspire HQ, axe staff as buyout closes - FierceBiotech ).
The probable ~60 Inspire job cuts in Raleigh hardly equals the ~400 currently working at the new plant, as you stated.
The 15% general layoff is mainly a result of their merger with Schering-Plough. Should they be forced to keep redundant operations? Even at that, I didn’t see any mention of the facilities in NC.
Merck Plans Layoff of 15% of Work Force - NYTimes.com .
You wanted “some proof, that these taxpayer funded handouts do anything beyond lining the CEO and executive staff's pockets with money.” It would appear that Merck has a larger work force presence in NC now than they did 7 years ago when they received a tax incentive to build the plant in Raleigh, so is this not the case for the state of NC? Isn’t this the purpose of these incentives? Isn’t 40% of the tax income generated by these 400 jobs and land use better than 0%? Should a company only operate in the state where their HQ is? Should they evenly distribute their jobs throughout the 50 states? Welcome to the flavor of capitalism that operates in the US.