When we abandoned the policy of America. First, we started rebuilding other countries instead of our own. The skyscrapers went up in Beijing and many other cities around the world, while the factories and neighborhoods crumbled right here in Detroit. In August, Donald Trump, then still accountidate, laid out his economic agenda in a major speech. In it, he pledged to generate more manufacturing jobs for Americans, and he couldn't have chosen a more appropriate location. Detroit, the poster child for post industrial decline. It did redounded sense of wanting to bring back Detroit. In the audience was a twenty six year old Detroit native, A. K. Bennett. We've heard it, you know, a few times, you know, from multiple politicians. UM. And there still hasn't been that true push to really bring things back, um in terms of manufacturing. But as president, Donald Trump has made a US manufacturing revival one of his biggest priorities in terms of spurring new manufacturing and industry. Um. There has not been a lot of outside help, not a lot of outside help yet, but there is a chance that could be about to change. Just one month after Trump's November elections, came the first promise to return significant jobs to US shores. We're gonna get things coming. We're gonna get Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country instead of in other countries. It's not Apple, but a company that works very closely with it. Fox Con is a Taiwanese company which makes the iPhone for Apple and the Xbox for Microsoft. It has promised to invest seven billion dollars in the US and generate as many as fifty new jobs in the process. Hi. I'm Brad Stone, and I'm Alex Wet and this week I'm Decrypted. We'll take a very close look at Fox Comp's plan and whether it really will create those good American factory jobs that President Trump is calling for. This is our third episode in a series looking at the impact that automation could have on our jobs. If you have a story to share, send it to Decrypted at bloomberg dot net. Advances an industrial automation are making it cheaper than ever to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, But by its very nature, that's because it would require fewer workers on the factory floor. We'll see whether those jobs could still give a boost to communities in the heartland and we'll find out what's in it for fox Con stay with us. So, Alex, were you surpris eyes by fox cons announcement that it was going to build a factory in the US. Yeah. I've been looking really closely at like the costs of making iPhones and any other electronic device, and it's the labor costs which make a huge difference between China and the US, and that's why they do this stuff in in in the cities around China. There's so much theater right now around companies saying they're going to bring jobs back to the U S. How real is this and when when do we think we'll see a fox complant in the United States? It clearly takes a while to build these things up, but it could be, you know, next year that we see something that The question is when they bring jobs back quite how many jobs will come and what kind of a boost does this give to potentially rest belt cities. A. K. Bennett comes from a family of auto workers on both sides of both my mother and father's side. I would say about were employed in the by the Big Three. The so called Big three means they work for General motors, Ford and Chrysler, you know, through the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. But grandparents, uh, two of my four grandparents were multiple and uncles, cousins. The post war Haiti I motor city, it was kind of like a golden age for American manufacturing. There are still some cousins and to the day that are working for the auto industry, whether it be for a supplier or one of the Big Three. But of course it's not just Detroit. The whole Rust Belt was booming with industrial activity for much of the twentieth century. Ohio typically ranked second only to Indiana in the US in steel production. Wisconsin meanwhile, fed that metallurgy industry with foundry and metal working equipment, which were a staple of its economy. Donald Trump is quick to evoke those times when he talks about manufacturing what you have in mind, or the jobs from the nineteen seventies of people kind of standing on an assembly line, being able to go from high school into uh good job that enables you to buy a house, in a car and have a pretty good life. That's Caroline Freud from the Pizson Institute, a DC based economics think tank, and those jobs frankly don't exist anymore. There's a few issues of play here. One big problem has been the cost of full time employment. American workers are more expensive than workers in China or other parts of the world. A factory worker here can cost close to forty when you take into account health, insurance and other costs. He accounts bought in China cost just one tenth of that. But cheaper still are robots, which offer the tantalizing prospect of a US manufacturing resurgence. The snag is that with robots doing a lot of the work, they probably won't bring back the millions of jobs that Trump is looking for. The number of Americans and manufacturing jobs has fallen from a ninety nine peak of almost twenty million to about twelve point four million today, but industrial output in that time has gone up because factories are increasingly automated. That also helps explain why labor costs in the US are higher. Rather than assembling components manually, these workers operate complex machinery, doing work that would otherwise be done by several people. If you look at manufacturing, there's a big increase in managerial work, or work that requires computer or engineering skills and a decline in the production worker because robots can do those kind of routine tasks more efficiently. Back in Detroit, Ak works as a project manager in the construction industry. Now, a K says he's not a Trump supporter, but he went to see Trump layout his economic plan, and Detroit was also one of the final three locations that fox Con is considering for a mega factory in the US. Detroit is up against Racine, Wisconsin, and Columbus, Ohio to win the plant, according to people familiar with the matter, which means A K is in a pretty good place of a huge industrial building project comes to his town. This would be a massive project. Uh that would you know? There's there'd be thousands of trades persons on site. But let's break this down. When fox Con talks about creating fifty jobs in the US, it doesn't mean the factory will have fifty workers. That number also includes the people who build the plant and then work in the extended supply chain feeding it with components. The plant would be huge in terms of construction jobs, design jobs, engineering jobs, and then um going forward for an additional logistics and other suppliers. Potentially, my understanding is from talking to sources that the factory could employ close to ten thousand people in the long term, and that fox could build other satellite plants elsewhere in the US and alex What will they be making there. The idea would be that this main plant would make large l c D display panels which would then be shipped to these other factories to make things like computer and TV screens, And these are the factories that Foxconn is thinking about building, So not the famous iPhone, right. It still requires a lot of manual labor to put an iPhone together, so the iPhone isn't the ideal project to build in a highly automated factory in the U S. L c D screens have been built by robots for years, so what specifically is holding back the iPhone from being produced or at least assembled in the US. So a lot of the components which go into an iPhone can be built by robots, but actually that final process of sticking all these bits together can require some really fiddly screws to piece it all together, and that's not something that's very easy for robots to do, right. Those fiddly screws are difficult for robots and tasks like printing silicon chips that's far better suited for automation, which is why there is still so much semiconductor manufacturing in the US right. Intel is building plans, particularly in Arizona, to processors. Well, there's a somewhat morbid joke that the fact of the future will just to have two employees, a human and a dog. That's Eric Brynjolfson. He's a professor the m I. T. Sloan School of Management and the co author of the influential book The Second Machine Age, Work, Progress and Prosperity In a time of brilliant technologies, the humans job will be to feed the dog, and the dog's job will be to keep the human from touching any of the equipment. Although I should say we're probably not at the dog and human stage yet. But one thing Eric did emphasize to me is that for all the rhetoric we hear from politicians about how manufacturing will bring back jobs for companies like Fox Com, this really isn't about jobs at all. You know, if you walk around a lot of American factories that virtually lights out with very few humans, and the few humans who are there, you know they're paid pretty good wages, but it's not the thousands or millions of jobs we used to have in that kind of work. It's really the to establish good relations with the Trump administration that it's driving fox Kin here and automation is what's making it possible. Will dig into that some more later in the show. Companies usually employ consultants who help them find potential sites for new factories. It always starts with sitting down with them and defining what exactly they need to be successful. I chatted with Darren Budau. He's based in Chicago and leads Deloitte site selection practice. We call those critical location factors. We really want to understand what makes them tick and what makes this new deployment of their's successful. It's a process of elimination. We will be reviewing potential sites, actual actual properties, whether they're existing buildings or land sites that have what the client needs. The consultants have a list of criteria, things like labor costs, transport links, proximity to key suppliers and customers. From there, there's always a due diligence process of conducting additional analysis and study on the labor market. On the the technical aspects of the site itself from a from a utilities and infrastructure perspective, we want to identify any possible risks before negotiations. With their shortlist of sites ready, the company then approaches the local government authorities to see what sweeten is they can offer. Those can come in three main forms. Tax incentives and rebates, infrastructure improvements like new bus and subway stations, and labor incentives, usually education programs to train staff. Incentive packages can sometimes stretch into the hundreds and millions of dollars. Fox Con is being advised by e Y, the consultant we probably know as Ernst and Young, which is helping it get the best possible deal. We said earlier in the show. Our sources tell us that e Y has whittled the shortlist down to Detroit, New Michigan, We're seeing in Wisconsin and Columbus in Ohio. But there's still one nagging question, Alex, what is in it for fox Com? Hi? Everyone? Every week, our team here at Bloomberg Technology spends so much work making sure that this show is great, and we have a special request to ask of you. If you like the show, um, please help us get the word out so more people can find us. Maybe you have a friend who likes technology a lot who's never listened to a podcast before, or if you listen on Apple podcasts, you can leave us a rating and a review. To do that, just search for Decrypted then hit write a review inside the reviews tab. Thanks so much for supporting our show. We spend ages puzzling out of this all. I will take your word for that. Seriously. I spoke to like tons of people over the course of several weeks trying to work out what exactly is the business appeal of Wisconsin or Michigan in particular. They don't check obvious boxes like having really good transport links which could allow equipment to be shipped to Asia for final assembly, or even proximity to customers. Well what about proximity to car makers? I mean, all these automobile manufacturers now need new technology, and the suppliers like Fox kind of help them put screens and digital technologies into their cars. Yeah. I did think about that, because autonomous cars will give drivers more time to serve the web and watch films because they don't have to pay as much attention to the road. But if that were the case, they wanted to be near those customers. The South would probably make more sense. There are more luxury car makers there who are going to be perhaps the first to have the autonomous cars, and the labor costs they are lower. Well, lots of declining industry in the Midwest. Is there something to the to the kind of labor base and the availability of possible workers in you know, former steel factories, former chemical factories that makes us appealing to fox Camp. Well, actually, the chemical factory idea we thought might be that you need chemicals to make l C D and so proximity to those guys would help. And of course Detroit has a legacy workforce from the automotive industry, but it's still a very different kind of skill set you need to run an electronics factory. From all my conversations, it increasingly seemed like there could be another motivation at play. If you look at the hun plan and there's a plant in the states that they're considering, Um, it didn't surprise me that so many of them happened to be swing states. That's Caroline the economist we heard from earlier. That's a good point. In Wisconsin. Trump won with a marchin of twenty three thou votes and had just eleven thousand more votes in Hillary Clinton in the state of Michigan. In Ohio, my home state, Trump had a more substantial victory, but it has long been considered a swing state. The sheer dollars are significant, I think for any state. David Welch is the Bloomberg Bureau chief in Detroit. He's been keeping his air close to the ground as FOTS gone whittles down its shortness. I asked him how significant an investment the plant would be for the region. But this would really tower, and it's important for for southeastern Michigan because the state has been trying to wean itself off of its master reliance on the auto industry for a long time, with with not a lot of success. The two other sites in the running have a similar story to tell. In Racine, politicians have worked hard to reduce unemployment from a two thousand ten peak of eighteen by bringing in new investment. It now stands at about five. Columbus is perhaps the town that needs the investment the least, but that also means it already has a strong labor force, which would suit Foxcount's needs. Any governor trying to attract a new manufacturing project has to negotiate a delicate balance between trying to attract projects that will create jobs but without appearing to plan it a big business. Here's what David said about Michigan's Republican governor Rix Nida Governor Snider has not been a big fan of just handing money to companies. He's been more interested in building infrastructure, giving training grants and and and sort of facilitating um as opposed to throwing money at people. Are companies? And what about the political calculation? Alex Trump wont all three states in the last election, but the wins in Michigan and Wisconsin were both unexpected and critical. If it really is a political calculation, Michigan and Wisconsin have got to be favorites because they had had such a narrow margin of victory for the Republicans last time around. But whichever state eventually wins the Megaplan, Trump will likely be able to stay credit for it. And Trump is going to be telling, you know, in a couple of years, he's gonna be telling the people in this area, hey, look, you know I got you some particularly it's Michigan, I got you a huge plant that's that's not automotive. I brought you something else, and we're talking about a few thousand workers, So it's it's it's a pretty big deal, no question. Okay. So even if fox CON's megaplant is going to be very highly automated, it's still going to create an investment to give a boost to a city like Detroit. So there's a clear advantage to Trump and building a plant here. But what's in it for fox Con? The short on SWA is that having a factory in the US could make life easier for false Cone when it tries to import iPhones made in China. Okay, so I think I get it. If fox Kind builds a plant or even several plants, employing thousands of workers in the US, it could convince Trump not to slap import duties on iPhones made in China and ship to the States, exactly because fos Cone could fairly say it's already bringing jobs here and bringing iPhone manufacturing to the U. S would be a far more involved prospect, Yes, because replicating the rich ecosystem of supplies that exist around these main manufacturing hubs in China would be incredibly complicated, right, And as we discussed earlier. iPhone production is just much harder to automate than making displays. In a sense, you could say that Scone is buying a stay of execution for its Chinese iPhone making business. Okay, So, in the sense we're seeing three tiers of manufacturing. You have basic repetitive tasks which can be done by robots, more complex tasks which are present need a lot of manpower, and a high level automation which will requires small numbers of staff and their dogs who might even need engineering degrees. Deloitte has one foecust showing the US could be more competitive than China as soon as because of this. And while it's not yet clear who will win the race when it comes to attracting high tech manufacturing projects, the bleak reality facing many American workers is the possibility that large scale manufacturing is unlikely ever to return douled automation. You know, you may have a job for five years, but then five years a job could be gone to a robot. And that's it for this week's Decrypted. Thanks for listening. We always like to hear what you think of the show. Record a voice message and send it to Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at a TB web and I'm at brad Stone. If you haven't already, please subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcast. While you're there, please leave us at reading and a review. It really helps more listeners find the show. This episode was produced by Pierre Gadkari, Liz Smith, and Magnus Hendrickson. Thanks to Isabel Gottlieb for her help on today's show, as well as David Welch and Detroit and John McCormick in Chicago for their tireless hounding of the story. In Michigan and Wisconsin. Aliceabar edited my print story about box cons Megaplant, which you can read at Bloomberg dot com, Forward slash Tech. Alec McCabe is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.

When we abandoned the policy of America. First, we started rebuilding other countries instead of our own. The skyscrapers went up in Beijing and many other cities around the world, while the factories and neighborhoods crumbled right here in Detroit. In August, Donald Trump, then still accountidate, laid out his economic agenda in a major speech. In it, he pledged to generate more manufacturing jobs for Americans, and he couldn't have chosen a more appropriate location. Detroit, the poster child for post industrial decline. It did redounded sense of wanting to bring back Detroit. In the audience was a twenty six year old Detroit native, A. K. Bennett. We've heard it, you know, a few times, you know, from multiple politicians. UM. And there still hasn't been that true push to really bring things back, um in terms of manufacturing. But as president, Donald Trump has made a US manufacturing revival one of his biggest priorities in terms of spurring new manufacturing and industry. Um. There has not been a lot of outside help, not a lot of outside help yet, but there is a chance that could be about to change. Just one month after Trump's November elections, came the first promise to return significant jobs to US shores. We're gonna get things coming. We're gonna get Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country instead of in other countries. It's not Apple, but a company that works very closely with it. Fox Con is a Taiwanese company which makes the iPhone for Apple and the Xbox for Microsoft. It has promised to invest seven billion dollars in the US and generate as many as fifty new jobs in the process. Hi. I'm Brad Stone, and I'm Alex Wet and this week I'm Decrypted. We'll take a very close look at Fox Comp's plan and whether it really will create those good American factory jobs that President Trump is calling for. This is our third episode in a series looking at the impact that automation could have on our jobs. If you have a story to share, send it to Decrypted at bloomberg dot net. Advances an industrial automation are making it cheaper than ever to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, But by its very nature, that's because it would require fewer workers on the factory floor. We'll see whether those jobs could still give a boost to communities in the heartland and we'll find out what's in it for fox Con stay with us. So, Alex, were you surpris eyes by fox cons announcement that it was going to build a factory in the US. Yeah. I've been looking really closely at like the costs of making iPhones and any other electronic device, and it's the labor costs which make a huge difference between China and the US, and that's why they do this stuff in in in the cities around China. There's so much theater right now around companies saying they're going to bring jobs back to the U S. How real is this and when when do we think we'll see a fox complant in the United States? It clearly takes a while to build these things up, but it could be, you know, next year that we see something that The question is when they bring jobs back quite how many jobs will come and what kind of a boost does this give to potentially rest belt cities. A. K. Bennett comes from a family of auto workers on both sides of both my mother and father's side. I would say about were employed in the by the Big Three. The so called Big three means they work for General motors, Ford and Chrysler, you know, through the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. But grandparents, uh, two of my four grandparents were multiple and uncles, cousins. The post war Haiti I motor city, it was kind of like a golden age for American manufacturing. There are still some cousins and to the day that are working for the auto industry, whether it be for a supplier or one of the Big Three. But of course it's not just Detroit. The whole Rust Belt was booming with industrial activity for much of the twentieth century. Ohio typically ranked second only to Indiana in the US in steel production. Wisconsin meanwhile, fed that metallurgy industry with foundry and metal working equipment, which were a staple of its economy. Donald Trump is quick to evoke those times when he talks about manufacturing what you have in mind, or the jobs from the nineteen seventies of people kind of standing on an assembly line, being able to go from high school into uh good job that enables you to buy a house, in a car and have a pretty good life. That's Caroline Freud from the Pizson Institute, a DC based economics think tank, and those jobs frankly don't exist anymore. There's a few issues of play here. One big problem has been the cost of full time employment. American workers are more expensive than workers in China or other parts of the world. A factory worker here can cost close to forty when you take into account health, insurance and other costs. He accounts bought in China cost just one tenth of that. But cheaper still are robots, which offer the tantalizing prospect of a US manufacturing resurgence. The snag is that with robots doing a lot of the work, they probably won't bring back the millions of jobs that Trump is looking for. The number of Americans and manufacturing jobs has fallen from a ninety nine peak of almost twenty million to about twelve point four million today, but industrial output in that time has gone up because factories are increasingly automated. That also helps explain why labor costs in the US are higher. Rather than assembling components manually, these workers operate complex machinery, doing work that would otherwise be done by several people. If you look at manufacturing, there's a big increase in managerial work, or work that requires computer or engineering skills and a decline in the production worker because robots can do those kind of routine tasks more efficiently. Back in Detroit, Ak works as a project manager in the construction industry. Now, a K says he's not a Trump supporter, but he went to see Trump layout his economic plan, and Detroit was also one of the final three locations that fox Con is considering for a mega factory in the US. Detroit is up against Racine, Wisconsin, and Columbus, Ohio to win the plant, according to people familiar with the matter, which means A K is in a pretty good place of a huge industrial building project comes to his town. This would be a massive project. Uh that would you know? There's there'd be thousands of trades persons on site. But let's break this down. When fox Con talks about creating fifty jobs in the US, it doesn't mean the factory will have fifty workers. That number also includes the people who build the plant and then work in the extended supply chain feeding it with components. The plant would be huge in terms of construction jobs, design jobs, engineering jobs, and then um going forward for an additional logistics and other suppliers. Potentially, my understanding is from talking to sources that the factory could employ close to ten thousand people in the long term, and that fox could build other satellite plants elsewhere in the US and alex What will they be making there. The idea would be that this main plant would make large l c D display panels which would then be shipped to these other factories to make things like computer and TV screens, And these are the factories that Foxconn is thinking about building, So not the famous iPhone, right. It still requires a lot of manual labor to put an iPhone together, so the iPhone isn't the ideal project to build in a highly automated factory in the U S. L c D screens have been built by robots for years, so what specifically is holding back the iPhone from being produced or at least assembled in the US. So a lot of the components which go into an iPhone can be built by robots, but actually that final process of sticking all these bits together can require some really fiddly screws to piece it all together, and that's not something that's very easy for robots to do, right. Those fiddly screws are difficult for robots and tasks like printing silicon chips that's far better suited for automation, which is why there is still so much semiconductor manufacturing in the US right. Intel is building plans, particularly in Arizona, to processors. Well, there's a somewhat morbid joke that the fact of the future will just to have two employees, a human and a dog. That's Eric Brynjolfson. He's a professor the m I. T. Sloan School of Management and the co author of the influential book The Second Machine Age, Work, Progress and Prosperity In a time of brilliant technologies, the humans job will be to feed the dog, and the dog's job will be to keep the human from touching any of the equipment. Although I should say we're probably not at the dog and human stage yet. But one thing Eric did emphasize to me is that for all the rhetoric we hear from politicians about how manufacturing will bring back jobs for companies like Fox Com, this really isn't about jobs at all. You know, if you walk around a lot of American factories that virtually lights out with very few humans, and the few humans who are there, you know they're paid pretty good wages, but it's not the thousands or millions of jobs we used to have in that kind of work. It's really the to establish good relations with the Trump administration that it's driving fox Kin here and automation is what's making it possible. Will dig into that some more later in the show. Companies usually employ consultants who help them find potential sites for new factories. It always starts with sitting down with them and defining what exactly they need to be successful. I chatted with Darren Budau. He's based in Chicago and leads Deloitte site selection practice. We call those critical location factors. We really want to understand what makes them tick and what makes this new deployment of their's successful. It's a process of elimination. We will be reviewing potential sites, actual actual properties, whether they're existing buildings or land sites that have what the client needs. The consultants have a list of criteria, things like labor costs, transport links, proximity to key suppliers and customers. From there, there's always a due diligence process of conducting additional analysis and study on the labor market. On the the technical aspects of the site itself from a from a utilities and infrastructure perspective, we want to identify any possible risks before negotiations. With their shortlist of sites ready, the company then approaches the local government authorities to see what sweeten is they can offer. Those can come in three main forms. Tax incentives and rebates, infrastructure improvements like new bus and subway stations, and labor incentives, usually education programs to train staff. Incentive packages can sometimes stretch into the hundreds and millions of dollars. Fox Con is being advised by e Y, the consultant we probably know as Ernst and Young, which is helping it get the best possible deal. We said earlier in the show. Our sources tell us that e Y has whittled the shortlist down to Detroit, New Michigan, We're seeing in Wisconsin and Columbus in Ohio. But there's still one nagging question, Alex, what is in it for fox Com? Hi? Everyone? Every week, our team here at Bloomberg Technology spends so much work making sure that this show is great, and we have a special request to ask of you. If you like the show, um, please help us get the word out so more people can find us. Maybe you have a friend who likes technology a lot who's never listened to a podcast before, or if you listen on Apple podcasts, you can leave us a rating and a review. To do that, just search for Decrypted then hit write a review inside the reviews tab. Thanks so much for supporting our show. We spend ages puzzling out of this all. I will take your word for that. Seriously. I spoke to like tons of people over the course of several weeks trying to work out what exactly is the business appeal of Wisconsin or Michigan in particular. They don't check obvious boxes like having really good transport links which could allow equipment to be shipped to Asia for final assembly, or even proximity to customers. Well what about proximity to car makers? I mean, all these automobile manufacturers now need new technology, and the suppliers like Fox kind of help them put screens and digital technologies into their cars. Yeah. I did think about that, because autonomous cars will give drivers more time to serve the web and watch films because they don't have to pay as much attention to the road. But if that were the case, they wanted to be near those customers. The South would probably make more sense. There are more luxury car makers there who are going to be perhaps the first to have the autonomous cars, and the labor costs they are lower. Well, lots of declining industry in the Midwest. Is there something to the to the kind of labor base and the availability of possible workers in you know, former steel factories, former chemical factories that makes us appealing to fox Camp. Well, actually, the chemical factory idea we thought might be that you need chemicals to make l C D and so proximity to those guys would help. And of course Detroit has a legacy workforce from the automotive industry, but it's still a very different kind of skill set you need to run an electronics factory. From all my conversations, it increasingly seemed like there could be another motivation at play. If you look at the hun plan and there's a plant in the states that they're considering, Um, it didn't surprise me that so many of them happened to be swing states. That's Caroline the economist we heard from earlier. That's a good point. In Wisconsin. Trump won with a marchin of twenty three thou votes and had just eleven thousand more votes in Hillary Clinton in the state of Michigan. In Ohio, my home state, Trump had a more substantial victory, but it has long been considered a swing state. The sheer dollars are significant, I think for any state. David Welch is the Bloomberg Bureau chief in Detroit. He's been keeping his air close to the ground as FOTS gone whittles down its shortness. I asked him how significant an investment the plant would be for the region. But this would really tower, and it's important for for southeastern Michigan because the state has been trying to wean itself off of its master reliance on the auto industry for a long time, with with not a lot of success. The two other sites in the running have a similar story to tell. In Racine, politicians have worked hard to reduce unemployment from a two thousand ten peak of eighteen by bringing in new investment. It now stands at about five. Columbus is perhaps the town that needs the investment the least, but that also means it already has a strong labor force, which would suit Foxcount's needs. Any governor trying to attract a new manufacturing project has to negotiate a delicate balance between trying to attract projects that will create jobs but without appearing to plan it a big business. Here's what David said about Michigan's Republican governor Rix Nida Governor Snider has not been a big fan of just handing money to companies. He's been more interested in building infrastructure, giving training grants and and and sort of facilitating um as opposed to throwing money at people. Are companies? And what about the political calculation? Alex Trump wont all three states in the last election, but the wins in Michigan and Wisconsin were both unexpected and critical. If it really is a political calculation, Michigan and Wisconsin have got to be favorites because they had had such a narrow margin of victory for the Republicans last time around. But whichever state eventually wins the Megaplan, Trump will likely be able to stay credit for it. And Trump is going to be telling, you know, in a couple of years, he's gonna be telling the people in this area, hey, look, you know I got you some particularly it's Michigan, I got you a huge plant that's that's not automotive. I brought you something else, and we're talking about a few thousand workers, So it's it's it's a pretty big deal, no question. Okay. So even if fox CON's megaplant is going to be very highly automated, it's still going to create an investment to give a boost to a city like Detroit. So there's a clear advantage to Trump and building a plant here. But what's in it for fox Con? The short on SWA is that having a factory in the US could make life easier for false Cone when it tries to import iPhones made in China. Okay, so I think I get it. If fox Kind builds a plant or even several plants, employing thousands of workers in the US, it could convince Trump not to slap import duties on iPhones made in China and ship to the States, exactly because fos Cone could fairly say it's already bringing jobs here and bringing iPhone manufacturing to the U. S would be a far more involved prospect, Yes, because replicating the rich ecosystem of supplies that exist around these main manufacturing hubs in China would be incredibly complicated, right, And as we discussed earlier. iPhone production is just much harder to automate than making displays. In a sense, you could say that Scone is buying a stay of execution for its Chinese iPhone making business. Okay, So, in the sense we're seeing three tiers of manufacturing. You have basic repetitive tasks which can be done by robots, more complex tasks which are present need a lot of manpower, and a high level automation which will requires small numbers of staff and their dogs who might even need engineering degrees. Deloitte has one foecust showing the US could be more competitive than China as soon as because of this. And while it's not yet clear who will win the race when it comes to attracting high tech manufacturing projects, the bleak reality facing many American workers is the possibility that large scale manufacturing is unlikely ever to return douled automation. You know, you may have a job for five years, but then five years a job could be gone to a robot. And that's it for this week's Decrypted. Thanks for listening. We always like to hear what you think of the show. Record a voice message and send it to Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at a TB web and I'm at brad Stone. If you haven't already, please subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcast. While you're there, please leave us at reading and a review. It really helps more listeners find the show. This episode was produced by Pierre Gadkari, Liz Smith, and Magnus Hendrickson. Thanks to Isabel Gottlieb for her help on today's show, as well as David Welch and Detroit and John McCormick in Chicago for their tireless hounding of the story. In Michigan and Wisconsin. Aliceabar edited my print story about box cons Megaplant, which you can read at Bloomberg dot com, Forward slash Tech. Alec McCabe is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.