The Oscar Mayer plant had been a Madison staple and one of the city’s largest employers for almost 100 years. But the plant will be closing down, putting about 1,000 people out of work, and its headquarters will be moved to Chicago as part of Kraft Heinz, its new parent-company’s, plan.

Shutdown of Madison’s Oscar Mayer plant came as ‘shock’ to employees

Apparently, it was not much of a secret that the facility was at risk of leaving the state. Other states had been, rather overtly, trying to lure Kraft Heinz plants out of Wisconsin.

With the plant’s inevitable closure in sight, various city and state government officials are throwing blame around like a hot potato.

Mayor Paul Soglin aims to point blame at the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, while taking heat from State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau.

It seems Soglin was right, and WEDC decided not to contact Kraft Heinz to persuade them to keep the Oscar Mayer plant open in Madison, all thanks to a little dissuasion from the WMC.

It seems almost irresponsible that WEDC and WMC thought it was a good idea to ignore the other states’ attempts to pull any employers out of Wisconsin. Apparently both WMC and the WEDC knew other states were offering hefty incentives to Kraft Heinz to move certain facilities out of the state. Neither of them made any real attempts to keep the Madison Oscar Mayer plant open.

On the other hand, states like Iowa and New York offered Kraft Heinz millions of dollars to keep in-state plants open.

No matter how long a company has been around, if there is any merger with a larger company, that facility is at risk of moving. To pretend there was no way Kraft Heinz would export the Oscar Mayer plant, especially considering the offers from other states, is just plain irresponsible.

Maybe the threat to the Oscar Mayer plant, specifically, was lost in the static, but either way, the fact that no one fought to keep one of Madison’s largest employers open does not reflect well on the people whose job it is to keep Wisconsinites on the clock.

But the fact of the matter is, somebody in charge of the Wisconsin citizens dropped the ball, and now almost 1,000 people have to pay for it. That somebody is the WMC and WEDC.

Phil Michaelson ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in biomedical engineering.