Word: seaboards
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...front. To pay off the loan, the county enacted a 1% sales tax. The state granted a $4 million, 10-year income tax credit with the understanding that it was "unlikely" the company would pay any income tax during those 10 years. The state spent $600,000 to train Seaboard's workers. The company received grants and low-interest loans to finance a waste-pretreatment plant. (Remember the one in Albert Lea?) The company was excused from paying $2.9 million in real estate taxes...
...always, local and state officials were on hand when Seaboard announced in August 1992 that it would employ as many as 1,500 workers at its new pork-production facility. In time the plant will slaughter 4 million pigs a year. Oklahoma Governor David Walters declared the plant "a huge and much deserved economic boost to the entire Panhandle area, and to the state...
Meanwhile, back in Minnesota, Seaboard's local president was reassuring newspapers that the Albert Lea plant would remain open...
That was in August 1992. Seventeen months later, in January 1994, Seaboard announced that it would shutter its hog-slaughtering operations and lay off upwards of 600 employees. The company said it would keep about 300 workers to process and produce ready-to-buy meats like bacon, sausage and ham. (The number of employees eventually dropped to about 200, and Seaboard sold the business...
...just Oklahoma's subsidies that persuaded Seaboard to relocate. The Albert Lea work force was unionized; wages had risen to $19,100 a year--still $3,100 below their level in 1983, but too rich for Seaboard's blood. Guymon, by contrast, promised low-wage, nonunion labor. Also, Seaboard had decided it wanted to raise its own hogs for slaughter, not just buy them from farmers. Minnesota banned corporate hog farms. Oklahoma had had a similar ban but had repealed it before Seaboard came along...