Where now for the knowledge economy?
So was McWilliams spinning a load of bull about the threat of Asia to the Irish economy? Or was that just a pile of crap designed to get ratings and sell a few copies of The Generation Game?
God help the poor divils in the Derry plant, I can’t see why you would close one plant and leave the other open when the labour costs in both are identical, that Fine Gael TD Joe McHugh was on this morining and his fear was that this would be another Unifi or Fruit of The Loom situation, domino effect with one plant closing shortly after the other.
Another employment disaster for the North West, is there any manufacturing left up there at this stage?
Tune in to Sean Doherty on Highland Radio today and I bet you’ll hear some hard talking
Oh noes, we’re all doomed!!!111 
For one thing.
Seagate is only closing part of the manufacturing segment of the operation in Derry, the R&D bit still survives.
And another.
Also, it wasn’t too long ago that Seagate pulled the plug on thousands of manufacturing jobs in Clonmel. Somehow, Clonmel hasn’t fallen into the sea since then.
Actually, its the Limavady operation thats being hit now, I was referring to the sister plant in Derry which all up north are worrying about as being next for the chop…
I don’t think we’re all doomed because Seagate are scaling back, I mean you’re right, we’re still afloat after this and other scalebacks such as Motorola and Lucent and Gateway and Pfizer and Procter and Gamble etc etc.
I’m pointing out that we’ve become wage uncompetitive here and that there is competition now from Asia in the high tech sector for these jobs. We used to lose low skilled manufacturing jobs to Africa and Asia in the nineties, now we’re losing high end tech jobs as well.
The Clonmel plant closed because it was making the wrong product at the wrong time, these are closing because its too damn expensive to pay the wages here required to service the jumbo mortages and the footballers wives lifestyles…
I don’t know about that.
According to the CAO, people in the manufacturing sector in this country don’t even earn the minimum wage for that sector.
Source
Look for “Manufacture of optical and electrical equipment”.