Nine prior Convent plants hired almost no local workers

Evidence

The Shintech Corporation proposed to build yet another plant in the community and promised that the plant would foster economic development. But many community residents were rightly skeptical, contending that such jobs had been promised at nine other industrial facilities that were operating in Convent, yet those companies had hired few if any local residents. Had they done so, Convent would not have had the highest unemployment of all the towns in Cancer Alley. Instead, many community residents reasonably concluded that they would get only Shintech’s toxic emissions, not its jobs. Eventually, corporate officials were forced to admit that almost none of the labor for the plant would come from the local community, because the educational background of local residents did not meet the company requirements. — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 378

Categorization

• SHARE: The admission that local residents were ‘too uneducated’ for jobs at a plant built in their own town is an infuriating, concrete anecdote.
• XREF: Concrete instantiation of chapter 377’s general claim that development promises rarely realize.