Kia factory in Georgia looked improbable
PHOTO COURTESY OF KIA CANADA
A long courtship in the Korean industrial sector finally paid off for Georgia. It helped Kia make land purchases and funded a huge training centre in West Point, Ga.
Who jumped out of bed in Seoul one morning and thought, "Let's pour a billion dollars into the red dirt of some far-flung spot in Nowhere, Georgia"?
How did auto executives convince no fewer than 32 separate land owners, some of whose ancestors had surely been farming this dirt for generations, all to sell out to create the 900-hectare parcel Kia needed?
I understand how complex the rest of the operation must have been.
Once those two incredibly improbable things were in place, the rest of it flowed in some sort of logical sequence.
It appears that the genesis of point No. 1 was a "Georgia is open for business'' visit to Korea made in 2003 by Georgia governor Sonny Perdue – and isn't that an appropriate sounding name for a governor of Georgia?
The state had already set up an economic development office there as far back as 1985, but nothing major had come of it to that point.
Most states in the vicinity – Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee – had car factories. Georgia had a rapidly disappearing textile industry, most of which (how's this for irony?) was heading to Asia.
Nothing immediate came of that visit. When Kia did start looking in that region, it was romanced by Alabama (which had already landed parent company Hyundai) and by Mississippi farther to the west (which was to become home to Nissan's truck plant).
Alabama didn't make the cut. Probably thought they had the inside track because of the Hyundai connection. But maybe they were overconfident, and perhaps their incentive barrel was getting low.
Mississippi seemed to be close to a deal, but Kia noted the planned site, a small town called Meridian, was too far from population centres as a source of workers.
West Point (not where the U.S. Army school is) is even smaller than Meridian, but surrounding communities were densely populated enough to give Kia confidence in the depth of the labour pool.
Heck, Atlanta is less than an hour and a half away, and there are loads of people in the GTA who commute longer than that.
West Point is also right on the Alabama border, only about an hour's drive from Montgomery, where the plant of Kia parent Hyundai was going in. Suppliers could locate midway between the two and have handy access to both.
Another point in favour of Georgia – now, this may be closer to legend than fact – was a lunch Georgia put on for the Koreans. They took a stab at various Korean delicacies, but also included some local Georgian fare.
No one is trying to say that Kia's factory landed here because of "Brunswick stew'' – a tomato-based heavy soup with meat, traditionally squirrel, but these days more often pork or beef. But the Koreans allegedly "cleaned their plates" and the deal was done.
Coincidence?
Now to Point No. 2: Where were they going to find a hunk of dirt big enough to locate a car plant?
Here's where a not-totally-unsung hero of the story comes in. Drew Ferguson III, a seventh-generation West Pointer and father of the current mayor, was a banker in the town.
Recognizing the economic importance of this deal, he sat down with each of the land owners and made the case that they needed to do this for the good of the area.
Mayor Drew Ferguson IV told me that it wasn't a matter of just backing the Brink's truck up to these peoples' porches, although estimates are the land owners got something like a 30 per cent premium for their properties.
"It really was a matter of these people understanding what was good for the community,'' Ferguson said.
A shovel was stuck in the ground in October 2006, and despite the worst economic depression in generations, the first Sorento rolled off the line a bit more than three years later.
Another factor in the success of this project has been something called Quick Start, a training program that's part of Georgia's technical college system.
The state kicked in millions of dollars worth of incentives and infrastructure development – highway interchanges, water towers, that sort of thing. (Unwillingness to do that sort of thing has probably cost Ontario more than one car plant, but that's a debate for another day.)
The first thing Georgia built was a state-of-the-art training centre on the Kia site, to assist in the recruitment and training of the workers. It really helped get this thing off the ground quickly.
A second shift is planned for the plant. Training was going on for these applicants as we toured the training centre. It's a nine-step process, beginning with interviews in an attempt to determine basic social skills, motivation, etc.
We watched a bit of Step Three, a series of simulated work stations where applicants perform tasks similar to what they might do on the line: wire a harness, apply a bead of sealant, bolt together a suspension assembly.
As they work, instructors watch their every move, and record details like how dextrous they appear to be, how well they follow the written instructions for the task, even how quickly they get back to work after their breaks, on hand-held data-capturing devices.
It all goes into the decision-making process.
I only need one car factory tour a year to remind me I'm on the right side of this business. But $14 an hour to screw fenders onto Kias has to beat, well, two bucks an hour spooning out grits at Billy Joe's diner.
In the week that ended with Martin Luther King's birthday, I couldn't help but wonder if "the dream" that he had could possibly have encompassed blacks and whites, working alongside each other in apparent harmony, building Korean cars.
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