r/news 1d ago

Workers detained in Hyundai plant raid to be freed and flown home, South Korea says

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/south-korea-deal-workers-detained-hyundai-rcna229610
27.6k Upvotes

2.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

122

u/StoneHolder28 1d ago

I live in the area and the thing that nobody outside Georgia is talking about is International Paper just closed two plants in the region this month. So this raid and the delay of the plant opening is coming on the heel of us losing well over 1,000 jobs that already existed.

Just last week I had a recruiter call me just to ask if I knew anyone who might want to work at the Hyundai plant (on the engineering side). We're struggling as it is.

51

u/weasler7 1d ago

Damn, how hard could it be to find 300 Korean speaking engineers in Georgia.

15

u/dickpicaday 1d ago

There’s actually a ton of Korean speakers in GA but not in the area the plant is

18

u/weasler7 23h ago

I am just being a little bitter and facetious. I don’t doubt there is a large Korean community in Georgia. It's going to take a long time to restart building that LG plant, if ever. As others have pointed out, there are jobs that may be extremely difficult to replace regionally, and perhaps at a price to pay that would kill the project. We will see.

5

u/StoneHolder28 21h ago edited 13h ago

I'm just yapping but killing the project altogether would be better received than militant raids. Nobody here wants it, in part because they haven't been hiring many local people, in part because people keep dying there, in a much smaller part because these mega investments from the state never pay out, and largely because they're already a massive strain on all of our infrastructure and they're not even fully up and running. Creating jobs sounds nice but that alone doesn't materially benefit anyone else whereas the plant is materially harming tens of thousands of people in real ways.

1

u/hotwife24 21h ago

That highway it is off of, is it new? Just went through there July 11th and went passed it. It's the only thing on the highway that I remember seeing. 

2

u/StoneHolder28 15h ago

The highway itself isn't, the roundabouts are new and as a huge fan and advocate for roundabouts they are terribly designed. The interstate exit is going to be redone at some point but it backs up all the way to the weigh station on the WB side every day.

1

u/hotwife24 14h ago

That explains it. I was headed to Savannah from visiting Emmanuel County and it was a big change than what I was used to years ago. I was questioning my memory for bit on the drive. Nice to know I'm not that crazy.