BlogWood: MT Archives

Another corporate Welfare Daddy abandons its family

Closing to cost bay area 1,900 jobs

The Tampa Bay area's coveted financial services industry suffered another damaging blow Wednesday when JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced that it will close its credit card call center by the end of the year and eliminate 1,900 jobs.

The news, long rumored, was denied by company officials for months until employees were notified in "waves" during midmorning gatherings. It comes just six months after Capital One did the same thing, closing its credit card call center in Tampa and releasing 1,100 workers.
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Like Capital One, the Chase Credit Services operation received millions of dollars in tax incentives for creating the jobs that are now vanishing.

In June 1997, the company pledged to add 1,330 jobs in the Tampa credit card center, which handles customer service, debt collection, technology support and fraud. In return for the promise, JPMorgan Chase was eligible to receive payments staggered over 10 years of up to $5-million in reimbursements under the state's Qualified Target Industry Program for state taxes paid.

QTI, as the program is sometimes called, was created in 1994 by the Florida Legislature to lure companies with high-paying jobs through the use of tax incentives.

As of June, JPMorgan Chase had received more than $3.1-million through QTI, state records showed.

"It's possible they may not receive any more reimbursements," said Scott Openshaw of the governor's Office of Tourism, Trade and Economic Development, which approves state incentives.

JPMorgan has earned tax incentives for its other divisions as well, among them nearly $1 million for its treasury operation and another $274,000 for its trade services subsidiary in a program that could net the company $4 million if it meets job-creation goals. Another JPMorgan subsidiary has so far been paid $175,000 in incentives that could total $2.5 million if the company creates enough jobs in billing services.

Here’s what I wrote about the last Big Corporate Welfare Daddy that pulled up stakes:

Well, it looks like our little $4 million welfare experiment, our pansy-ass coddling of “needy” people companies is turning into a huge failure. We give these shiftless irresponsible louts our tax dollars, we pay these unrefined yahoos to make babies jobs, which they happily do as long as the free money is coming in, and they just sit around all day sucking from the welfare teat and getting fat off the public dole as we hard working tax payers put in extra hours to support their dysfunctional lifestyle shareholders.

We do all this hoping to give them a leg up, a little push down the road to success, but all we end up doing is making them weak and lazy. And then, when these wily welfare daddies sense a better deal elsewhere, they up and leave us in the lurch. They abandon their children employees, shirking all responsibility, leaving the state to provide for their former charges, and shack up with the first sugar daddy they can find.

Here’s an idea: instead of throwing away literally millions of dollars on tax breaks for these greedy capitalist pigs, why don’t we shift those funds into education or healthcare. It seems to me that a well educated, healthy workforce would provide a real and sustainable incentive for drawing new business to the state.