Celebrate Volvo, make all of S.C. Volvo-ready

The following editorial appeared in The (Columbia) State:

WHEN BOEING touched down in South Carolina in 2009, everybody called it a game-changer. Maybe that new game is what we’re seeing with this spring’s announcements that Mercedes-Benz’s parent company Daimler would invest a half-billion dollars and hire 1,300 South Carolinians to build vans and now Volvo will put down another half-billion dollars and hire up to 4,000 people to produce its first U.S.-made cars.

To paraphrase Gov. Nikki Haley, South Carolina landed Volvo because we know how to make things, as we have demonstrated for Boeing and BMW.

We also know how to train people to make things, and we have a deep-water port with its own reliable workforce, which Volvo officials said was crucial to their decision.

And we have an energetic, hands-on governor who has built quite a reputation as a deal-maker when big fish are circling. Maybe we could have landed Volvo without that sort of governor, but there’s no way to ever know, so she gets credit.

Maybe we could have landed Volvo without Commerce Secretary Bobby Hitt, whose expertise as a former BMW executive was singled out by Volvo officials, but there’s no way to ever know that either, so he also gets credit — and Gov. Haley gets credit for appointing him.

Whatever ingredients were essential, the fact is that yet another A-list international manufacturer is calling South Carolina home, and that is worth celebrating.

It’s worth celebrating that at least 2,000 South Carolinians and up to 4,000 will get jobs in the high-wage auto-manufacturing industry. It’s worth celebrating that we have expanded our cluster of vehicle manufacturers, which makes us even more attractive to all sorts of supply-chain manufacturers that will bring even more jobs.

It’s worth celebrating that we paid considerably less in incentives than we did for Boeing. (Of course, it turned out that we spent more than twice as much on Boeing incentives as the projections that lawmakers accepted from Commerce officials when they passed a special package of new incentives that they didn’t understand.) It’s worth celebrating that state officials apparently were more forthcoming about what they gave away in return for the investment than they have been in the past. (Of course, time will tell whether that truly was the case.)

It’s worth celebrating that the Commerce Department and Volvo brought in environmental watchdogs to make sure we didn’t give away our environmental birthright in the deal (and we didn’t).

But while Volvo is unequivocally good news, it doesn’t make our state’s many challenges go away. In fact, in some ways, it underlines them.

We’re fixing roads for Volvo, and that’s a smart thing to do. But what about the rest of the state, which has a decades-long backlog of road and bridge repairs and improvements that the Legislature seems nowhere near agreeing to get to work on?

We’re training a workforce for Volvo, and that’s a smart thing to do. But what about the rest of the state, which still has too many high school dropouts and too few college graduates and too many prisoners and a 6.7 percent unemployment rate and 150,000 people looking for jobs — many because they lack the skills to land work in today’s economy? What about all of those people who don’t even bother looking for jobs any more, many because they don’t even have a sufficient educational foundation to be trained?

And what about the generations who come after them? What is our state doing to make sure that all children can get a decent education, so they will have the skills to get a job at Volvo, or Daimler, or Boeing or BMW? Or to become doctors or lawyers or engineers or other professionals? Or to create their own companies? Or, at the very least, to get a job that allows them to provide for their families — so the rest of us don’t have to? A job that keeps them from turning to crime — so we don’t become their victims?

Above all else, the reason Volvo’s announcement is worth celebrating is that it means more South Carolinians will have the sort of jobs that allow them to be productive, contributing members of our society. The reason we have to improve our schools and our roads and our health is so even more South Carolinians can do the same.

This story was originally published May 15, 2015 at 10:03 AM with the headline "Celebrate Volvo, make all of S.C. Volvo-ready."