Foxconn Employees Move Into Gateway Building

Several dozen Foxconn employees have temporarily moved into the SC Johnson iMET Technology Center located less than a mile from where the Taiwanese company is expected to build a huge display screen manufacturing plant.

Gateway Technical College owns and operates the center that serves as a teaching facility.

The Foxconn employees are made up of project planners and logistics managers, said Deb Davidson, the school’s vice president of workforce and economic development.

“They’re quite happy to be where they are,” Davidson said. “They’re integrating well with everybody at the iMET Center.”

The move into iMET, where Gov. Scott Walker signed the $3 billion Foxconn incentives package Monday, was done discreetly because Foxconn has not announced the site for the plant, although a tract of land southwest of iMET is believed to be the likely location.

Davidson revealed the existence of the newcomers at a Gateway Board of Trustees meeting Thursday morning at the Horizon Center in Kenosha.

At the meeting, the trustees gave tentative approval to a 50 percent expansion of iMET in order to accommodate Foxconn’s training needs.

Expanding the building to the west will cost $5 million and be paid for by the state. Remodeling parts of the building and expanding the parking lot will cost $1.2 million, and be paid for by Gateway. The state’s share was tucked into the incentives package.

In the coming months and years, thousands of Foxconn employees are expected to be trained in a variety of skills at iMET. A mock assembly line is expected to be set up. The Foxconn manufacturing complex is expected to be as automated as they come.