Florida’s Commerce Secretary says North Carolina’s big pockets just cost Florida a major manufacturing expansion.
Jabil is building a $500 million manufacturing facility for its cloud and AI data center customers that is projected to create nearly 1,200 jobs in North Carolina.
“Now we’re out of those jobs. What can we be doing better so we have that edge?” Republican Rep. Berny Jacques asked Florida Department of Commerce Secretary Alex Kelly during a House Careers and Workforce Subcommittee hearing.
North Carolina’s Commerce Department offered Jabil $11.3 million over a dozen years — which Kelly called a “megafund” — as an incentive for creating the new jobs. Kelly said he was against Florida making similar deals with taxpayer money.
“To be frank, I wouldn’t advise you to go down that path,” Kelly said. “That is a state that’s choosing to literally take taxpayer dollars and just give out tens of millions of dollars for nothing in particular, no guarantee that the company is going to stay there forever. And that is a risk.”
Throughout the rest of the meeting, Kelly updated lawmakers about different industry challenges, including the issue of replacing aging workers in the manufacturing industry.
More than 430,000 Floridians work in manufacturing — a number that has risen under Gov. Ron DeSantis’ leadership, Kelly said. He said the shift was impressive in a state previously known for tourism, agriculture and real estate.
But many of those workers are now retiring, which could leave a hole, Kelly warned.
“More than 50% of our manufacturing workforce is 45 or older, which is very disproportionately different than most of our other workforce sectors in Florida,” Kelly said. “We’re just simply aging out. Retirements out of our manufacturing sector are faster than people coming into it. It’s a constant challenge.”
Manufacturing isn’t the only growing sector in Florida. Other high-tech industries, financial services companies and life sciences fields have also been expanding.
But manufacturers also face challenges due to the fact that many different manufacturer sectors are competing against each other for workers.
“Every manufacturer that I visit with, this conversation comes up that those manufacturers usually lose people to completely different manufacturing sectors because the skill sets are converging more and more,” Kelly said.
