Today, Google-owned Motorola is officially announcing the new Moto X, an Android-powered device that, as its ads remind us, will be the first smartphone actually manufactured in the United States. Motorola is teaming with Flextronics to assemble the handsets at a former Nokia factory in Ft. Worth, Texas, which will eventually employ somewhere around 2,000 workers.
In other words, we're all finally about to see what happens when a tech company actually tries to bring production back to the U.S. of A. from low-wage Asia, much as Apple is planning to do with some of its Macs, and how much the resulting new jobs will actually pay.
In some cases, it appears, the answer is not much. Flextronics seems to have kept mum about wages. But after a little bit of surfing around jobs boards, I was able to find some help wanted ads from a staffing company that don't leave a whole lot of questions about what factory they were headhunting for. (Here's a link to the one below.)
So at the lowest wrung, we're talking Walmart wages. For better-educated technicians and production leads, we're in a more middle-class pay range. There's no mention of benefits in the ads, but I'm not going to draw any hard conclusions from that.