We love Torrington and Connecticut but not all the things the General Assembly and the governor have done to induce us to leave family and friends behind. After more than a century of manufacturing in Connecticut, we are not looking for handouts.
We have paid our fair share, but enough is enough.
Connecticut’s high cost of doing business and its anti-employer attitude have finally driven us out. We are not moving for any government incentives.
The high cost of doing business in forced-unionism Connecticut has nothing to do with high living standards for employees. In fact, the Zordans are actually taking a large share of their employees with them to Right to Work South Carolina, where Borgeson Universal is relocating, and will continue to pay them the same wages after the move. But a dollar goes much further in the Palmetto State than in the Nutmeg State. According to data collected and published by the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center, a state government agency, the overall cost for necessities like housing, food, energy, and health care is 35% higher in Connecticut than it is in South Carolina. That’s why the Zordans are surely correct in asserting that, when their employees earn the same pay in South Carolina that they formerly did in Connecticut, it will be “as if they are getting a big raise.”
It is regulation-happy, tax-hiking politicians, installed in office and kept in power by Big Labor’s forced dues-fueled political machine, who are primarily responsible for the high cost of doing business in Connecticut. The Zordans explain:
• We sold our 50,000-square-foot building [in Connecticut] for enough money to buy a 100,000-square-foot building [in South Carolina] — and still had enough money left to pay for the transport of 100 trailer loads of machinery and equipment to our new site.
• The property taxes on our big new facility in South Carolina are much less than those on our smaller former building in Connecticut.
• Our utility costs in South Carolina, especially for electricity, will be about a third of what we paid here, though our space will more than double.
If elected officials in the Nutmeg State want to stop the hemorrhaging of good-paying jobs to Right to Work states like South Carolina, they need to make their state more hospitable for private-sector employees and business owners. And passage of a Right to Work law prohibiting the termination of employees for refusal to join or pay dues to an unwanted union is an absolutely necessary first step towards making Connecticut a better place to work and hire people.
