Now it is official: The Netherlands IS the mailman of China! And Prime Minister Mark Rutte is the head of the mail department! But we should ask ourselves if that is what we really want!

Prime Minister Rutte is old-fashionedly begging Jack Ma of Ali Baba to build his behemoth distribution centre close to Maastricht Aachen Airport in The Netherlands. And guess what?! It won’t yield a lot of jobs and it won’t bring much innovation to The Netherlands.

Probably the only thing it does is making the Dutch landscape uglier, while flooding The Netherlands and other European countries with a tidal wave of cheap products with a very limited lifespan and a high “near-future waste”-factor. When will the government leaders stop with aiming on low quality distribution and service jobs for the sake of it…?!

It was the news of last weekend. The Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte was “smooching and sweet-talking” to founder Jack Ma of Alibaba, in order to make him establish his new, behemoth distribution centre in The Netherlands, close to the Maastricht Aachen Airport. To achieve this, PM Rutte has to make a better ‘bid’  than the earlier bid from Belgium, which thought it already made a winning one with its offer for Zaventem Airport as place of establishment.

The following snippets are from Het Financieele Dagblad:

Belgium thought to have won the battle, but The Netherlands surely hopes it didn’t. As PM Mark Rutte himself has interfered in the battle: winning the bid for the establishment location for the European distribution centre of Alibaba. It is the glittering prize this year for countries that want to put themselves on the map as logistic strongholds. The battle seems to have become in a decisive stage.

The Chinese powerhouse Alibaba is very much challenging the throne of Amazon as largest webstore in the world. This requires six enormous hubs, of which one will be located in Europe. And there is big money involved. For the development of the six global distribution centres, Alibaba reserved a total of $16 billion. 

Both The Netherlands and Belgium have deployed ‘heavy artillery’  in order to lure the Chinese. PM Rutte is said to have received an executive-laden delegation of Alibaba in his official office, Het Torentje (i.e. the tiny tower) in The Hague. The nature of this visit is not disclosed. Next to Jack Ma, founder and withdrawing executive of Alibaba, also the Executive Officer of the ‘Global Business Group’, Angel Zhao, and the CEO of Alibaba Europe, Terry von Bibra, were part of the delegation.

I appreciate it when the Dutch Prime Minister does his utmost to lure interesting companies to The Netherlands, especially when large numbers of high-quality jobs are involved. And Alibaba and its founder Jack Ma are definitely some of the biggest names in the business. Nevertheless, I still don’t get it. I really don’t understand this international battle for this distribution centre.

Yes, it will become big and it will arguably become one of the biggest distribution centres in the world. But will it become a big driver of jobs? I really doubt that…!

At the beginning of my career, I have worked at the factory and distribution centre/warehouse of a local milk plant. Even though the automation of processes already became more prominent then (i.e. end Eighties / early Nineties) and the early deployments of robotization had already started, it was still a labour-intensive plant.

Packing roll-in dairy containers, putting crates of bottles and packages from pallets into distribution carts was still heavy physical work, that required quite a few workers. And of course there were the jobs of forklift truck and pallet truck driver and all those other logistical jobs that kept the clockwork of a modern factory running.

But that all changed quite dramatically… The same milk factory, with relativity small branches spread all over the country is now condensed into a few mega-factories and warehouses that are strongly automized and robotized, enabling the same turnover as those smaller plants, but with a fraction of the people involved. Hundreds of jobs had vanished due to the robotization in those factories.

A few years ago I had the chance to look into the “slow mover” distribution centre of my own employer, PLUS Retail in The Netherlands. PLUS is a chain of 250+ supermarkets and it operates four distribution centres at strategic places in The Netherlands. 

Although the distribution centre already used a modern robotized collection machinery for small articles, there was still quite a lot of manual labour involved. Yet, those workers consisted for a large share of Polish and Bulgarian workers, who were ‘operated’ by a computerized voice on their headsets. The machine speaks and the people collect. This is not interesting work anymore and it doesn’t require a large level of skills and trainings.

Yet, PLUS is now developing a new, even more modern distribution centre, which – albeit much, much smaller – can be very well compared to the distribution centre that Alibaba wants to develop. Keywords of this distribution centre are: fully automized, fully robotized and labour-extensive to a degree that only a limited number of operators is required to operate it 24 – 7 (in theory). May there work 50 to 75 people when it is fully operational, then I am probably on the upside of labour requirement.

I don’t expect the Alibaba distribution centre to require many more workers, as I also expect that to be fully automized and robotized, to a degree that – in spite of its mammoth size – probably less than 100 people suffice to operate it. And I’m afraid I also expect the establishment and development of this distribution centre to be mainly a Chinese affair, with probably very limited involvement for Dutch companies and Dutch construction jobs.

What remains then is an extremely large, box-shaped and blind building in the Dutch landscape, that offers a few dozen medium and high-qualified jobs and a lot of extra, logistical traffic on the Dutch highways, ports and airports. Of course those logistical activities are all jobs, but it is not the kind of job that I would like my country to have.

In past articles I have called my country sarcastically The Mailman of China, as it continues focussing on logistical and distribution jobs related to the so-called ‘mainports’ Schiphol and the ports of Rotterdam/Amsterdam; all on behalf of massive imports, exports and transit freight to and from the European continent and the British isles. This way of working is fully using the Dutch logistical network of waterways, railways and highways, with all the drawbacks that it brings.

Unfortunately, all these activities bring a lot of pollution and they clot up the Dutch infrastructure with endless stacks of trucks, trains and inland waterway vessels.

With this massive distribution centre of Alibaba, the inland and foreign logistics will be intensified to much higher levels. And the increased distribution of Alibaba products will lead to a surge in low-cost, low-quality products with a lifecycle of less than a year. Near-future electronic waste, in other words.

When I say that I would wish that the Dutch economy would invest more in high-qualified, labour and research-intensive jobs, I probably start to sound like a broken record.

Companies like ASML, Philips, (formerly) Akzo/Organon, NXP and many others can bring and maintain The Netherlands at the forefront of Research & Development, in cooperation with the Dutch universities and tech infrastructure. 

Those are great jobs and jobs that cannot be easily taken over by other European countries, as they would be lagging in knowledge and skills.

Distribution and transport is relatively easy and doesn’t require special skills. 

Besides that, it deteriorates the environment and air in the very dense populated country The Netherlands, due to the pollution and excess traffic it produces. Another factor that is increasing in influence is the ‘trashification’ of the Dutch landscape, with countless large and ugly buildings, like distribution centres, data centres and large warehouses.

Everybody who traveled to Northern France via the ‘Route du Soleil’, knows what the devastating and depressing influence can be of the countless ugly warehouses at the side of the road that one sees there. The surroundings become ugly and depressing for the people who live there.

Is that what we want for our small country? Or is that a development we need to avoid at all costs?!

I made my choice! Let Belgium have Jack Ma and his giant distribution company and let The Netherlands focus on companies and jobs that really matter for the world!