Trump visits Indiana to tout Carrier deal

Apparently under pressure from Trump, Carrier announced this week it had agreed to keep more than 1,000 jobs at the plant and at its headquarters, while still planning to move more than 1,000 other U.S.jobs to Mexico.

President-elect Donald Trump promised to punish USA companies that ship manufacturing jobs out of the country.

In February, a video was released by a worker within Carrier Corp., showing a Carrier executive telling workers that jobs making heating and air conditioning units would be moved to Mexico over a three-year period.

But the author of “The Art of the Deal” will have a lot more deal making to do if he wants to stop the steady erosion of manufacturing jobs from the country because of automation and lower costs overseas.

Mr. Trump on Thursday said he forgot about the promise, and when he saw it replayed on a television network he realized he meant it as a “euphemism” for all the jobs fleeing the country, not for Carrier specifically.

The Trump team hailed the agreement as a “big win”. That decision followed calls Trump made to the top executive of Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies. “I really thought I would retire from there”, said Freeman. We have to do something. Because you have a lot of people leaving and you have to understand we can’t allow this to happen anymore with our companies. This is a tiny symbolic gesture – 1,000 jobs is less than 0.01 percent of the manufacturing jobs in the U.S. Moreover, the country still has about 1.5 million fewer manufacturing jobs than it did prior to the recession.

In fact, how about giving United Technologies state tax breaks worth about $7 million over the next decade, in exchange for moving only 1,300 jobs to Mexico? Those incentives are contingent upon several factors including employment, job retention and capital investment.

Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the bipartisan White House Transition Project, said Trump has good reason for wanting to be with his people.

“He truly wants to make a difference and save jobs here”, he said. He warned of “consequences” for businesses that choose to leave the U.S.

For Donnelly, the issue is larger than Carrier, the latest in a series of profitable US companies moving work overseas. When he heard the news about cutting jobs, he said he was anxious.

“If it’s going to help business stay here in IN, I’m all for it”, Robinson said.

Blackford said he’s thankful for the new deal with the company. “I loved it”, she said.

We asked if she thinks they will keep good on their promises.

“This has been a very special state to us”, Trump said.

Like Carrier, Rexnord still makes a big profit – $67.5 million on $1.9 billion in sales in fiscal 2016 – but the company told union officials it could make more by paying cheaper wages to Mexican workers. He says since about six years ago, 260 new federal regulations have passed – 53 of which affect the Carrier plant. The update noted that more details would come soon. Much like he did during the stretch run of the campaign, he read from teleprompters, but he was bombastic as ever, spending more than a dozen minutes bragging about his victory before outlining his economic plan.

As elsewhere in the United States, factory work in IN has lagged as the broader economy has recovered from the 2008-2009 recession.

On Thursday, the Democratic National Committee blasted Trump, saying in a statement: “Every American job is important, but it’s clear that Donald Trump not only got rolled by Carrier, he set a risky precedent that companies can easily shake down taxpayers with the mere threat of outsourcing jobs”.

The company’s decision is something of a reversal, since earlier offers from the state had failed to sway Carrier.

In an unusual move for an incoming president, Trump later was to rally supporters in Cincinnati at the same sports arena where he drew huge crowds during his campaign. He’s talking about the kind of programs that will appreciably improve our lives – free higher education, single-payer health care, a major attack on climate change, massive public job creation, real criminal justice and immigration reform, a Wall Street speculation tax and now the Outsourcing Prevention Act.