Workers were waiting to hear details about how many jobs would remain in the US and how the president-elect had persuaded Carrier to keep jobs in the state.
Nine months after announcing plans to move more than 2,000 jobs from Indiana to Mexico, the Carrier Corporation said Tuesday evening that it had reached a deal with President-elect Donald Trump to keep nearly 1,000 of those jobs in Indiana.
Carrier said via Twitter that it would announce more details soon. The New York Times reported that, according to transition team officials, Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who is Indiana’s governor, would appear at Carrier’s Indiana factory on Thursday to announce a deal.
During the presidential campaign, Trump had repeatedly attacked Carrier’s plant-closing plans after a video went viral last February showing a Carrier official telling hundreds of shocked employees of the company’s plans to close its Indianapolis plant. Trump has threatened to impose a 35% tariff when American companies seek to import goods they once made in the US but now produce in Mexico.
“Most people feel pretty happy about the news,” said TJ Bray, an assembly line worker for 14 years at Carrier’s factory in Indianapolis. “It looks like they’re staying.”
Bray said he and other workers were waiting to hear details about how many jobs would remain in Indiana, which jobs would remain, and what the president-elect had done to persuade Carrier to keep 1,000 jobs in the state.
In Indianapolis, Carrier workers were debating whether Trump had persuaded the company to alter its plans by offering tax breaks and reduced regulations or by threatening Carrier with various punishments if it went through with its plans.
The Indianapolis Star reported that state incentives had helped to persuade Carrier to keep the 1,000 jobs in the state. Pence will remain governor until 20 January.
In February, Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies, said it would move two Indiana operations to Mexico: a Carrier furnace and fan coil plant in Indianapolis with 1,400 employees, and a United Technologies factory in Huntington, Indiana, about 100 miles north-east of Indianapolis with 700 employees.
These moves are part of a large-scale exodus of factories from the midwest in recent decades to Mexico and other lower-wage countries. Candidates including Trump and Bernie Sanders railed against Carrier as an unpatriotic company, selfishly throwing close to 2,000 Americans out of work. Both Trump and Sanders said Nafta was partly to blame for Carrier’s decision.
The Indiana workers average between $15 and $26 an hour. Carrier pays its workers in Monterrey, Mexico – where it was planning to move its Indianapolis plant – about $2 or $3 an hour.
During the campaign, Trump mistakenly said the Indianapolis plant produced air conditioners. They manufacture furnaces and fan coils. Bray and other Carrier workers said that their union, the United Steelworkers, had repeatedly reached out to Pence in the weeks after the closings were announced and that he hadn’t responded to the union and had not helped at all.
Last Saturday, Sanders – in a move that might have influenced Carrier’s decision – threatened to introduce legislation that would bar awarding federal contracts to companies that send jobs offshore.
For Trump, Carrier’s decision to effectively half the amount of jobs heading to Mexico will be a public relations triumph. Rarely in American history have presidents or presidents-elect intervened to pressure individual companies not to move jobs abroad. Had Obama sought to pressure Carrier not to move the jobs to Mexico, many conservatives would have undoubtedly attacked him for improperly intervening in the free market.
Some experts question whether Carrier’s move would be more than a symbolic victory for Trump. According to federal data, Indiana has lost more than 235,000 manufacturing jobs since 1969, and the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal thinktank, estimates that the US loses more than 300,000 factory jobs annually because of foreign competition.
Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan, suggested that the Carrier deal might in ways backfire for Trump and might ultimately do little to stop the decades-long exodus of US manufacturing jobs. Wolfers wrote in a tweet: “Every savvy CEO will now threaten to ship jobs to Mexico, and demand a payment to stay. Great economic policy.”
David Parliament, a precision inspector who has worked at the Carrier plant for 35 years, said, “Of course I’m happy about the news.” He said the company’s decision to keep 1,000 jobs in Indiana should enable him to remain at the plant until he is old enough for social security and Medicare.
“We don’t know any details about why Carrier decided to stay,” Parliament said. “Mr Trump is a businessman, and he has proven to Carrier that if he has the authority to hit them heavily with tariffs, they’ll make a lot less money if they go to Mexico.”
Carrier also had to consider that it made a well-known consumer product – air conditioners – and that if Trump were to step up his attacks against the company if it moved its Indianapolis factory, that could badly hurt the company’s image and cause angry consumers to turn to other manufacturers for their air conditioners.
(TheGuardian US )
