Less than a year ago Trump heralded an agreement he made with Carrier that would keep a plant in Indianapolis instead of moving it to Mexico. The plan was supposed to save around 730 jobs. However it turns out those jobs are still disappearing in the form of layoffs:
FOX NEWS – Carrier Corp., the HVAC manufacturer that had planned to move its operations to Mexico before President Trump staged a much-heralded intervention, said Tuesday it is gearing up for yet another round of layoffs.
Less than four months after it laid off nearly 340 employees at its Indianapolis factory, Carrier announced that 215 more employees will be terminated on Jan. 11.
The company said in a statement that it had originally planned to lay off 275 employees on Dec. 22, but decided to reduce the size of the layoff and delay the timing because of voluntary employee attrition.
Employees at the Indianapolis plant reportedly do not feel they have job security.
“They just don’t have any faith in this plant staying in Indianapolis,” Robert James, the president of a union that represents plant workers, told The Indianapolis Star.
Shortly after Trump’s election, Carrier announced that it had reached a deal with the then president-elect to keep approximately 1,070 jobs in Indianapolis for 10 years in exchange for up to $7 million in various incentives.
The highly publicized deal, which protected about 730 manufacturing jobs, abruptly reversed the plan Carrier announced in February 2016 to move its factory to Mexico and eliminate nearly 1,400 jobs.
I went back and looked at our reporting on this and I found something interesting:
United Steelworkers 1999 President Chuck Jones was optimistic when Trump first promised to save the jobs of 1,350 workers at Carrier’s Indiana plant, The Washington Post reports. Carrier had originally planned to move the jobs to Mexico, but decided to keep 730 of the jobs in Indiana after receiving $7 million in tax breaks from the state, where Vice President-elect Mike Pence is governor.
Jones told the Post that he hoped Trump would explain at a Dec. 1 meeting that 550 of the Carrier jobs weren’t saved.
“But he got up there,” Jones said, “and, for whatever reason, lied his ass off.”
Jones said the numbers of jobs saved reported by Trump and Pence were misleading and included positions that weren’t slated to move to Mexico.
“Trump and Pence, they pulled a dog and pony show on the numbers,” Jones said. “I almost threw up in my mouth.”
Do the math. The 340 employees that Carrier laid off four months ago plus the 215 they are laying off now…well that’s just over 550 jobs, almost exactly what this Union boss said nearly a year ago.
Did Trump and Pence lie about the details of the Carrier deal? Based on this it certainly looks like it.