By the end of the month, 600 employees at Carrier’s large plant in Indianapolis will be unemployed. Many of those jobs will go to Mexico where labor is cheaper and less regulated. This comes just seven months after then-President-elect Donald Trump championed a deal requiring the U.S.-based air conditioning, heating, and refrigeration company to employ 1,069 employees at its Indianapolis plant in exchange for a massive $7 million incentives package.
While Trump touted the achievement as an example of his economic populist messaging materializing into a jobs-saving godsend, the actual deal that was negotiated was modest at best and did little to keep Carrier from laying off its workers by the hundreds before automating its factories and exporting jobs abroad.
When Trump announced the deal last Thanksgiving Day, the company said it would invest a whopping $16 million in its Indianapolis facility. One month after the deal’s announcement, CEO Greg Hayes suggested that the $16 million would be invested in automation, the same automation that is largely responsible for the layoffs in the company’s manufacturing division.
While the deal made for good headlines at the time, many, including The Daily Wire’s own Ben Shapiro, were skeptical about the deal’s merits.
In an article entitled “Before Celebrating Carrier Keeping Jobs Home, Let’s Get The Full Story,” Shapiro criticized the socialist-like way in which Trump offered government-subsidized assistance to a private entity like Carrier.
“Before we get too excited about the headline ‘Carrier Decides To Keep 1,000 Jobs In The United States,’ let’s find out how it was done. That headline wasn’t a positive when the company in question was Solyndra and the president was Obama,” wrote The Daily Wire’s editor-in-chief. “Special favors and cronyism aren’t any better just because Trump gets to brag about a friendly headline, or because your political allies are the beneficiaries.”
It turns out Shapiro was right.
As CNBC explains, the fine print of the deal undercuts Trump’s populist push to keep jobs in America:
The agreement does guarantee that Carrier, a unit of United Technologies Corp., will continue to employ at least 1,069 people at the Indianapolis plant for 10 years in exchange for up to $7 million in incentives. …
But fewer than 800 of those 1,069 jobs — 730 to be exact — are the manufacturing jobs that were always at the heart of the debate. The rest are engineering and technical jobs that were never scheduled to be cut.
In other words, Trump, supposedly representing the workers, got the short end of the stick.
Every day that goes by, it’s becoming more clear that Trump’s message of economic populism is disconnected from reality.
Indeed, one day after Carrier’s announcement that it would be laying off hundreds more factory workers, Ford said it would send jobs to China, a move that undermines the spirit of the car company’s pledge to send less jobs to Mexico and invest in more jobs at home.
None of this should be surprising.
There’s only so much the federal government can do to alleviate the economic hardship of the Rust Belt, America’s manufacturing heartland. The steamboat of globalization and technological innovation cannot be tamed, let alone reversed. In short, there won’t be a manufacturing renaissance. That’s a pipe dream.