President-elect Donald Trump plans to appear at Carrier’s Indianapolis factory on Thursday to announce a deal to keep nearly 1,000 jobs in Indiana, according to officials on Trump’s transition team and Carrier.
The president-elect campaigned heavily on bringing manufacturing jobs back to America and often cited Carrier as an example of jobs moving to Mexico after the company announced last March it was moving approximately 2,000 jobs from Indiana to Monterrey. The projected economic damage to Indiana from this development was estimated to be $108 million.
Carrier, owned by United Technologies Corp., received months of pressure from local officials and the United Steelworkers before working out the forthcoming deal.
Said Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) President Scott Paul:
"One of the lessons of this campaign was that economic pain in the industrial heartland has been ignored. If we can help nearly one thousand American workers, it’s a welcome development.
“Governors aggressively seek to keep and court businesses every day, and foreign countries do the same. Inducements are not in any way unusual. In fact, they are always part of the equation. Pretending like this game doesn’t exist is naïve.
“In this case, Carrier is of a higher profile because of action from the plant’s United Steelworkers local, a viral video, and the attention that Sen. Bernie Sanders and President-elect Trump brought to bear on the company during the campaign. But there are other companies around the nation – not to mention in Indianapolis, like nearby Rexnord – that still have plans to move jobs overseas.
“The Carrier intervention is only a bandage on our industrial heartland that has suffered from thousands of similar wounds. It will take an aggressive manufacturing, tax, and trade policy to keep more jobs here – and to reshore others, even in this age of robotics and increasing automation.
"My hope is that this is one of many steps the incoming administration takes to ensure a strong manufacturing sector in America. We must tilt the playing field back to America to create good jobs."