Carrier reversal hopefully starts trend of keeping jobs
It was welcome news this week that Carrier Corp. had decided, for now, to keep about 800 jobs at an Indianapolis factory rather than shift them to Mexico.
The furnace and air conditioner manufacturer had been a target for criticism during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign after announcing in February it planned to close up shop in Indianapolis, eliminating 1,400 job there, along with a 700-worker factory in the northeastern Indiana city of Huntington that is also owned by Carrier parent company United Technologies Corp. of Hartford, Connecticut.
Trump, now president-elect, had declared the move would never have happened under his watch.
That watch hasn’t officially begun, yet Trump and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, the soon-to-be vice president, and their team have managed to convince Carrier to at least roll back some of that relocation.
About 800 production and supervisor jobs now will remain in Indianapolis; the site also retains headquarters and engineering staff that were not going to be outsourced, according to United Steelworkers Local 1999 president Chuck Jones, who represents workers at the factory.
Carrier, in return, receives a package that includes $7 million in state tax incentives.
It’s not the hard line Trump had said he’d take with Carrier while campaigning in Indiana in April, when he suggested stiff taxes would curb companies from moving jobs out of the U.S.
And nothing has been mentioned about the 700 factory jobs in Huntington, Indiana, still slated to go to Mexico by 2018.
Still, the deal does deliver for 800 workers who get at least a temporary reprieve on seeing their jobs disappear.
That’s at least a partial victory in stemming the loss of jobs to overseas production. The challenge for Trump and his administration going forward will be maintaining that trend.