Thread: Analysis: Trump's win with Indiana's Carrier comes with huge asterisk

Analysis: Trump's win with Indiana's Carrier comes with huge asterisk

By Danielle Paquette
November 29, 2016 9:30 pm

As news broke that President-elect Donald Trump reached a deal to keep nearly 1,000 jobs at an Indianapolis plant on Tuesday evening, factory worker Brian Reed prepared to lose his job of 24 years just a mile away.

Reed assembles roller bearings at Rexnord, an industrial supplier that plans to send his job and 294 others from the Midwest to Mexico. The 45-year-old father worries about the mortgage, college tuition for his daughter and health insurance for his son, a football player. He hopes Trump will try to save his family's livelihood, too.

"We are counting on him," Reed said. "The working class elected him. Now take a stance."

This week, the president-elect steered national attention to Carrier, the air conditioning manufacturer that had intended to move about 1,400 jobs from Indiana to Monterrey, Mexico. Carrier now says it will keep nearly 1,000 of those jobs in the state's capital after coming to an agreement with Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who is governor of Indiana.

Neither the company nor Trump's transition team released details of the agreement.

The deal followed Trump's pledge at an April rally in Indianapolis to rescue the jobs.

"That's what is going to happen," he said at the time. "It's not like we have an 80 percent chance of keeping them or a 95 percent. One hundred percent."

Yet, the situation in Indianapolis highlights just how intractable the outflow of manufacturing jobs is in much of the nation. For every factory Trump publicly targets, there's another downsizing somewhere else, sometimes just around the corner.

Since 1969, Indiana has lost more than 235,000 manufacturing jobs, shedding nearly a third of such positions, data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis shows. Rexnord is at least the third manufacturer in Indiana this year to reveal Mexico relocation plans. Carrier announced its decision nine months ago, along with United Technologies Electronic Controls, its parent company, which said it will lay off 700 workers by 2018.

Local and state officials had pleaded with the companies to keep their operations running. Mayor Joe Hogsett turned his focus to containing the economic fallout from the manufacturing exodus, creating a task force to, among other acts of aid, help laid-off employees with job training.

He urged Rexnord last week to pay back more than $300,000 in tax incentives because of the looming closure, set for June. The city plans to hire an "economic recovery coordinator," said city spokeswoman Taylor Schaffer, and before announcement of the deal with Trump, she said it planned to use the $1.2 million in tax incentives that Carrier returned to help displaced workers.

Hogsett didn't respond to calls from The Washington Post. However, a letter to Rexnord that the mayor publicly released this month noted his own futile effort to keep the company in town.

"Despite every offer I have made and the good-faith efforts of your employees, Rexnord has decided to cast aside the quality and experience of your longtime, dedicated Indianapolis employees to chase cheap labor in Mexico," Hogsett wrote in a publicly posted letter to the company.

Rexnord, headquartered in Milwaukee, is packing up its Indianapolis operations to resettle in the same Mexican city that Carrier had picked. Rexnord expects to save $15.5 million during its first year south of the border, said Chuck Jones, president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, which represents both Carrier and Rexnord. That cushion is estimated to grow by $200,000 a year, according to figures the manufacturer shared with the union.

To reverse course, Jones said, Indianapolis employees would have had to slash their hourly pay from an average of $25 to $5.

Jones said he was surprised by Trump's deal concerning the Carrier jobs.

"I don't know how to react, because they haven't told us the particulars," he said. "One word to describe how I'm feeling right now is optimistic."

Trump has pledged to bring back American jobs that were offshored, promising to generate 25 million as president. He spoke to workers who have lost their paychecks to the forces of trade and technology, and they responded enthusiastically. Men in economically shabbier counties, particularly older white men, overwhelmingly voted him into the White House.

"Our politicians have aggressively pursued a policy of globalization - moving our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas," Trump said in his June jobs speech. "It doesn't have to be this way. We can turn it all around - and we can turn it around fast."

Economists have pushed back on that point. Since North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994, quashing tariffs and tripling the product exchange between the United States, Canada and Mexico, about 4.5 American manufacturing jobs have disappeared - a consequence they ascribe to both globalization and automation.

Though Trump argues that NAFTA shoved jobs south of the border, wiping out some of the best-paying gigs Americans can find without a college degree, proponents of the move say it brought prices down for American families, stretching their dollars while boosting the economy.

Derek Scissors, who studies global economies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, said Trump's promises to resurrect manufacturing jobs thus far appear impossible to keep. Renegotiating NAFTA or imposing new double-digit tariffs, two of Trump's trade proposals, wouldn't restore the American manufacturing landscape of the past, he said.

"You can't make the world go backward 20 or 30 years," Scissors said. "You could bring some jobs back, but it's going to cost a lot. It would drive up prices."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/busine...129-story.html

You have to repeal NAFTA, CAFTA, and every single one of these free trade treason agreements, reimpose tariffs on US based manufacturers back-hauling into the US and pass the FairTax.

If we pass the FairTax and repeal these trade agreements, they'll all come home in a nanosecond and none will leave, there will be no price increases beyond normal demand based inflation, and life in our country will be as it was intended by the Founders of our Nation who supported tariffs and banned federal income tax in the US Constitution.

When you stray from the roots that feed you, you are no longer a thriving beautiful flower, you're a deformed parasitic weed.

Now go save those 294 jobs at Rexnord. You find out what products their roller bearings are used in and you blast that name all over Twitter and the Media.

Originally Posted by Judy

You have to repeal NAFTA, CAFTA, and every single one of these free trade treason agreements, reimpose tariffs on US based manufacturers back-hauling into the US and pass the FairTax.

If we pass the FairTax and repeal these trade agreements, they'll all come home in a nanosecond and none will leave, there will be no price increases beyond normal demand based inflation, and life in our country will be as it was intended by the Founders of our Nation who supported tariffs and banned federal income tax in the US Constitution.

When you stray from the roots that feed you, you are no longer a thriving beautiful flower, you're a deformed parasitic weed.

Now go save those 294 jobs at Rexnard. You find out what products their roller bearings are used in and you blast that name all over Twitter and the Media.

I was with you until you brought up that not so fair tax scheme.

The FairTax is crucial to actually fixing our economy on a long-term permanent basis. If you don't understand that, that's fine. The federal income tax was illegal in the United States until Democrats with a Democratically controlled Congress, both chambers, and a Democratic Globalist President, Woodrow Wilson, pushed through the 16th Amendment in 1913, the same year they reduced tariffs and increased imports of foreign goods t compete with US suppliers, and the same year they passed the Federal Reserve Act that created the oh-so-troubling Federal Reserve System.

So if you want to continue to publicize your support for the continuation of a Democrat concocted liberal socialist mandatory income tax system that redistributes income from those who earned it to those who didn't instead of repealing it and replacing it with a voluntary retail sales tax on new goods and services that is not only Constitutional under the original constitution but used in one form or another by 45 states for the majority of their state funds, I mean that's fine with me, I sort of get a kick out of it.

Mike Huckabee just reported on Fox News that the annual compliance costs of the existing federal income tax system is around $500 billion a year. For nothing but paperwork on your life stored in files and on IRS computers.

Imagine the infrastructure we could build with that? Imagine how much debt we could pay down with that? Imagine how many businesses and investments and savings and industry expansions and employee benefits that would pay for? If you capitalize that income stream at a 5% cap rate, that's $10 trillion of value lost to our economy and citizens, $10 trillion of American Wealth wasted on income tax paperwork and compliance.

Only Evil Democrats could have come up with such a destructive debilitating tax system for the United States, which they did in 1913, a system that hasn't paid the bills once in its 103 year history and to date has put US in $20 trillion of national debt while impoverishing our citizens and bankrupting our nation.

The FairTax stops that drain on our wealth and turns our economy right side up soaring to the top with jobs, higher wages, greater expendable incomes, happier freer citizens, healthier more solid businesses that have more incomes to pay employees good wages and benefits and expand and grow their companies that feed the beauty of prosperity and grow personal wealth and financial security.