Brian Eason

IndyStar

The union representing 1,400 Carrier workers whose jobs will be outsourced to Mexico voted to endorse Bernie Sanders for president, spurning Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner who has made the Carrier plant closure a key talking point of his campaign.

The Sanders campaign announced the closure in a news release on Tuesday, exactly two weeks before Indiana's May 3 primary.

“Bernie Sanders for decades has fought against the kinds of disastrous trade deals that are now allowing Carrier to ship over a thousand good-paying Indiana jobs to Mexico,” United Steelworkers Local 1999 President Chuck Jones said in a statement. “Bernie Sanders is the only candidate running for president who will do something to stop this kind of corporate greed if he is elected — because he’s been fighting against it for years.”

The air conditioning giant Carrier announced in February it would relocate its manufacturing operations to Mexico, shuttering its plant on Indianapolis' west side and shedding 1,400 jobs over the next three years. The loss of manufacturing jobs and wage stagnation across the country has become a top issue in this year's presidential campaign, with candidates like Sanders and Trump denouncing U.S. trade policies that they say encourages American companies to ship jobs overseas.

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“In my view, we have got to fundamentally rewrite our failed trade policies so that American jobs are no longer our number one export," Sanders said in a statement.

The endorsement could be seen as a slight toward Trump, who has repeatedly cited the planned outsourcing by Carrier to make his case that the U.S. economy is broken and he is best positioned to fix it. One way he plans to do that is by imposing tariffs on companies that outsource jobs. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

In an interview, Jones said the union's executive committee recommended Sanders, and the union's membership voted to approve the endorsement. They did not release the vote tally.

He said Sanders had taken the more "consistent stand on trade, the middle class, the working class and unions." Trump, he said, talked about the importance of keeping jobs in America but has business interests of his own in China.

"Which way does he want it? He wants the jobs to stay in the United States, that’s what he says," Jones said. "Before that, he says American manufacturing workers make too much money."

Union officials told IndyStar previously that Carrier’s Mexican employees will be paid a base wage of $3 an hour. About 75 percent of Carrier’s Indianapolis workers earn $26 an hour, or about $55,000 a year. They can earn more than $70,000 a year with overtime included in their pay. The remaining 25 percent, who were hired in under a second-tier wage, earn about $14 an hour, or $30,000 a year.

When asked if he would support the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton, over Trump, Jones replied: "yet to be determined."

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Call IndyStar reporter Brian Eason at (317) 444-6129. Follow him on Twitter: @brianeason.