The Company Pocketed $7 million of Taxpayers’ Money, but the Workers Were Fired Anyway

Remember those Carrier air conditioning factory jobs in Indiana that Donald Trump crowed that he saved from going to Mexico shortly after the November elections? The story dominated the news for several days because Trump said it showed how his administration would create jobs, jobs and more jobs.

Trump said last November the deal he said he brokered would save 1,100 jobs. And then with Trumpian exaggeration, he added to this fiction, saying, “that number is going up very substantially, so the 1,100 is going to be the minimum number.”

Those jobs got vastly more attention than the nearly 16 million private sector jobs added during the Obama years once the massive job losses from the George W Bush era were stopped. Indeed, few reports about Trump’s seeming mastery of job-saving negotiations even mentioned job growth under Obama. And not one we could find pointed out that in 2013 wages started growing for the first time since 1999 and grew at an accelerating rate in 2014 and 2015.

Turns out Trump didn’t save one job in Indiana. The layoffs planned before Trump flew into town on his private jet are the same as today. The only jobs that will remain are those the company always had planned to keep in Indiana.

However, that is not to say that Trump and Mike Pence, then Indiana governor, failed to accomplish anything. They delivered $7 million to United Technologies, which owns the factory whose jobs will be going to Mexico.

The fine print in the deal Pence’s subordinates negotiated and Trump claimed would save factory jobs will remain in force.

Basically, this means Indiana taxpayers will pick up the tab for that corporate welfare—or is it for just a Trump fake news PR stunt?

By the way, we have the official word that this is not fake news, but not news at all. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said June 23 that the layoffs were planned long ago and so there was nothing new for journalists to report.

The layoffs start July 20.