A Trump Administration Fun Fact: Offshoring Contractors Are Getting Paid
President Trump ...
... was out in Missouri last week, pitching the Republican tax reform package, feeling his oats. He talked about getting rid of the illegals, building the wall, how great the stock market is doing, jobs. This tax reform package is part and parcel with all that stuff!
“We're going to cut taxes on American businesses so they will compete for workers, they'll raise salaries,” the president said. “The business is going to be happy and the workers are going to be happy and the country is going to be a happy place.”
Well that’s good! That’s where we are in early December 2017. A happy place.
But where was the president a year ago? Early December 2016?
Oh yeah: At Carrier, in Indianapolis.
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The Carrier deal – which saw the Connecticut-based air conditioner and furnace manufacturer reportedly receive $7 million in incentives from the state of Indiana to retain some of its Hoosier manufacturing workforce, after announcing plans (layoffs) to move production at its Indianapolis facility to Mexico – was relatively standard as far as incentive packages go, according to the Wall Street Journal. It was an abrupt about-face for a company that rejected other cost-saving proposals presented in the months before Trump’s election.
Nevertheless, many of the affected workers in Indianapolis were understandably happy, even if Trump overstated the number of jobs saved and then said the whole problem was the union’s fault after they called him out on it.
A year later, the good vibes have faded. Staggered layoffs continue. Hundreds of other Hoosiers are out of work at just-down-the-road Rexnord (their plight earned a Trump tweet but no deal) and United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, is giving the boot to 700 workers at a Carrier plant in nearby Huntington. That’s according to Chuck Jones, the president of Carrier’s United Steelworkers local.
In an op-ed last week he wrote:
Workers know that Trump has the power to stop offshoring. His victory lap in Indianapolis said as much. As president of the United States, he can tell federal contractors like United Technologies that our tax dollars will not fund corporations that continue to offshore jobs. But Trump has failed to take action. In fact, the new report by Good Jobs Nation shows that the pace of offshoring by major federal contractors is accelerating under Trump.
Here is the Good Jobs Nation report to which Jones is referring. Among its fun facts:
- Since Trump was elected, major federal contractors have been certified as shipping 10,269 American jobs abroad.
- The total number of jobs outsourced by contractors since Trump’s election is the highest yearly total of outsourcing by federal contractors on record, and will likely rise when reporting for 2017 is complete.
- The top-100 federal contractors for 2016 that have outsourced American jobs since Trump’s election have received almost $21 billion in contract awards under the Trump administration.
Read the full report here. And remember: The president, who has spent a lot of time talking about bringing manufacturing jobs back, has seen only approximately 120,000 of them reappear in the United States since his election. That’s about on par with the pace set under his predecessor, former President Barack Obama.
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Reposted from AAM
