More than 133,000 American workers sacked under Trump
More than 133,000 Americans have been sacked since President Donald Trump took office 18 months ago, according to a study by an advocacy group, Good Jobs Nation.
In a new report, Broken Promises #2, the group said Trump administration has actually been encouraging companies to ship jobs abroad. And they are doing so in record numbers.
The study showed that Trump administration has awarded more than $50 billion in new federal contracts to companies that continue to shutter U.S. factories as they seek cheaper labour abroad.
As a result, top federal contractors – Carrier’s parent company United Technologies, General Motors, Honeywell and Siemens – are now offshoring jobs at the fastest rate since the Great Recession. In fact, annual offshoring by taxpayer-funded corporations under Trump is on track to be three times greater than under the Obama and Bush administrations, the report said.
Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, President Donald Trump is campaigning in battleground states with a new slogan: “Promises Made, Promises Kept.”
But The Hill.com reported that Trump’s message isn’t ringing true with working-class voters like Renee Elliott, a Democrat who cast her ballot for Trump in 2016. Elliott – who lost her job at the Carrier plant in Indianapolis after Trump promised to save it from being outsourced Mexico – thinks Trump’s slogan should be the opposite – “Promises made, none of them kept.”
Trump won the White House by selling himself to voters like Elliott and vowing to deliver “more jobs and better wages” by bringing jobs back to the U.S. Trump’s pro-worker message helped him score upset victories in Democratic strongholds that have been hard-hit by outsourcing and the disappearance of good union jobs..
For working-class voters who supported Trump, his inaction is political hypocrisy.
According to a Pew Research Panel survey of validated voters taken three times in 2016 and again in 2018, 62 percent of Trump voters still felt very warm views toward him. At the same time, there are a significant number of voters who hold a negative view of the president, and that number has grown since his election.
Randall Troyer of Elkhart, Indiana, said he voted for Trump because he said he would keep companies like his employer, CTS Corp, from sending his job to overseas. But in a few weeks, CTS will be closing down its Elkhart plant and sending Troyer’s job, along with others, to Mexico. And President Trump has done nothing, even though CTS was just awarded a federal contract.
“I voted for Donald Trump because he promised to save jobs. But my plant is moving to Mexico and he hasn’t stopped it,” Troyer said. “I’m 62 and worried about retirement. Who’s going to hire me at this age?”
Dave Green, in Trumbull County, Ohio feels the same way. He’s the local union president at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, which went from 5,000 workers down to 1,500 in a series of recent layoffs. General Motors, which received $600 million in federal contracts from the Trump administration, announced the second layoff at the Lordstown plant earlier this summer — on the same day, the company also announced plans to build the Chevy Blazer in Mexico.
“When Trump campaigned here, he told us hold on to your homes because the ‘jobs are coming back.’ But the reality is that people keep getting pink slips, and now hundreds of my members have put their homes up for sale to look for jobs elsewhere,” Green said.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka also said Sunday that President Trump has done more to hurt workers than he has to help them.
“Unfortunately, to date, the things that he has done to hurt workers outpace what he’s done to help workers,” Trumka said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Trumka’s comments, made one day before Labor Day, come after Trump on Friday issued a statement praising labor unions. Trump lauded organized labor for “advocating for the interests of the American worker and wage-earner.”
But Trumka criticized a number of Trump’s policy decisions.
“He hasn’t come up with an infrastructure program that could put a lot of us back to work,” Trumka said. “He overturned a regulation that would deny over 5 million overtime that they would’ve had. He overturned some health and safety regulations that will hurt us on the job.”
“We keep trying to find areas where we can work with him,” he added.
Trumka has praised Trump in the past for his stance on U.S. trade policies, but has called the president a disappointment, charging that Trump has “used his office to actively hurt working people.”
“If President Trump wants to change course and join us in the fight to raise wages and standards, and strengthen our democracy and build better lives, then we’ll be ready,” Trumka said in January. “But if he continues down his current path, workers will be looking for a new president in 2020.”
Fox News host Chris Wallace also pressed Trumka on the state of the economy, pointing to low unemployment numbers and suggesting that Trump deserved credit.
“Those are good, but wages have been down since the first of the year,” Trumka said. “Gas prices have been up since the first year. So overall, workers aren’t doing as well.”
*Adapted from thehill.com
