Author: Michael Mandel

December 2016: In February, Carrier announced that it was moving 1400 jobs in an Indiana factory making furnaces and heating equipment to Mexico. That announcement during the presidential campaign became an important symbol of how trade was hurting American workers. After his election, President-elect Donald Trump helped broker an agreement in which Carrier kept some of those jobs–the exact number is not clear–in the United States, in exchange for $700,000 in state tax incentives from Indiana. After the deal was made, Greg Hayes, CEO of United Technologies, the parent company of Carrier, went on television. This was his comparison of...