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Sanders: Trump Carrier Deal Sets Dangerous Precedent for All Workers

HeadlineDec 02, 2016

The speech in Cincinnati came after Trump spoke in Indianapolis, where he celebrated his involvement in Carrier’s decision to keep hundreds of jobs at its Indianapolis air conditioner factory instead of moving them to Mexico. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has criticized the deal to keep the jobs in the United States as setting a dangerous precedent, since Trump used a $7 million corporate tax break to convince the company not to ship the jobs overseas. This is precisely the type of tax break Trump said he was against during his campaign. Meanwhile, local reporter Rafael Sánchez, who has spent nearly a year investigating the Carrier plant and the proposed job relocation, says Carrier denied him press credentials for Trump’s speech yesterday. This is Sánchez.

Rafael Sánchez: “So many stories to tell. Now, unlike my colleague Katie Heinz, I was unable to be at the conference today, watch the announcement by Donald Trump. And that’s because my press credential was denied, which meant that I could not be inside the Carrier plant. It appears that after 10 months of telling the workers’ story, going to Monterrey, Mexico, and asking tough questions of a company, that all came with a price today.”

Sánchez, who works for the Indianapolis station WRTV, also said that Trump did not save a full 1,000 jobs—and that at least 600 more Carrier jobs are still at risk of being shipped to Mexico.

Rafael Sánchez: “Here are the numbers: 720 of those jobs are production workers. Those are the folks that make the gas furnaces. About 300 of those jobs were the corporate jobs that were never going to leave anyway. So that’s where we get to the 1,100 or close to the 1,100. Here is the bad news in the short term: Unless something gets done, some 600 jobs are still scheduled to go to Monterrey, Mexico.”

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