During a time when much of the country is analyzing the way president-elect Donald Trump will do his job, he demonstrated his best skill: Deal making.
Trump and Mike Pence the Vice President-elect surprised many skeptics on Tuesday by convincing United Technologies to keep nearly 1,000 jobs at its Carrier, Indiana manufacturing plant rather than move them south of the border into Mexico, according to a tweet sent by the company.
The company’s tweet said it was pleased to have reached a new deal with Trump and Pence and that more details would soon follow.
Pence is the governor of Indiana until January 20, 2017 and his staff was able to hammer out all the details of the deal.
On Thursday, Trump will join Pence in traveling to Indiana to announce the deal.
This victory largely a symbolic one since the U.S. had lost over 300,000 manufacturing jobs annually to competition overseas, shows data from the Economic Policy Institute, which is left leaning.
However, the jobs that were saved by the agreement, account for about half of 2,000 that Carrier was going to move into Mexico.
They help to redeem the pledge that Trump made as a candidate this past February to halt offshore outsourcing at Carrier or to hit it with high tariffs on air conditioners it imports from Mexico into the U.S.
Carrier was a flashpoint during the presidential campaign after a video from a cell phone of the announcement Carrier made to its workers that it was moving work to Mexico went viral.
Trump, Bill Clinton, campaigning for Hillary, and Bernie Sanders all quickly denounced it. However, just Trump said he would keep the jobs in the United States, which seemed an unlikelihood at the time.
The deal with Carrier does not represent that much of a model going forward for the reversal of deindustrialization. Every CEO who is perceptive will now make threats to ship jobs south of the border, said an analyst on Wall Street.
However, the credibility of Trump as a working class tribune should at least for a slight period be a reprieve from the deal made with Carrier.
The plan by Carrier to shift some jobs to Mexico was nearly complete when these negotiations began. The company had handed back tax incentives of 1.2 million to the city of Indianapolis, said a local newspaper and returned more than $382,000 in grants for training to the state.