Tracey Aikman: I'm one of those factory workers Trump lied to

From OtherWords.org

My entire working life has been dictated by offshoring. I’ve spent my career jumping from one factory closing to another.

When President Trump was elected, he said: “Companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences.” His promises ring hollow to me after I got my latest layoff notice.

My first job out of high school was at a factory owned by United Technologies in Wabash, Ind. I showed up to work in March 1991 and a sign on the door read: “Moved to Mexico.” My mother, who worked for a sister factory, also lost her job when her factory was sent south of the border.

I eventually got a union job at Chrysler in Kokomo, Indiana, which allowed me to give my family a middle-class life and build our dream house on five acres of land. In 2008, I got laid off. I lost my house and had to start over financially.

When I got my job at Schneider Electric’s “Square D” plant in Peru, Ind., five years ago, making electrical boxes and equipment, I hoped that this job would sustain me until I was ready to retire.

Unfortunately, the multinational corporation that owns our plant announced this summer that they would be moving our work to Mexico and other plants. Once our plant closes, all of Schneider Electric’s North American factories will be non-union.

Now I’m facing another layoff, even though our Peru plant was profitable. In fact, the same week I was laid off, Schneider Electric announced profits of $2.2 billion for the first half of 2019.

I’m not alone. Workers across the Midwest are suffering the same fate. And President Trump continues to fail us. Instead of punishing companies like Schneider Electric, he has rewarded them with $120 million in federal contracts and a massive tax break. The closure of my factory is sad proof that Trump’s lies have consequences.

Trump’s broken promises have become a broken record destroying our communities, even though here in Miami County, we gave him the vast majority of our votes in 2016.

Right now, Our Revolution, a political advocacy organization inspired by Sen. Bernie Sander’s historic presidential run in 2016, is helping to organize a miracle effort to save our plant. Joined by workers from the shuttered GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio, and workers from the Carrier plant in Indianapolis, we are calling on Trump to sign an executive order that would prevent taxpayer dollars from going to companies that are shipping American jobs overseas.

With the next round of layoffs scheduled for Sept. 27, there is no time to waste.

We have one request for President Trump: Use the power of the government over federal contracts to stop our jobs from leaving the United States. Show us that you mean what you said when you promised to be a workers’ champion.

We need your help now — and we’ll remember if we don’t get it.

Tracey Aikman has been laid off by global corporations United Technologies, Chrysler and now Schneider Electric. He is married and is a father of two.

Chris Powell: No state is big enough to hold back a big business

Headquarters of United Technologies Pratt & Whitney unit, in East Hartford, Conn.

Connecticut has been more surprised than it should have been by the announcement from United Technologies Corp. that upon its merger with Raytheon Co. it will move its headquarters from Farmington to Raytheon's outside Boston, in Waltham.

As much as some politicians feared and others hoped that the move was prompted by the state's awful economic conditions, it wasn't. Rather the move was just another natural step in the evolution of a company that began a century ago as the Pratt & Whitney machine tool shop in Hartford.

The tool shop became a manufacturer of aircraft engines, merged with the predecessor of Boeing to become United Aircraft and Transport Corp., started making airplanes as well as their engines, was broken up by New Deal-era antitrust legislation, kept growing anyway, and became a conglomerate -- United Technologies -- that was heavily dependent on government contracts. As such UTC came to need political support outside Connecticut, so it diversified operations into other states and even other countries.

As a result UTC's employment in Connecticut, around 19,000, has declined to a fraction of what it was a few decades ago, and state government could have done little to prevent it. For these days no conglomerates and big government contractors are going to stick to one state. It's not just their need for national political influence for securing federal government business. It's also to avoid becoming hostage to any one predatory state government.

So Connecticut's economic future does not depend on the big companies already here. For the same reasons motivating UTC, they are more likely to expand out of state. Instead Connecticut's economic future depends on growth by smaller companies already here and entry here by companies elsewhere.

But good luck drawing or keeping anyone here while the most important thing state government has to offer anyone is the duty to share the burden of $70 billion or so in unfunded state and municipal employee retirement obligations -- that is, the duty to pay more in taxes every year [ITALICS] forever [END ITALICS] to sustain a pension-and-benefit society.

xxx

SLUSH FUND MAY EXPLAIN IT: Maybe there's a good case for giving an exemption from state freedom-of-information and ethics laws to the Partnership for Connecticut, the entity just created by billionaires Ray and Barbara Dalio and state government in the name of improving public education. The Dalios are donating $100 million, state government is appropriating an equal amount, and more donations will be sought from other wealthy people.

But if there is a good case for the exemption, nobody is making it.

Spokeswomen for Governor Lamont and the Dalios insist that the partnership should be exempt from the accountability laws because it's not really a state agency. But it was created and funded by the new state budget, a majority of its board will be state officials, and it will dispense public money to public schools. Private entities don't need any provision in the state budget exempting them from FOI and ethics laws, since those laws apply only to government agencies.

So the budget writers thought the partnership would be considered a state agency subject to the accountability laws unless another law asserted, against the evidence, that it wasn’t a state agency.

Why did the budget bestow such an exemption and exactly who asked for it and why? The spokeswomen for the governor and the Dalios were asked about this more than a week ago but have declined to provide an answer. So here's a guess: The partnership will make a great slush fund.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Species of fraud at UConn and Carrier

College football and basketball coaches are paid the big bucks because they're so talented and their programs earn the big bucks -- and sometimes, as at the University of Connecticut lately, they are paid the big bucks even when they produce only failure.

That is, of course, the case with UConn's football coach, Bob Diaco, who is paid almost $1.7 million per year and has just completed his third season at the university, all losers -- 2-10 in 2014, 6-7 in 2015, and 3-9 this year. Just a few months ago the university somehow thought so well of him that it extended his contract through 2020 and promised to give him fat raises each year.

Lucky for Diaco, his golden parachute is firmly in place. While the university could have fired him early this year for a mere $700,000, firing him before the end of this year now will cost UConn $5 million. After Jan. 1 the price of dismissing him will go down, but only to $3.4 million.

But like love, working at UConn means never having to say you're sorry -- and not just for Diaco but also for the university's athletic director, David Benedict, and its president, Susan Herbst, who arranged the contract extension on the eve of what may have been the football team's worst season in living memory. Two years ago Herbst also gave a $251,000 honorarium to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for a brief, informal public conversation at a university auditorium -- another bet that failed spectacularly.

Meanwhile, as the decline of Connecticut's economy accelerates, Gov. Dannel Malloy is trying to save money by, among other things, closing state parks and reducing day-care services for the working poor and rehabilitation services for drug addicts. But the governor never seems to notice any extravagance at the state's flagship university. The governor, Herbst, and Benedict must hope that UConn's men's and women's basketball teams, which have just begun their seasons, will make everyone forget about football before snow covers Pratt & Whitney Stadium's empty end zones.

xxx

Making America great again probably will require more than what President-elect Donald Trump and the vice president-elect, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, arranged to persuade Carrier Corp. not to relocate quite as many jobs from Indiana to Mexico.

Contrary to the triumph being claimed by the Trump camp, many Indiana jobs still will be shipped out. The remaining jobs were saved only through the usual corporate welfare -- tax breaks delivered by state government and more tax breaks promised by the new president -- and saved by the possibility of extortion.

That is, Carrier is part of conglomerate United Technologies Corp., based in Farmington, Conn., and a major military contractor that needs to curry favor with the incoming administration, circumstances that don't apply to other corporations attracted by cheaper foreign labor.

Tax and tariff policy may discourage the export of manufacturing jobs, but bigger forces are at work here, such as the longstanding use of the dollar as the world reserve currency, which enables this country to run huge trade deficits, in effect printing money for other countries and exploiting their cheaper labor, and the declining educational performance of the U.S. workforce relative to foreign workforces.

Blessed with peace and plenty of capital from dollars, the most backward parts of the world are industrializing even as U.S. students are not keeping up with foreign students. In addition, the movement to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour throughout the United States will not just induce employers of low-wage workers to automate; it will also induce such employers to export more simple manufacturing jobs.

America won't be made great again by scapegoating employers for pursuing their own interest just as everyone else pursues his own interest. Greatness may begin with enough courage and honesty to tell people about their own shortcomings.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer.