Final round of layoffs planned at Carrier plant Trump promised to save

FILE: Shortly after President Trump’s election, Carrier announced that it had reached a deal with the then president-elect to keep approximately 1,070 jobs in Indianapolis for 10 years in exchange for up to $7 million in various incentives. (AP)

Carrier Corp., the HVAC manufacturer that had planned to move its operations to Mexico before President Trump staged a much-heralded intervention, is gearing up for a final round of layoffs.

Less than four months after it laid off nearly 340 employees at its Indianapolis factory, Carrier said Tuesday that 215 employees will be terminated on Jan. 11.

The company originally had planned those layoffs for late December, but delayed the move until January. The number of layoffs is slightly lower than the 275 employees who initially would have been impacted – the company said fewer workers were affected because of voluntary attrition.

Employees at the Indianapolis plant reportedly do not feel they have job security.

"They just don't have any faith in this plant staying in Indianapolis," Robert James, the president of a union that represents plant workers, told The Indianapolis Star.

Shortly after Trump’s election, Carrier announced that it had reached a deal with the then president-elect to keep approximately 1,070 jobs in Indianapolis for 10 years in exchange for up to $7 million in various incentives.

The highly publicized deal, which protected about 730 manufacturing jobs, abruptly reversed the plan Carrier announced in February 2016 to move its factory to Mexico and eliminate nearly 1,400 jobs.

Although Carrier employees appeared elated in widely circulated photographs after Trump struck the deal with the company, the mood in Indianapolis has apparently soured as layoffs continue.

“Trump came in there to the factory last December and blew smoke up our a---s,” Brenda Darlene Battle, a longtime Carrier employee, told The New Yorker. “He wasn’t gonna save those jobs.”

But the company said in a statement: “More than 1,100 jobs remain at the Indianapolis facility in keeping with our 2016 commitment.”