What the Layoffs Look Like at the Carrier Plant Trump Said Hed Save

n February 10, 2016, the Carrier Corporation, an H.V.A.C. company founded in 1915, announced that it would be closing plants in Indianapolis and Huntington, Indiana, and moving to Monterrey, Mexico. Months later, at the first Presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump brought up the closings. “We have to stop our companies from leaving the United States and, with it, firing all of their people,” he said. “All you have to do is take a look at Carrier air-conditioning in Indianapolis. They left—fired fourteen hundred people. They’re going to Mexico.” Shortly after the election, Trump and Mike Pence, who was then the governor of Indiana, announced a headline-grabbing deal with Carrier that was said to keep about eight hundred jobs in the U.S. “So many people in that other—the big, beautiful plant behind us, which will be even more beautiful in about seven months from now, they’re so happy,” Trump said at a celebratory press conference.

In May of this year, Carrier announced its time line for eliminating what will ultimately be six hundred and thirty-two Indianapolis-based jobs. The first round of layoffs began on Thursday, with the departure of three hundred and thirty-eight employees. Watching with dismay was Brenda Darlene Battle, a fifty-five-year-old Indianapolis native who’d been working at Carrier for twenty-five years, most recently as a fabrication technician, or fab tech, before she decided to take a buyout this week*. She helped run the automatic press that makes steel doors, among other parts, for A90 furnaces. When the final furnace door was completed on the first day of mass layoffs, employees working the assembly line—some for the last time—autographed it. On Friday, shortly before finalizing paperwork related to her departure, Battle spoke by phone about the company that employed her for a quarter century, President Trump, and her future. Her account has been edited and condensed.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-its-like-to-get-laid-off-at-the-carrier-plant-trump-said-hed-save