INDIANAPOLIS — There was joy inside the Carrier Corp.furnace plant Thursday as President-elect Donald Trump announced the expected news of a deal to keep about 1,000 jobs — most held by union steelworkers — from moving to Mexico.
But for the steelworkers at the Rexnord bearings plant just a mile away, the news was bittersweet.
Their plant is shutting down in April, with 300 good-paying jobs moving to Monterrey, Mexico. The new facility isn't far from where Carrier still plans to send 600 jobs from its Indianapolis plant and another 700 jobs from its electronics control plant in Huntington, 100 miles north of here.
"Everybody asks me if I'm mad at the Carrier workers who get to keep their jobs," said Rexnord worker Don Zering. "I'm not mad at them, how could I be?"
But he's bitter about the company that is putting him out of work, after 43 years.
Like Carrier, Rexnord still makes a big profit — $67.5 million on $1.9 billion in sales in fiscal 2016 — but told union officials it could make more by paying cheaper wages to Mexican workers.
Zering, the local union president at Rexnord, spent Wednesday at the plant, negotiating with company officials over a severance package for workers making about $26 an hour now.
It's dependent, in part, on workers' willingness not to sabotage the facility and to show up every day until it finally closes.
Leaving the plant late in the day, Zering spotted an American flag flying over it.
"I don't know how an American company can go to Mexico and still fly the American flag. That's tough for me to take," he said. "You're not an American if you pull the rug out from 300 people and their families and take away their livelihoods just so you can make more money for yourself."
Stoppering the bleed of U.S. factory jobs to Mexico was a theme of Trump's campaign.
On Thursday, the president-elect joined Indiana's governor, Vice President-elect Mike Pence, at the Carrier plant to announce a deal in which the state will give Carrier's parent company, United Technologies, $7 million worth of tax breaks over a decade in return for keeping 1,000 of its Indianapolis jobs in place.
The deal covers 800 union workers from the Indianapolis plant and an additional 200 research and headquarters positions that weren't slated to go to Mexico.
The state offered similar tax incentives to Carrier earlier this year, when the company first announced its plans to move. But Carrier said then the incentives wouldn't keep the jobs in place.
That's led to widespread speculation that Trump leaned on United Technologies, a major supplier of jet engines to the Defense Department, threatening to pull some of its $5.6 billion in contracts with the federal government.
The suggestion that Trump leaned on Carrier was met with a mixed reaction from U.S. Sen. Joe Donnelly, a Democrat who has been calling for the federal government to develop tough penalties for American companies that move jobs elsewhere and to offer incentives to those who "re-shore" jobs back into the U.S.
"I'm happy about the 1,000 jobs that are going to stay here," he said, "but what about those that aren't?"
For Donnelly, the issue is larger than Carrier, the latest in a series of profitable U.S. companies moving work overseas.
There were 17 million manufacturing jobs in the U.S. in 2000. That number is down to 12 million.
"What I've seen is the fundamental erosion of the American promise," Donnelly said. "You've got all these people working hard, doing all the right things to help a company make money, and in return they're fired."
Details of what Carrier got to keep jobs in Indiana are still fuzzy, but some economists worry about the implications of the known deal.
Indiana University economist Justin Ross said giveaways by state and local governments — totaling about $80 billion a year, according to a New York Times report — are woefully inefficient because officials usually can't know if a company's claims about what it needs to stay competitive are legitimate — or just extortion.
"This kind of gamesmanship has been taking place for a long time," he said.
Inside the cinder-block building that houses Local 1999 of the United Steelworkers, some Rexnord workers spent Thursday morning in advance of Trump's appearance being interviewed by major news outlets, including CNN and MSNBC.
Back in 1998, the union local represented workers at 32 area plants. With Rexnord closing, it's down to 11.
"I feel betrayed," is how Rexnord worker Tim Mathis described his mood. At 51, Mathis is losing his second job due to an employer moving work out of the country.
Before hiring on at Rexnord 12 years ago, he spent 16 years at a ball-bearing manufacturing plant in Greensburg.
For him, blame rests with elected officials who've done little to stop the wave of lost jobs.
He's hopeful that Trump will step in to save his job now, he said, though there are no indications from Rexnord or the state that will happen.
"The jobs we're losing and the decline in our standard of living go hand in hand," he said. "Our elected officials have to be able to see this. They're not stupid. But they choose to idly sit by and do nothing.
"I'm sorry, but that's not acceptable," he said.