Tone-deaf Manager Announces Layoffs to 1400 Carrier Air Conditioner Workers, Whose Jobs are Moving to Mexico

If this isn’t a Donald Trump recruiting rally, it might as well be. I especially like the part where the manager explains that this is a great move because “it is strictly a business decision” to protect the shareholders, as if that is something.

VIA BOING BOING – In this video, employees at the Carrier Air Conditioner factory in Indianapolis are gathered together by a manager who explains that the company’s profit-margins dictate that all 1400 of them will lose their jobs as their factory is moved to Mexico.

The manager’s prepared remarks are fantastically tone-deaf, almost unbelievably so. Although there’s not really any good way to spin the news that a company is moving a factory to a place where workers are paid less and enjoy fewer employment and industrial safety rights, there are surely bad and worse ways, and the manager here chose virtually the worst way imaginable.

Short of actually wiping his ass with their pink-slips, that is.

The speaker repeatedly stresses that moving the plant to Mexico will make the company’s owners richer by increasing their profit margins, as though this will somehow seem to be a comfort to the workers who will soon be unable to feed their families or save for their retirement — workers whose labor made every dime of the company’s profits to date possible.

It’s an odd sign of the times that the people who prepare this sort of speech believe that workers will be swayed by the logic that “We will make more money by destroying your life and the lives of your families” and lead with that as their best defense for visiting tragedy upon thousands of people.

The biggest surprise is that no one threw the guy out on his ass.