Despite President Trump convincing Carrier to keep its Indianapolis furnace plant in the United States rather than move it out of the country, the company still intends to move roughly 300 jobs to Mexico, according to CNN.
On July 20, 2016, Carrier formally notified the state of Indiana that it planned to eliminate over 500 jobs at the Indianapolis plant over the next six months. After his visit to Carrier's plant on December 1, 2016, Trump said that Carrier agreed to keeping 1,100 jobs, though CNN reported the actual number at 800. It turns out that the discrepancy arose because both Trump and Carrier were accounting for 300 "engineering and administrative positions that were never expected to be moved to Mexico."
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Even when the company announced that it would keep the furnace plant open in Indianapolis, it simultaneously made clear that it would move some jobs to Mexico anyway to take advantage of cheaper labor, according to CNN.
But even those 800 jobs Trump purportedly helped save aren't completely safe. Greg Hayes, CEO of United Technologies — the parent company of Carrier — said in a December interview on CNBC that many of those 800 jobs saved will be replaced by automation in the near future.
"We're going to ... automate to drive the cost down so that we can continue to be competitive," Hayes said, according to CNN. "Is it as cheap as moving to Mexico with lower cost labor? No. But we will make that plant competitive just because we'll make the capital investments there. But what that ultimately means is there will be fewer jobs."
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