Here Come The Layoffs!
Whee!
According to a report from recruiting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas released on Thursday, 275,240 people lost their jobs last month. That is a fuckton of people. In fact, it is the third highest number of jobs lost in a single month since they first started tracking job cuts in 1989, the other two being the first two months of the COVID pandemic.
Are you tired of winning yet?
It should come as a shock to absolutely no one that roughly 80 percent of those job losses were caused by Elon Musk and his merry band of incels running around federal agencies and firing people at random. That’s so many jobs!
And it’s something that Republican legislators like Sen. Jim Banks (R-Indiana) are really, really happy about.
After all, it’s not as though they were fired for using racial slurs or groping their female co-workers — which you may have noticed are pretty much the only instances in which the Right can manage to rustle up even a modicum of sympathy for people who have lost their jobs.
This month isn’t going much better so far, either — Trump’s big “Liberation Day” seems to have liberated hundreds of autoworkers from their jobs at Stellantis.
Stellantis announced on Thursday that it was temporarily laying off 900 hourly employees as a result of having to stop production at their plants in Canada and Mexico. The plants affected include the Warren Stamping and Sterling Stamping plants in Michigan, and the Indiana Transmission Plant, Kokomo Transmission Plant, and Kokomo Casting Plant, all located in Kokomo, Indiana.
Would you like to take a guess as to which candidate people in the counties where those plants are located overwhelmingly voted for? Do I even need to tell you? I guess I’ll tell you.
It was Donald Trump.
In fact, the Warren Stamping plant is located in Macomb County, Michigan (55.81 percent to Trump), which is pretty interesting given that pro-Trump autoworkers from Macomb joined Trump in the Rose Garden for his big “Liberation Day” announcement.
Luckily for those workers, they are unionized, which means they will still get paid — for now. If it goes on for much longer, however … that could change.
Whirlpool also announced this week that they would be laying off 651 workers at their plant in Amana, an unincorporated place in Iowa County, Iowa, as a result of “necessary adjustments ... to align with current market conditions driven by consumer demand.”
The company said the layoffs were unrelated to tariffs, but it seems safe to say that the “market conditions” are likely related to Trump’s general nonsense.
Would you like to guess who Iowa County, Iowa voted for? Also Donald Trump, with 62.95 percent.
I will say, perhaps controversially, that I’m actually not entirely against targeted tariffs or taxes or something on products and parts manufactured outside of the United States, when it is done for the purpose of protecting and increasing American jobs. I’m not even against increasing prices for certain things that (sorry) we actually do pay too little for, so that everyone in the supply chain is paid fairly for their labor.
However, this is something that needs to be done thoughtfully and carefully to ensure the least possible economic impact to American consumers, as well as targeted specifically towards products that are already manufactured in the United States. Or on products produced in sweatshops (you know, like the kind where Ivanka Trump’s clothing line was produced?), by forced labor or child labor or in countries where US trained death squads kill you for trying to unionize.
It would likely take from one to two years for Stellantis to open plants in the United States to replace the plants in Canada and Mexico. Were Trump to really be acting in the interests of American workers, he would figure something out to protect their jobs while Stellantis built those plants and put the company on some kind of timeline to bring those jobs to the US before any tariffs are enacted. He hasn’t.
It’s already hard to find workers at the moment — though who knows for how long, given all the layoffs — and the fact is, we don’t actually have the infrastructure or the workers necessary to produce everything here. Many people assume that all manufacturing jobs are good, well-paying jobs that help people without college degrees ascend to the middle class, but that’s not always the case. If factories are not unionized, those jobs are not going to pay any better than jobs at Walmart or McDonalds. Especially with Trump and his Department of Labor chipping away at workers’ collective bargaining rights and more. This is why our primary focus should actually be first ensuring that all workers in the United States are paid a living wage.
The only reason why some manufacturing jobs pay well is because they are union jobs. In fact, one of the things that really kicked the labor movement into gear in the first place was how very bad the working conditions and pay were for those working in factories. So if you bring manufacturing back to the US without ensuring that those jobs will be union jobs, they’re not actually going to help anyone.
On Xitter, there were tons of people excitedly proclaiming that we could bring clothing and textile manufacturing back to the United States, which sounds great in the hypothetical. The fact is, we do still have garment workers in the United States, but they often make far less than minimum wage. Because they are frequently paid on a piece-rate basis, many only make about $1.58 an hour. That needs to be fixed before we bring more of it over here, because “more jobs that pay $1.58 an hour” is not something that helps anyone.
We should always be looking for ways to ensure employment and a living wage for all Americans who are able to work, as well as to ensure that it is far more expensive for corporations to fuck over workers than to not fuck over workers. That being said, it needs to be done in a careful and thoughtful way so as not to accidentally screw workers in the process.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Churning out bangers today, she is!
Deep-red Kentucky is thrilled by all of this, of course. Especially the bourbon makers.
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Business/kentucky-bourbon-industry-caught-middle-global-tariff-war/story?id=119675707