The true size of Trump’s Carrier win

President-elect Donald Trump accomplished what many people saw as his first victory on the manufacturing front this week, as he persuaded an air-conditioning factory in Indiana not to move up to 1,000 jobs to Mexico.

Many saw it as a step toward fulfilling Trump’s promise of reviving well-paying factory jobs. Yet the number of jobs saved at the Carrier factory is still extremely small compared to the number of manufacturing jobs that have been lost in the U.S. in recent years – so small, in fact, that these kinds of deals alone seem unlikely to do much to revive the manufacturing industry.

Since 2000, the U.S. has gone from having 17.3 million manufacturing jobs to around 12.3 million, a net loss of about 5 million jobs. The number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. bottomed out in 2010 at around 11.5 million and has risen in the years since.

Data show that Trump could negotiate a Carrier-like deal every week for the rest of his presidency, and still only restore about 4 percent of the manufacturing jobs that the U.S. has lost since 2000, as the New York Times’ Paul Krugman tweeted Wednesday.

Indiana alone has lost a net 147,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000 – meaning the Carrier jobs represent only 0.2 percent of manufacturing jobs lost in the state in that period. As the New York Times points out, Indiana has also added about 300,000 private sector jobs in the same period, but nearly three-quarters of those have been service sector jobs, which are on average lower-paying.

Liberals were also quick to argue that the effects of President Barack Obama’s bailout of the auto industry during the recession dwarfed the number of jobs saved in the Carrier deal. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the program had created 805,000 jobs over eight years, not including jobs that were saved, like at Carrier.

“So, if he does that 804 more times, he will have matched the standard set by President Obama – at least when it comes to creating manufacturing jobs,” Earnest said.