MS. IFILL: Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Mr. Kurchner.
As you may have noticed, following this election, Donald Trump came to Indiana and talked a lot about what happened with the Carrier Corporation and shipping their jobs out of state. Here is someone who worked for Carrier, and he has a question for you.
Q How are you doing, Mr. President?
THE PRESIDENT: How are you?
Q My name is Eric Cottingham (ph). And I'm representing the Steelworkers Union, No. 1999. And I'm trying to find out what do we have left as far as all of our jobs are leaving in Indianapolis. And I see here you're doing a lot of things, but in Indianapolis, there’s nothing there for us. I mean, what’s next? What can we look forward to in the future as far as jobs, employment, whatever? Because all of our jobs have left or in the process of leaving, sir.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, in fact, we've seen more manufacturing jobs created since I've been President than any time since the 1990s. That's a fact. And if you look at just the auto industry as an example, they’ve had record sales and they’ve hired back more people over the last five years than they have for a very long, long time. We actually make more stuff, have a bigger manufacturing base today than we've had in most of our history. The problems have been -- part of the problems have had to do with jobs going overseas. And this is one of the reasons why I've been trying to negotiate trade deals to raise wages and environmental standards in other countries so that they’re not undercutting us.
But, frankly, part of it has had to do with automation. You go into an auto factory today that used to have 10,000 and now they’ve got a thousand people making the same number of cars or more. And so what that means is, even though we're making the same amount of stuff in our manufacturing sector, we're employing fewer people.
Now, the good news is that there are entire new industries that are starting to pop up, and you're actually seeing some manufacturers coming back to the United States because they’re starting to realize, you know what, energy prices are lower here, workers are better here, this is our biggest market, and so even though we off-shored and went someplace else before, now it turns out we're better off going ahead and manufacturing here.
But for those folks who’ve lost their job right now because a plant went down to Mexico, that isn't going to make you feel better. And so what we have to do is to make sure that folks are trained for the jobs that are coming in now, because some of those jobs of the past are just not going to come back.
And when somebody says -- like the person you just mentioned who I'm not going to advertise for -- that he’s going to bring all these jobs back, well, how exactly are you going to do that? What are you going to do? There’s no answer to it. He just says, well, I'm going to negotiate a better deal. Well, how exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have? And usually the answer is he doesn’t have an answer. More
Source:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/06/02/remarks-president-pbs-newshour-town-hall-discussion-gwen-ifill-elkhart