President Trump, stop our jobs from leaving Iowa

This Labor Day, President Trump tweeted: “The Worker in America is doing better than ever before.”

As a worker who is about to lose my job at the Siemens plant in Burlington — along with 1,400 other workers at Siemens plants across the country — I don’t live in the same America as Trump.

Siemens, a massive German corporation valued at $47 billion, gave us no warning that our layoffs would happen. They sat us down on April 23 and spent 20 minutes giving us the bad news — taking no questions and offering no support.

If it were not for my union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, and our union bargaining committee who worked to negotiate severance benefits and services to help in the transition, we would have been left with nothing more than a pink slip and an apathetic “thank you for your service.”

None of it makes any sense.

Our plant has been a bedrock of our community for 150 years. Today, we are a modern, profitable, productive workplace. The workers in India and Europe who will take our jobs can’t compete with our skills and collective knowledge. Upper management told us that themselves.

That’s why I’m asking President Trump to follow through on the promises he made on the campaign trail to punish companies like Siemens who send American jobs overseas.

As the CEO of America, Inc., Trump has the power to tell a company like Siemens to keep our plant in business. He could demand that as a federal contractor, they can’t send our jobs overseas. All he would have to do is sign an executive order.

Instead, Siemens is being rewarded for sending our jobs to foreign workers with nearly $550 million in lucrative contracts from the Trump administration. Siemens is raking in profits thanks to our hard-earned taxpayer dollars.

We are not alone. As a new report from Good Jobs Nation shows, close to 8,000 jobs have been lost in Iowa since President Trump was elected, including almost 2,000 jobs with federal contractors. Nationally, the pace of outsourcing by federal contractors is at the highest level since the Great Recession and U.S. corporations have sent more than 142,000 American jobs abroad under Trump’s watch.

The truth is that the Trump administration has actively encouraged job losses by awarding more than $50 billion in federal contracts to companies like Siemens, General Motors, AT&T and other corporations that continue to ship our jobs overseas.

People here in Iowa are hurt and angry. If good manufacturing jobs continue to disappear, so will the American middle class.

That’s why I’m calling on President Trump to stop Siemens from shutting down our plant.

Back when he was running for president, Trump delivered a lot of tough talk about stopping corporations from outsourcing our jobs to foreign countries. We need action and leadership now, not just empty words.

Chris Tucker is the president of International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Local 1010, which represents workers at the Siemens plant in Burlington.