The Terrible Punishment For Firing American Workers

So, if you ran a company like Whirlpool that was planning to fire 1,000 American workers and move their jobs to Mexico, where you'd be paying your new employees $70 per week, one thing that might happen is that you might get publicly praised by a sitting US Senator.

Last week, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) spoke at a Center for American Progress event focused on green jobs, where she pointed out that the US "can't have a 21st Century clean energy economy if we're using an electric grid that was built in the 1960s."

Stabenow said that it was therefore important to have a smart electric grid, and praised Whirlpool by name for doing a lot to create smart grid appliances and develop other technology that would reduce peak energy demand. She added that, "we can't just use green tech, we have to make it," and, "where things are made really does matter."

So when she was done speaking, I put in a question with her staff to see what she had to say about Whirlpool's taking stimulus money and firing Americans. I was told that her office was doing what they could with Whirlpool and were very supportive of buy American provisions, but that they'd been told by various companies that there would have been even more jobs lost without the stimulus. I was encouraged to follow up over email, which I did, sending along a link to be sure we were talking about the same incident.

I was sent this statement:

“The United States cannot afford to continue allowing other countries to lure our jobs overseas. That’s why we need a 21st century manufacturing strategy so that we can lead the world again by making things in America.”

Nothing about Whirlpool, nothing about the plant closing. I asked if the Senator didn't want to make a more specific statement about this incident after having brought the company up on her own to praise them by name. This afternoon, I was thanked for my interest.

Does Whirlpool make a habit of threatening elected officials that if complaints are made, matters will get worse, like they threaten workers planning to strike? Is making things in America more important in the abstract than it is in practice? We've had a lot of recent experience with Senators who supported policies publicly right up until it looked like they might pass, so who knows?

What I do know is that there are a lot of companies, like the banks and insurance giants, that make life hard on the public and get little but praise from our elected representatives. It's no more fun to see it happen close up than it is to read about it in the news.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future