Carrier leaving Indy for Mexico

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A lot of talks with my 2nd-generation AC guy in Austin. He's pretty grossed out where the industry went (this was in the 00s). Yes he's very busy but fixing it every season or more is not his idea of service/satisfaction. Even after 20yrs these things should go 3-5 between needing work. Like my BOL/builder Rheem did until it finally cracked a solder in the evaporator at which point it's landfill.

A neighbor got a whole new Carrier system.... that tripped the breaker the second season they tried to run it. Yeah they fixed it after several days of customer sweating but that's not the idea with a new top-brand installation, is it?

Speaking of UTC, this building has a 15yo Otis hydraulic elevator serving only 30 users. The motor starter fails no less than every 9 months, a repetitive 3-hour inconvenience and gawd knows what the service call costs. Meanwhile, the down landings can knock fillings out of your teeth. And the one thing that users have to tolerate everytime they use it is the chintzy buttons. They're stictiony plastic and square. If you don't push them exactly the way they feel like being pushed, they jam in the housing and don't do anything. Oh, and in this hundred-thousand-dollar machine with a presumed design life in excess of 30 years, the cab fan makes more noise than a cheapo/builder Nutone bathroom fart fan.

Unite THIS, UTC. &#92|/ If you don't give a damn about the enduser market, just go back to cost-plus DOD contracting where you clearly belong.
 
Back in our childhoods and even into the 80s, we could not do business with communist countries. Now China has our manufacturing, our patents, our trade secrets and CHINA EVEN MAKES SOME OF OUR WEAPONS COMPONENTS. Yesterday was parts day and for the first time that I can remember, I picked up a bag with an Electrolux (Westinghouse style) dryer renewal kit that was marked Made in the People's Republic of China. I remember what I learned in elementary school: any country with People's Republic in the name is communist and any country with Democratic in the name is not.

As to why and how families in the post war era could do reasonably well with a single wage earner: organized labor. Labor unions had clout to set wages for their workers and those wages became the benchmark for other workers in other industries. One of the goals of moving manufacturing out of this country is to cripple labor unions which have traditionally been supportive of Democratic candidates and positions. Don't you see the connection between a country of the very rich and the poor and Republican ideals? If you can't, don't bother taking art appreciation lessons because you are blind.
 
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Trouble is a lot of those union worker didn't vote the way they should have to keep the gravy train rolling. Now it stops mostly in Wall Street, DC, costal California/Seattle and a few scattered other places.
Starting with Nixon, and especially Regean, Union-Joe-Six-Pack became an increasingly hard vote to get for the liberal/dems.
By Bill Clinton's time Dems were increasingly less liberal or, as in Bill's case, not at all liberal.
Obama, functionally at least, is well to the RIGHT of Eisenhower on many issues, as is HRC.
Sanders is making such a splash because he is, as Noam Chomsky says, "a good New Dealer Democrat."
In this post i am talking about economic issues.
[this post was last edited: 2/12/2016-12:36]
 
Unions

I've been a supporter of Unions for a long time, but I get this feeling that this anti-union sentiment these past few decades...along with the well crafted smear campaign from a certain faction...is largely the doing of the Unions themselves.
I think 'bojack' touched on it.
Many of the members started voting against their interests.
While at the same time, many of the Union leaders and management types, became as greedy and corrupt as the company bosses they so objected to.

Now granted this isn't "everybody" who's in a Union.
But, I think everybody out there has some kind of "union slug" story to tell.
Heck, I have a few of my own!

-The GM employees PROUDLY leaving speaker wires unplugged, or leaving beer cans/sandwiches inside door panels of Corvettes.

-The high school jr. algebra teacher who blatantly told a kid in my class "I'm tenured, and this is an elective class, so I don't have to go over homework problems I don't want to."

- The college friend who worked for Chrysler, being threatened constantly by a few union jack-holes if he ever tattled on them for taking 3hr. lunches or coming back drunk!

- The fellow Pratt & Whitney engineers telling stories of strike times when their cars were beaten and their lives were threatened for crossing picket lines going to their non-union engineering jobs!

- The GM union rep who pulled out a bottle of whiskey when he got the strike order in mid 2000s from the UAW.....IN A FACTORY! (I'd be fired if I pulled out booze on my desk!)

It's constant anecdotes like that....that really stretch the imagination of trying to be a union supporter.
I can't help but think.....maybe we need a period of union collapse, purging and squalor to reset things; peoples' priorities, and reorganize with more pure intentions.
I don't know.
Just my thoughts.
 
Per Faux news and the wall street journal

Unions are baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.
 
"to protect product quality?"

Can you even have more of slap in the face?

F$%# THAT GUY.

UGH.
Those poor people.

I'm changing my new furnace and AC purchase this Spring to Trane.
 
Tom,

 

I appreciate your concern for my sight.  What I said was that there were problems with both ends of the economic spectrum.  I don't hate the poor.  I hate what seems to be a lack of personal responsibility in bringing children into this world when it seems they have little interest in raising and caring for them.  It made some sense years ago with a higher infant mortality rate to have more children.  In today's world, I don't see the need.  Even as a gay man, I know how children are created.  Much of societies problems can be blamed on greed, but you can't blame the wealthy for irresponsible breeding.  If your bathtub was overflowing, the first thing you would do is turn the water off before cleaning up.

 

Back to the topic, what Carrier is doing is terrible.  It's only another in the long exodus from this country.  Not one politician on either side knows what to do.  Our manufacturing base is gone.  The factories have been replaced by fast food restaurants or loft apartments.  The general public is just as greedy as consumers.  We must have it all now and for cheap.
 
Why do I get the feeling (after seeing the general reaction in that video) that there will be a lot of sabotage going on from now until the shut down from disgruntled employees.
 
You couldn't pay me

to buy anything from Carrier for the last 30 years.  Every neighbor we had with Carrier AC and heat had problems from DAY ONE!  Lennox's, rarely, and my parents' Trane only one problem in 20 years until the heat exchanger cracked and they replaced the whole unit with a Rheem (time will tell about it).
 
Just what line of Carrier products were built in that plant?Their commercial products I have had or others have had no problems.We have Carrier commercial chillers at the transmitter plant.Yes-one of them is running even in this cold!That is just what that area needs-another site closing!
 
If you have a job at a company that can be outsourced, it is more difficult to negotiate union contracts. The Garment Workers Union is a classic example. Textile manufacturing was one of the first to travel out of the U.S.
The Teachers Union is evidently crafted in stone. It is a job that is not going to get outsourced. In some cases retirement begins on the job. Reply #22 contains a classic example. Too bad more school kids don't use their iPhone for something useful.
 
Sabotage

From what I know, the vast majority of residential HVAC units are/were made in Indiana.
It is, or was, the largest HVAC factory in North America, after UTC consolidated all of Carrier and Bryant's capacity.
Those workers are PISSED. I would not trust a large necessary machine coming out of that factory anymore.

I worked for UTC for a while.
They actually are a great employer, until the day they don't need you.
I saw a management presentation once on accident.
All the rest of us "little people" were literally described as "engineering energy" and that ENERGY can be transferred wherever and whenever they see fit.
That was the day I knew I had to leave.
Not that the grass is ever much greener elsewhere.
 

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