Trump Saved Carrier Jobs. These Workers Weren’t as Lucky.

HUNTINGTON, Ind. — These are the Indiana workers whose jobs President Trump didn’t save.

After assembling circuit boards for Carrier furnaces at a factory here for 21 years, Jim Sholle, 56, walked out of the plant for the final time last month. But he still finds himself waking up every morning at 4:30, ready to work the 6 a.m.-to-2 p.m. shift.

“I’m a routine guy, and I’m not boohooing,” he said. “But I feel used up.”

Pat Saylors, 57, is still employed, but her days here are numbered, as they are for more than 700 other blue-collar workers. Production is set to end by late December at the plant, this town’s largest private employer, and each month several dozen of them are being let go.

“I loved my job,” said Ms. Saylors, who earns $17.31 an hour as a materials specialist, readying parts for the workers on the assembly line. She joined the company 40 years ago, when the plant was in tiny Converse, Ind., and then followed her job to Huntington when the factory here opened in 1990.

Ms. Saylors is typical of the factory’s work force, which is mostly female, with an average age around 50. She joined a few months after graduating from high school, as did her daughter Amanda, who is now 33.

“It’s all I’ve ever known,” she said.

During Mr. Trump’s campaign, the fate of more than 2,000 Carrier jobs that the company wanted to move to Mexico from Indiana, including those in Huntington, were Exhibit A in his attacks on the free-trade policies of his predecessors, both Democratic and Republican.

So when President-elect Trump announced on Thanksgiving that he was near a deal with Carrier’s corporate parent, United Technologies, to save them, Mr. Sholle and Ms. Saylors thought they were among the lucky ones.

It was not to be. Thanks to public pressure from Mr. Trump and a generous package of tax breaks negotiated by Gov. Mike Pence, now the vice president, Carrier did agree to keep making some of its furnaces in Indianapolis, preserving roughly 800 of 1,400 jobs there.

But the plant in Huntington operated by United Technologies Electronic Controls, or UTEC, was not part of that deal — nor would it be helped by the “buy American” mandate for federal infrastructure projects that Mr. Trump promised in Wisconsin last week. And by early next year, the components used for furnaces still assembled in Indianapolis will come instead from Monterrey, Mexico, where it takes a day to earn what workers here make in about an hour.

The economy in Huntington, a town of 17,000 in rural northeast Indiana, is quite different from what workers in Indianapolis face, however, as is the culture. Despite some notable closings, many factories remain, with 21 percent of local workers employed in manufacturing, a higher proportion than in more than 90 percent of the other counties in the country.

And as Mr. Sholle’s reluctance to complain suggests, the anger about the economy and about Washington that was so evident in Indianapolis and other parts of the Midwest that Mr. Trump carried is more muted here. Not that it’s absent — more than 70 percent of Huntington County voters supported Mr. Trump — but the pain is further below the surface.

For the most part, the workers do not fault Mr. Trump for failing to preserve their jobs, even as he took credit for keeping the Indianapolis plant open.

“I support him 100 percent,” said Tami Barnett, a 27-year veteran who left at the end of March. “I was very pleased he saved the jobs in Indianapolis. Do I wish he could have saved mine? Absolutely. But he did his best.”

Susan Cropper, 55, who works in the plant with her sister, Sandy VanDiver, 58, said she did not regret voting for Mr. Trump in November, either.

“I’m glad he stepped in, but it’s a letdown,” she said, adding that most of her fury was reserved for Carrier and its executives.

Asked about the failure to keep the Huntington plant open, a White House spokesman said last week that Mr. Trump was “incredibly proud to work with United Technologies to save nearly 1,000 jobs in Indiana and will continue to work with major companies to ensure he is doing all he can to increase American manufacturing, job creation and economic growth.”

Huntington’s mayor, Brooks Fetters, admits when pressed to being frustrated that he never heard back from Mr. Pence’s office after he called late last year to find out why Huntington was not helped.

“Right or wrong, that’s where we are,” said Mr. Fetters, a moderate Republican. “We’re not in panic mode.”

And in any case, he said, “German stoicism runs deep in northern Indiana, and you take your lumps.”

Huntington has managed to adapt by luring new metalworking and automotive suppliers in recent years, according to Mark Wickersham, director of economic development for Huntington County.

“We are not a dying town,” he said, citing the $1.4 million expansion last fall of a learning center opposite the high school, where teenagers as well as adults can earn certificates in fields like advanced manufacturing and health care.

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