Pa. Democrats slam Trump on jobs, economy ahead of his Pittsburgh visit
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Pennsylvania Democrats used President Trump’s visit to Pittsburgh on Wednesday to blast his economic policies, saying their constituents have been left behind.
“The Trump economy is not working,” said state Rep. Austin Davis, D-McKeesport. “My Mon Valley constituents are frustrated by closed factories. They’re frustrated by the lack of a good plan that will make prescription drugs more affordable.”
Davis cited the July closing of the Riverbend Foods North Side plant, which resulted in the layoff of 400 workers.
“We’re sick of being disappointed by the man in the White House,” he said.
Riverbend Foods, a subsidiary of Insight Equity, a private equity firm, made soup, baby food and other products on the site Heinz opened in 1888 and sold to Del Monte Foods in 2002. TreeHouse Foods acquired the plant in 2006 and sold it to Insight Equity in 2017.
Joining Davis on the media conference call were Pennsylvania Democratic Party Chairwoman Nancy Patton Mills and Pennsylvania AFL-CIO President Rick Bloomingdale.
They said a “hallmark” of Trump’s presidency has been the loss of 8,000 manufacturing jobs in Pennsylvania in the last 12 months, stagnant wages and “skyrocketing” health care costs.
“On nearly every front, Donald Trump has broken his promises to the voters in our state,” Mills said. “Pennsylvania voters … will hold him accountable next year.”
Bloomingdale acknowledged that many Western Pennsylvania union members voted for Trump in 2016 but said “they won’t make that mistake again (in 2020).”
Trump was the scheduled keynote speaker at Shale Insight 2019 — a gathering of oil and gas industry leaders from Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia – on Wednesday in Downtown Pittsburgh.
While Trump came to tout his administration’s policies on shale gas drilling, Bloomingdale said he has “abandoned other sectors of energy,” including coal. He cited the impending closing of FirstEnergy’s Bruce Mansfield Plant, a coal-fired power plant in Beaver County, as an example.
Originally scheduled for closing in 2021, the Shippingport plant will now close in November. About 200 people work at the plant.
“The idea that Donald Trump will come to our state to talk about the economy is frankly insulting,” Bloomingdale said. “He promised he’d bring back manufacturing, and yet economists say the manufacturing sector is in recession.”
The U.S. Labor Department reported in September that Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — two important swing states in 2020 — have lost the highest number of manufacturing jobs in the country in 2019, Bloomingdale said.
The national unemployment rate dropped to 3.5% in September, while Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate was 4%, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Two decades ago, the U.S. had 17.4 million manufacturing jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That figure fell annually to a less than 11.5 million in 2010, during the economic recession. Since 2011, the number of manufacturing jobs has steadily climbed to more than 12.8 million this year — which federal figures shows is about 500,000 more manufacturing jobs than when Trump took office.
There were 868,000 manufacturing jobs in Pennsylvania in 1999, figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show. That fell steadily to 557,700 in 2010. When Trump took office in 2017, Pennsylvania had 561,200 manufacturing jobs.
In January, there were 569,800 manufacturing jobs in the state — a figure that fell to 561,700 in September, preliminary federal data shows.