The leader of the union that organizes an Indiana Carrier plant shrugged off angry tweets sent by President-elect Trump, who criticized the union leader by name Wednesday night.
Chuck Jones, the president of United Steelworkers 1999, called out Trump for misleading workers about the amount of jobs that would be kept in Indiana by his deal with Carrier. While Trump initially touted about 1,100 jobs staying at the plant, the number is actually closer to 700.
After Jones said Trump misled the employees of the plant, Trump lashed out on Twitter Wednesday night. Trump said Jones was doing “a terrible job representing workers” and was an example of why jobs are leaving the country. Jones said he expected better of the president-elect.
“He overreacted, President-elect Trump did, and I would expect if he was going to tweet something he would come out and try to justify his numbers, and try to justify when I called him out on when he said he did not make any direct mention of keeping Carrier jobs in this country,” Jones said on CNN. “He said it numerous times during his campaign.”
Jones confirmed he received death threats since the tweets were sent, but he wasn’t worried.
“I’ve been doing this job for 30 years, I’ve had a lot more serious threats than what people are doing now,” he said. “I’ve got a little more thicker skin than I did 30 years ago. Everybody’s got a right to their opinion and disagree on things, but I’m not overly upset about any of it.”
