In an interview with CNN on Monday, Sen. Kamala Harris argued that President Donald Trump has failed to deliver on his promises to workers. And she issued a dire warning about autoworkers’ jobs in particular.
“He said he was going to help working people, and it is estimated that as many as 300,000 autoworkers may be out of a job before the end of the year,” she said aboard her campaign bus in Iowa.
That was a more conservative figure than Harris used July 12 on the radio show “The Breakfast Club,” during which she said, “He’s helped the top 1% and the biggest corporations. Meanwhile, some estimate that as many as 700,000 autoworkers were going to lose their job before the end of the year.”
Facts First: There is no credible estimate that 300,000 autoworkers might lose their jobs by the end of the year. And there has been an increase in autoworker jobs during the Trump presidency, though there has been a slight decrease over the past year.
We can’t fact-check the future of automotive employment; anything is possible, even a sudden depression. But Harris was wrong to claim that experts are suggesting there might be a massive decline in autoworker jobs within five months.
Harris’ campaign told CNN that the “300,000” figure came from a study published in February by the Center for Automotive Research. That study, however, estimated approximately 367,000 job losses in the entire economy, not among autoworkers in particular.
And the estimate was for job losses a year after Trump imposed a 25% tariff on automobiles and auto parts from every country except for Canada, Mexico and South Korea — which he has not done.
