Trump’s unorthodox style on jobs proving successful

It seems President-elect Donald Trump’s ongoing drumbeat to keep American jobs from moving offshore paid dividends again this week when Ford Motor Co. announced it would forgo building a $1.6 billion factory in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, and will instead invest $700 million in its Flint Rock, Mich., factory where new electric and autonomous vehicles will be built.

While Ford CEO Mark Fields said it was market forces that led to the decision, he also said the move was “a vote of confidence for President-elect Trump and some of the policies he may be pursuing.”

Among those “policies” is Trump’s promise to make the United States more competitive by lowering taxes and easing regulations on businesses as well as his threat to place a 35 percent tariff on products made in Mexico and imported into the United States.

Ford still plans to move production of its compact Focus automobile to Mexico, but that work will go to its existing plant in Hermosillo that currently produces midsize cars. Ford will hire about 200 additional workers at the Hermosillo plant.

Ford also plans to hire about 700 workers for the Michigan plant starting in 2018.

U.S. sales of the Focus were down 17 percent through November, but sales of Ford’s biggest SUV, the Expedition, were up 46 percent, due in no small part to low gasoline prices sparked by the current worldwide oil glut.

Previously on the jobs front — an issue that played large in his campaign for president — Trump announced in late December that Japanese billionaire investor Masayoshi Son had pledged that companies controlled by his firm SoftBank would invest $50 billion in the United States and create 50,000 jobs — including 5,000 jobs by wireless carrier Sprint and 3,000 jobs by One-Web, which is building a network of satellites to provide broadband internet. Son, a dominant investor in both companies, made the announcements after meeting with the president-elect at Trump Tower.

And that followed a deal Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence, the current governor of Indiana, struck in December with the heating and cooling giant Carrier Corp. to keep a manufacturing plant in Indiana instead of moving it to Mexico, saving up to more than 1,000 American jobs.

The verdict is not yet in on the trade policies the Trump administration ultimately will try to implement, but it’s nice to see the president-elect being an effective cheerleader for American businesses and workers.