Donald Trump’s claim that, because of him, SoftBank would be investing $50 billion in the U.S. and creating 50,000 jobs was greeted somewhat less credulously than his Carrier claims. But it’s still worth an extra look at the details. It’s not just that SoftBank had already planned a major investment fund before the election:

Worse yet, this deal is lose, lose, lose for the domestic economy. First, this inflow of foreign capital will bid up the U.S. dollar, which will reduce the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing by making imports cheaper and exports more expensive. This will increase the U.S. trade deficit and reduce employment in U.S. manufacturing. The U.S. dollar has gained about 25 percent in the past two-and-a-half years, and one-fifth of that increase has occurred since the election. As a result, the trade deficit in manufactured goods increased sharply in 2015 and is poised for another increase after the recent run-up in the dollar. Meanwhile, the United States has lost 78,000 manufacturing jobs since the first of the year due, in part, to the rising trade deficit.

Second, foreign investment in the U.S. economy is dominated by foreign purchases of existing U.S. companies. Between 1990 and 2005, foreign multinational companies (MNCs) acquired or established domestic subsidiaries that employed 5.25 million U.S. employees. The vast majority (94 percent) of jobs associated with those investments were in existing firms acquired by foreign MNCs. However, 4 million of those jobs disappeared through layoffs or divestiture of part or all of those companies [...]

SoftBank provides a clear example of plans to acquire and merge existing U.S. businesses. 

Labor Secretary Tom Perez is running for Democratic National Committee chair, he told DNC members Thursday after a lot of very heavy hinting. Perez has been an effective and respected labor secretary, but he enters the DNC race after Rep. Keith Ellison has locked up a great deal of support, including the AFL-CIO endorsement.

With President Obama forced to work largely through executive action in his second term, Perez’s Labor Department has been the site of many of Obama’s major recent accomplishments, such as the expansion of overtime eligibility to millions more workers (currently held up in the courts).

Perez has proven himself an able handyman, steering a dizzying array of labor rules and regulations through Washington’s often-stymied bureaucracy despite constant political threats and general hostility coming from Republicans and the business lobby. Those include not only the overtime rule, but an expansion of federal labor protections to cover home-care workers; a long-shot crusade to establish new standards in the retirement-advising industry; an executive order to use the federal government’s contracting process to create good jobs; and a stern guidance aimed at stopping rampant worker misclassification.

Perez has the potential to bridge some of the Democratic Party’s battling priorities after the November elections—he is the son of Dominican immigrants, but as labor secretary, he has gained deep experience with the concerns of white working-class voters (and others, but we all know it’s the white ones who count in the media). However, he’s a relatively late entrant in a field with some strong candidates, including one—Ellison—who has support not just from the AFL-CIO but from a long list of big names.

People under the age of 18 have to get parental permission for a lot of things. In Texas, that list includes getting married, getting an abortion, and joining the military. Soon, it could include joining a union. Moshe Z. Marvit reports on a bill that’s been pre-filed for the Texas legislature’s session starting in January that would do just that. Anyone under 18 years of age would need parental permission to join a union, because unions are a thing teens desperately need to be protected from. But, uh:

If the bill passes, children as young as 14 will be able to enter into an employment agreement with most employers without parental consent, but they will not be permitted to join a union without a signed parental consent.

The purpose of such a bill is not immediately clear. There appears to be no problem for which this bill is a solution. Texas has long been a right-to-work state, which means that any worker who is represented by a union can choose to pay no dues. It is also not clear how many unions even have minors as members in Texas.

Teens can and do die on the job, but let’s by all means protect them from unions, which make workplaces safer by bargaining for improved training, working conditions, and safety equipment. Of course teens don’t need protecting from unions—but passing a law is a good way to to create the impression that there’s some big problem of unions endangering kids.

This week has been one horrible story after another for working people, and the Trump years are guaranteed to be more of the same, and worse. But let’s take a minute to focus on a couple of positive stories just to alleviate the gloom a teeny tiny bit.

● A raise for some:

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan announced Tuesday the Charlotte-based company will raise wages for its lowest-paid workers to $15 an hour, the latest big bank to make such a move.

Moynihan briefly discussed the plan at an industry conference in New York but did not provide further details. Bank of America spokeswoman Ferris Morrison told the Observer the change, to take effect in early 2017, will increase the bank’s current minimum pay of $13.50.

● Good stuff in New York City:

If it passes — and council members are confident it will — the law would require fast-food employers to automatically deduct fees from the paychecks of workers who choose to be represented. The money would go to a member organization of their choosing, tasked with advocating on the worker’s behalf. It looks and sounds an awful lot like a union, in an industry where unionization is all but impossible under the current system.

● Also up in New York City, bills to protect retail and fast food workers from scheduling abuses.

● Ikea is expanding paid parental leave for U.S. employees.

● Columbia University graduate students voted to unionize.

Chuck Jones is the president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, which represents the workers at the much-discussed Indiana Carrier plant. That put him in the spotlight when he had to be the person to correct not just Donald Trump but much of the media by pointing out that Trump’s deal with Carrier had saved not the thousand-plus jobs claimed but just around 800. And calling out a Trump lie made Jones Trumpic Enemy Number One, at least for Wednesday night:

Chuck Jones didn’t start his work life with a seven-figure loan from his daddy. He doesn’t have tens of millions of Twitter followers. He can’t offer Carrier hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in tax breaks. He can’t threaten its parent company’s federal contracts, or promise to rewrite the laws governing corporations in ways it likes. He is not the president-elect.

So, no. Chuck Jones could not singlehandedly save jobs at Carrier that, by the way, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence had not been able to keep in the state when he was a mere governor without a notorious bully backing him. Jones could only negotiate the best deal he could backed by the power his workers and his union had been able to build, person by person—and he was doing that in the face of an economy shaped by union-busters and greedy billionaires like Donald Trump. 

Now, thanks to the president-elect deciding it’s a reasonable use of his power to attack a private citizen, Jones has a little bit of a platform. Let’s hear what he has to say:

Jones then responded to the tweet on CNN, saying of Trump: "If he wants to blame me, so be it, but I look at him and how many millions of dollars he spent on his hotels and casinos, trying to keep labor unions out, you know, so, I like my side, trying to work to make people's lives the best they can be," Jones said.

And:

Jones, who said the union wasn't involved in the negotiations, said he's working to lift his members' spirits. He said he didn't have time to worry about Trump.

“He needs to worry about getting his Cabinet filled,” he said, “and leave me the hell alone.”

Don’t forget—Jones is working to lift his members’ spirits because more than a thousand of them will be out of work while the president-elect runs around claiming to have saved their jobs.

And by the way, CNN and Politico, Jones is not a “union boss,” unless you want to start calling Trump “U.S. boss” (not that he’d mind). Jones is the elected president of his union local, not an autocrat.

The Department of Labor is appealing the judge's decision blocking the Obama administration’s expansion of overtime eligibility. That expansion would mean that millions of additional workers would be paid time and a half if they worked more than 40 hours a week, which means that a lot of people are now being kept from either extra time or extra money they should be getting. The Economic Policy Institute offers some of their stories:

My day was ruined when I found out they blocked the new overtime law. I’m a salaried manager at a gas station. I’m required to work 45 hours a week, but it usually ends up being more because I pick up shifts for people and fill in when employees call out. My company switched me to hourly, so I would get overtime for those extra hours. Without the new rule, they’re switching me back—just when I was on the cusp of finally getting paid for every hour I work. I don’t understand why lawmakers don’t want people to get paid for their work.

But the court case could be moot if Donald Trump decides he doesn’t think workers should get overtime. And Dave Jamieson points out that this is yet another conflict of interest for Trump, whose businesses would likely have to pay some workers more under the new threshold:

To understand the conflict in clear terms, imagine an assistant groundskeeper at a golf course that may or may not be owned by the Trump Organization. Our hypothetical employee works on salary, earning something in the low $40,000s. He likes his job, but it’s brutal in the busy winter season (we’re in Florida), and he’s often putting in 60-hour weeks to keep the course in shape. Under the old rules, he doesn’t get paid any overtime for those extra 20 hours he works in the high season ― all he takes home is his base salary.  

But under the new rules, he’d be eligible for time-and-a-half pay on those additional hours. That leaves his employer with a few options. They can start paying our groundskeeper overtime pay. They can bump up his salary so that it’s above the new threshold of $47,476, thereby making him exempt from the rules. Or they can hire an additional assistant and give her those extra 20 hours, thereby avoiding the time-and-a-half pay on our original worker. But any way they do it, the employer is going to have to pay some amount of money they weren’t paying before.

I guess we know what Trump will base this decision on.

When you get below the “Whoo! Trump!” headlines on Donald Trump’s deal with air conditioning and heating manufacturer Carrier to keep some jobs in the United States that had been planned to move to Mexico, there are some real head-scratchers.

On Thursday, as he toured the factory floor here to take credit for saving roughly half of the 2,000 jobs Indiana stood to lose, Mr. Trump sent a message to other businesses as well that he intended to follow through on his pledges to impose stiff tariffs on imports from companies that move production overseas and ship their products back to the United States.

Not sure where “giving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in tax incentives to keep some jobs” equals “following through on his pledges to impose stiff tariffs on imports.”

“The free market has been sorting it out and America’s been losing,” Mr. Pence added, as Mr. Trump interjected, “Every time, every time.”

Leaving aside the fact that the market that’s been sorting things out hasn’t exactly been free at any point, what we’re looking at here is a combination of doubling down on existing practices of bribing companies to keep jobs in the U.S., promising future policy shifts in favor of corporate interests, and conveying that cooperation in one case will make the president-elect happy where not cooperating will lead him to hold a grudge. Making America Great Again?

Meanwhile, Carrier sent a letter to workers raving about how “the incoming Trump-Pence administration has emphasized to us its commitment to support the business community and create an improved, more competitive U.S. business climate.” Gosh, that really sounds like Trump stuck it to them! Oh, and by the way: “We are moving forward with previously announced plans to relocate the fan coil manufacturing lines, with expected completion by the end of 2017.” Okay, then. I’m sure the media will give blanket coverage when those jobs go.

The details are fuzzy on Donald Trump’s deal to save 1,000 (or is it 800?) Carrier air conditioner manufacturing jobs from outsourcing, but the picture that’s emerging is not a confidence-inspiring one. The state of Indiana is paying for the jobs with a big tax incentive package, which isn’t unusual at all. In fact, such incentives are so common that one Donald Trump took the time to rail against them on the campaign trail repeatedly.

"Over the years, I've watched, for years, for 10 years, for 12 years, for 15 years, beyond Obama, and I've watched as politicians talked about stopping companies from leaving our states," Trump said. "Remember, they'd give the low-interest loans. Here's a low-interest loan if you stay in Pennsylvania. Here's a zero-interest loan. You don't have to pay. Here's a this. Here's a tax abatement of any kind you want. We'll help your employees. It doesn't work, folks. That's not what they need. They have money. They want to go out, they want to move to another country, and because our politicians are so dumb, they want to sell their product to us and not have any retribution, not have any consequence. So all of that's over."

But if it’s so common, why hadn’t Indiana Gov. Mike Pence offered Carrier tax incentives before now? Well, he had.

But John Mutz, a former Indiana lieutenant governor who sits on the [Indiana Economic Development Corporation’s] 12-member board, told POLITICO that Carrier turned down a previous offer from IEDC before the election. He said he thinks the choice is driven by concerns from Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies, that it could lose a portion of its roughly $6.7 billion in federal contracts.

“This deal is no different than other deals that we put together at the IEDC to retain jobs, but the fact is that the difference is that United Technologies depends on the federal government for lots of business,” Mutz said.

“The major factor that’s changed is we had an election,” Mutz said.

Trump did talk about “retribution” for companies taking jobs overseas. So it seems the choice, at least implicitly, was “take this giant pile of money to only move half as many jobs to Mexico, or the president-elect will hold a grudge come contracts time.” If President Obama suggested an executive order making this kind of threat policy, as opposed to private deal-making, House Republicans would pass a resolution of disapproval and the Chamber of Commerce and five other business lobby groups would sue to block it. And if it was policy, it would be evenly applied, not done the Trump way—in secret to generate good headlines with no transparency on what’s actually going on. The media is going to have to learn that if it’s done in secret with no transparency, the good headlines should probably be put on hold. (I'm looking at you, CNN.)