The international luxury fashion and leather goods brand Louis Vuitton is planning to create about 1,000 American jobs by opening its newest plant in the small town of Keene, Texas, this year.
As President Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump visit the brand new plant in Johnson County, Texas, on Thursday, Louis Vuitton executives have committed to creating about 1,000 American jobs at the facility over the next five years.
Louis Vuitton’s announcing the opening of its Texas plant — in the small town of Keene, which has a population of less than 6,500 residents — allows the global luxury fashion label to avoid tariffs on the goods made at the factory.
“This is consistent with Louis Vuitton’s recent signing of the Pledge to America’s Workers, which aims to expand programs that educate, train and support American workers,” Louis Vuitton executives said in a statement.
The Louis Vuitton factory in Keene will first open with about 150 American workers and with a plan to expand that workforce by 850 American workers by 2024. The goods manufactured at the plant will be labeled with “Made in the USA” tags.
Over the past three decades, free trade agreements and globalization of the U.S. economy have devastated American fashion manufacturing production and U.S. garment workers. Since 1990, fashion manufacturing jobs in the U.S. have declined by more than 80 percent, dropping from about 900,000 jobs to just 150,000 jobs in 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
Two years after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), companies laid off a total of 706 American workers from fashion manufacturing jobs in the U.S.
Between 1996 and 2011, companies laid off an average of 323 American workers every year in the fashion manufacturing industry. In that same period, American workers in textile mills suffered an average of 200 layoffs per year. In 1996, some 1,040 American workers in the clothing, textile, and leather manufacturing industry were fired from their jobs.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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