General Electric to Union Workers: Drop Dead

[Better Believe It]

GE to Unions: Drop Dead
By Alexandra Brown
May 24, 2011

Flush with cash and celebrated at the White House, GE said the company would still seek to double workers' costs for health insurance and eliminate new hires' pensions. Bargaining opened today in New York.

The four-year national contract expires June 19. Contract talks come as GE has cut its U.S. workforce by 20 percent since 2004. The company has shed 32,000 jobs by closing plants, such as the many incandescent bulb plants replaced by compact fluorescent bulb plants in China.

In just 2009-2010 GE closed 27 U.S. locations. The result was that by 2010 only 15,000 workers were left in the 10 unions united in the GE Coordinated Bargaining Committee.

But wait—isn’t this the same GE whose CEO is President Obama’s “jobs czar”? In January Jeffrey Immelt was picked to head a presidential council whose goal, Obama said, is to “get the American people back to work.”

Read the full article at:

http://labornotes.org/2011/05/ge-unions-drop-dead

[Wilms]

1. .

[Starry Messenger]

2. recommend.

[Trey9007]

3. Disgusting........

Thats the only word that came to mind, after I read this article.

[Brickbat]

4. How's that council coming along, anyway?

Hmmm, let's see...there was a big tongue-kiss article on Immelt from Reuters a few days ago:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/19/us-ge-immelt-idUSTRE74I4UL20110519
Immelt, who was tapped by U.S. President Barack Obama in January to head an advisory panel on job creation, is also expanding the company's presence overseas. With the U.S. economy still in a sluggish recovery from the recession, he sees the fast-growing emerging markets of China and India, as well as oil-rich countries in the Middle East, as offering GE's best growth prospects for the next few years.

In 2010 GE generated about 53 percent of its revenue outside the United States, up from about 33 percent in 2000. Immelt himself travels so much that he only wears watches with built-in alarm clocks. With an eye toward growing foreign sales, he shifted Vice Chairman John Rice to Hong Kong this year, a move intended to help GE's Asian operations make decisions faster.

"If we woke up tomorrow and we're in a trade war with China where nothing can happen and no trade can occur, or if you woke up and saw what's going on in Libya was all of a sudden happening in Saudi Arabia, those are big secular threats that in the end I think have as much to do with GE's success as anything else," he said.

Seems to me that having a strong manufacturing base, competition and customers in the U.S. would be a good way to protect against that, but what do I know? In any case, let's see what the council itself is up to:

http://www.daytondailynews.com/business/2-u-s-jobs-council-members-talk-to-area-business-leaders-1157470.html

VANDALIA (Ohio) — Two members of President Barack Obama’s new council on job development visited the region Tuesday and praised the Dayton area for its manufacturing legacy and role in aviation history.

“I know for a fact that Dayton works,” said Jeff Immelt, head of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and chief executive and chairman of industrial giant General Electric Corp. Immelt noted that GE has more than 1,000 employees in the Dayton area, and GE Aviation will occupy a research and development center off River Park Drive.

Karen Mills, administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration, said, “Small business is really the engine of growth in a community like this.”

Immelt and Mills were among the council members who met with local business leaders and owners as part of the board’s inaugural information-gathering session.

Wait, "inaugural information-gathering session"? Just last week? Way to jump right on that jobs thing there.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/05/23/BU7C1JJLM5.DTL#ixzz1NNkmhnDh
Seven publicly traded U.S. corporations represented on President Obama's advisory Council on Jobs and Competitiveness - including Intel Corp. - have devoted a growing pool of their non-U.S. earnings to investments in other countries.

As a group, multinational companies with current or former chief executive officers on Obama's jobs council have, over the past four years, almost doubled the cumulative amounts they've reinvested overseas, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Well, that's certainly telling. It doesn't look like change to me, but it sure looks like something.