U.S. Taxpayers Bankrolled General Electric. Then It Moved Its Workforce Overseas

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U.S. Taxpayers Bankrolled General Electric. Then It Moved Its Workforce Overseas



The General Electric plant in Lynn, MA is pictured on Feb. 10, 1970. Photo by Dan Sheehan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

BY ABBY VESOULIS https://twitter.com/abbyvesoulis NOVEMBER 9, 2021 12:20 PM EST

When Sam Bansfield first started working as a material handler at General Electric’s Lynn, Massachusetts plant in 2012, she remembers the noise—the loud clanking of her coworkers in the piece-making wing of the jet engine factory. ... Nowadays, she says, the place is painfully quiet. “You can hear everybody,” she says. “There’s no machines running. There’s not any work.”

Bansfield’s experience resonates across the United States. Since 1989, GE’s domestic labor force has declined by 75%—from 277,000 to just 70,000 workers, according to a new report first reviewed by TIME from the University of Massachusetts, Boston and Cornell University. Part of that decrease can be explained by GE’s decision to sell pieces of its business, including its biopharma and transportation arms. But its manufacturing plants have been gutted too: since the 1980s, production personnel at GE’s Lynn, and Schenectady, New York plants have been cut by 90%.

This dynamic reflects in many ways a central economic story in the U.S. over the last thirty years. Large corporations have been off-shoring, and down-sizing domestic manufacturing en masse since the 1990s, fueled by noncompetitive labor rates, powerful trade agreements, and innovations in automation. On Tuesday, GE announced that it will divide itself into three public companies—aviation, healthcare and energy.

But GE’s disinvestment in America’s domestic labor force is different, the UMass/Cornell report says, because of the volume of state and federal taxpayer grants, tax credits, and subsidies the company received while simultaneously disinvesting in the U.S. economy. GE has drawn roughly $1.6 billion in federal money since Fiscal Year 2000, plus $687 million in state and local awards since 1992, totaling more than $2.2 billion, according to a nonprofit’s subsidy tracker that the report uses. Over roughly the same period, the report says, three out of every four GE jobs in the U.S. disappeared.

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