In the news: TIME: U.S. Taxpayers Bankrolled General Electric. Then It Moved Its Workforce Overseas
A report released by the UMass Boston Labor Resource Center and the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations became the subject of a major TIME article, calling attention to General Electric’s decades-long practices of offshoring jobs while relying on taxpayer subsidies.
“It’s been an ongoing joke since I’ve been there that GE will close in, like, five years,” said Sam Bansfield, a GE worker at the company’s Lynn, MA plant. “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,” notes the article. “Over roughly the same period, the report says, three out of every four GE jobs in the U.S. disappeared.”
The academics describe GE’s government-dependent business model and outline an alternative path for GE and the federal government to take as the country looks to boost renewables and address supply-chain related challenges. “GE’s reliance on government subsidies is an indisputable fact,” says Nick Juravich, a primary author on the report and the associate director of the Labor Resource Center at UMass Boston, “as is our government’s willingness to continue awarding subsidies to GE despite its rampant offshoring. We hope that GE’s plan to ‘realize the full potential of each of [their] businesses’ will include re-investing in US workers and communities.”
We’re continuing to call for GE to “Bring It Home.” Read the TIME article here. You can access the UMass/Cornell joint report here.