Screw That Bulb: How GE Is Plugging Into the Green Movement to Move Jobs and Advanced Technology to China

Save the environment … or save a U.S. job?  That’s the choice General Electric is forcing on U.S. consumers and its own workers. 

 

GE is promoting new, energy saving light bulbs known as compact fluorescents, or CFLs.  These bulbs last longer and use less energy than the typical incandescent bulbs found in most U.S. homes – but can cost up to 10 times the price.

 

GE is asking consumers and its employees to sign a pledge to “go green” and start purchasing the CFL light bulbs, which are imported from China.  The problem is that each pledge leads to the loss of jobs in U.S. lighting plants.  GE is actually asking workers in its lighting plants to pledge to put themselves out of a job!

 

As a company, General Electric is synonymous with the light bulb: Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulbs built GE into the global corporation it is today.  But if GE has its way, it will no longer manufacture light bulbs in the United States.  Since 1980, employment in GE lighting has dropped by 68%.  If everyone switched to the Chinese-made CFL bulbs, all U.S. plants would close.

 

But it doesn’t have to be this way.  The growth of “environmentally sustainable technology” was supposed to be a breakthrough on par with the discovery of incandescent bulbs.  Green manufacturing was supposed to stimulate our economy, not lead to further deindustrialization.  Cutting-edge products like the CFLs should lead to more jobs and profits.  GE is making the profits … but it is sending the jobs to China, a country known for exploiting workers and polluting the environment.

 

GE supported a European Commission ban on Chinese-made CFLs … so CFLs bought in Europe are manufactured in Europe.  But GE is refusing to invest in advanced technology for its U.S. plants so workers here can have a future too.

 

Please join with us, the workers at GE lighting, to ask GE to manufacture green in U.S. plants, so we all can benefit.  We shouldn’t have to choose between a clean environment or a pink slip for American workers.  Sign our petition today.