What GE did to Your Future and Past

by Susan Ohanian

Although the name Schenectady comes from the Mohawk skahnéhtati meaning "beyond the pines," when I moved there a few decades ago, I didn't have a clue about the city’s history of American Indian usurpation or later slavery import. For me, this city sitting at the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson rivers brought back strains of “The Erie Canal,” the obligatory song everybody learned in grade school.


A huge sign boasted “General Electric City.” By far the largest employer, GE employed over 30,000 and every year boasted of increased production, way over the national average. It was a good city to live in, and I believed the GE slogan “We Bring Good Things to Life”—producing not just lightbulbs and refrigerators, but NBC and high tech stuff I knew nothing about.


Then Schenectady became one of the city’s GE dumped, relocating thousands of manufacturing jobs to cheap labor in the Sun Belt and overseas, leaving environmental brownfields behind. Then I remembered that Kurt Vonnegut worked there briefly as a publicist.  Besides generating good news about GE, Vonnegut wrote Player Piano, about a dystopian world run by machines.


And GE sponsored Ronald Reagan's TV career.


Neutron Jack Welch was in charge of strategic planning when all this restructuring went down. Then, as CEO he was famous for the edict that 10% of managers must be fired. No matter what kind of job they were doing, they were out. This is how he got the moniker Neutron Jack: eliminate the employees while leaving the buildings intact. It’s no surprise that by 1999 he was named "Manager of the Century" by Fortune magazine. When he retired from GE he received a severance payment of $417 million, the largest such payment in history. GE may decimate cities without so much as a shrug, but it knows how to reward its own top executives.


After leaving GE, Welch was grabbed up by the New York City public schools. A January 2003 dimwitted New York Times headline read “Executive Who Saved G.E. Is to Train School Principals. The artucke sang hosannas for the fact that Mayor Bloomberg and schools chancellor Klein were bringing in Jack Welch to train the city’s principals and save the schools.  Caroline Kennedy had been hired a couple of months previously to be the school system's chief fund-raiser.


Of late, Welch has consulted with Donald Trump whom he supported for president.  A few months into the Trump term, Welch gave The Donald a D on management skills (the Comey firing) and an A on policies such as tax reform and deregulation and on his Cabinet and Supreme Court picks.
Trump’s take on global warming sounds right out of Welch’s playbook: "the attack on capitalism that socialism couldn't bring."
After GE dumped so many workers, Schenectady suffered years of decline: Many businesses boarded up. It is now on the upswing, having become one of three sites selected for development of Class III casino gambling, under terms of a state constitutional amendment that allows such gaming in off-reservation sites.


But GE devastation continues. The six reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant, which suffered disastrous nuclear explosions, are all GE-designed boiling-water reactors, known in the industry as BWRs. Five have containment systems of GE's Mark I design, and the sixth is of the Mark II type. They were placed in operation between 1971 and 1979. Twenty-three sites in the US have sister GE reactors. The Japanese government estimates that cleaning up the Fukushima plant will take at least another three to four decades.