164 local GE employees lose jobs

About 164 employees of Bloomington’s GE Consumer and Industrial plant were laid off Monday.

Today will be the last day of work for those employees.

The layoffs are a response to current market conditions, said Kim Freeman, director for public relations for Louisville-based GE Consumer and Industrial plants.

“Not only have appliance sales overall declined significantly during the past year, consumer demand for side-by-side refrigerators is down 42 percent,” Freeman said.

In an attempt to avoid the job cuts, plant officials presented options to the company such as wage freezes, said Carven Thomas, president and business manager of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union, Local 2249.

However, Thomas said the company was not interested in entertaining these options at the time.

“Their story was we were carrying too many people,” Thomas said. “Even if I got a wage freeze, we were making too many units with the amount of people we had.”
GE aims to decrease Bloomington production from 1,400 to 1,100 units per day, Thomas said.

“They’re adjusting the workforce to recessionary numbers, and I don’t think they’re looking forward to what happens when we come out of this recession,” Thomas said.

In March 2008, GE announced it would close during the first quarter in 2010 as a response to a decline in side-by-side refrigerator sales and rising material costs, according to a statement from plant manager Kent Suiters.

However, in July, GE announced its decision to cancel the previously announced closing in light of new developments including new energy legislation, Freeman said in her company statement.

The energy legislation is what extended the closing of the plant, Thomas said.

“If we reduce the amount of emissions in our products, we get a rebate,” Thomas said.

The idea behind this legislation was for companies to reduce emissions while
stimulating the economy by creating and keeping jobs, Thomas said.

“Congress did that to stimulate jobs,” Thomas said. “But when the bill was passed, no one said we expect you to create jobs and that’s the number of jobs we expect you to create.”

Some of the workers who are being laid off qualify for benefits, such as retirement, Freeman said.

They wanted to drastically minimize the impact of these job cuts, Suiters said in a statement.

“For those not eligible for retirement, we will work closely with them to take advantage of GE’s comprehensive range of benefits ... to help them through this transition,” Suiters said.

Currently, 78 of the Bloomington plant’s workers qualify for a retirement option, Thomas said.

“The retirement option is for those who are 55 years old with 25 years of seniority,” Thomas said. “It allows you to be supplemented until you reach the age of 62 – it’s a good deal.”

On Wednesday, plant officials handed out at least 93 lay-off notices and have been working throughout the week to get former employees proper benefits, Thomas said.

“We’re looking for that number to go down a little more,” Thomas said. “We’re hoping it will.”