Generous Electric

Believe it or not, that's what they used to call GE. Obviously that was many years before the unctuous a-hole Immelt was lecturing the lads and lassies about how to make do with less.

That's what it's about these days. Y'all better adjust your expectations, 'cause if you don't this factory is heading to (PICK ONE) China, Mexico, Bulgaria, anywhere we can successfully bully the workers.

When my forbears left a broken Europe, GE was one of their favorite destinations. Uncle Horst, who had got his millwright ticket in Switzerland, was the first of the immediate family to decamp to the new world, and it was to take a job at the new GE plant in Guelph circa 1955.

He became a welding inspector there. His brother Werner soon followed. Werner went on to several welding gigs before breaking out to become one of the world's leading scholars of reformation history.

Numerous relations followed. I served time at GE, as did two of my three brothers. Innumerable nephews did too. Uncle Horst paved the way for at least two dozen family members to get some serious stuff on their resumes.

And then GE morphed into Westinghouse which morphed into ABB which eventually closed the plant but miraculously opened one in Mexico!

And that miracle was the result of the folks in Ottawa pushing "free trade" on those of us who were supposedly going to benefit from it.

Marx, Engels... Forbes?

I know!

There's a disconnect in that title. But take a read of this slam of uber-corp General Electric.

Turns out "Generous Electric" is one of the most polished practitioners in the art of looting employee pensions.

Here in Canada none other than Conrad Black was one of the pioneers of the practice when he went after the pension "surplus" of the Dominion Store cashiers and shelf-stockers back in the day.

Unfortunately, practices that were once seen as egregious violations of the social contract, if left unchallenged, eventually give rise to a revised social contract.

Which is how Canada's most liberal newspaper today came to publish an article called "Bankable sick days a perk past its prime."

They were not, regrettably, being ironic.

Canada's most liberal newspaper references both the Fraser Institute and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business in a "news" article that argues vehemently that "perks" like defined benefit pensions and bankable sick days are relics of an era when unions had too much clout.

Thanks to the last thirty years of Reaganomics, bankable sick days and defined benefit pension plans are now almost exclusively the purview of unionized public sector workers.

That's because the private sector workers have been squeezed out of their unions and their benefits by the ever-present and all-too-real threat of having their jobs offshored.

As you may have noticed, most public sector workers are immune to that threat. You can't really hire out the township snow-plowing to China or Mexico. Or your teaching or policing.

But you can demand that they reduce their expectations to the emaciated level of the utterly gutted private sector.

And what a shameful spectacle it is to see Canada's most liberal newspaper leading this charge.

GE and me

GE and me go way back. Back to the C.S. Jackson era.

C.S. Jackson was for a long time the leader of the United Electrical workers union that represented the shop floor folks at GE.

He was also an unabashed commie.

It's probably him who I have to blame for my political awakening. Long before Jeffrey Immelt waxed eloquent about the need for unions to be "reasonable", his forbears at GE were giving us the exact same message.

Back in the mid seventies I'd been sitting in the shithouse at the GE plant on Woodlawn Road in Guelph, reading the financial pages of the Globe and Mail. Feature story was about GE and their record profits.

As coincidence would have it, later the same day the shop floor folks were herded into the cafeteria for a presentation by a big cheese from head office.

His message was all about how we the union goofballs had to lower our expectations and yadayada all the rest of the thank-your-lucky-stars-you-have-a-job bullshit that Immelt was spewing in Toronto just the other day.

I still had those business pages in the back pocket of my Big Bill coveralls, and I remember this moment like it was yesterday. Management guy gets done his doomsday speech and one of his flunkies asks if there's any questions.

I had a question. First question I ever asked in a public meeting.

"How come we gotta tighten our belts when it says right here (waving paper) in today's Globe that the company is making record profits?"

Well, that sure sparked a commotion. Head office guy didn't have an answer. Sensing his weakness, the herd immediately backed me up, even though most of them hadn't spent an hour in the shithouse with the business pages that morning.

The first question was the last question. Meeting adjourned.

And while I never met C.S. Jackson, I like to think he'd be proud of me.

Words of wisdom from Jeffrey Immelt

Hey, the CEO of General Electric should be a stand-up comic! He's really good. Here's a few zingers he let loose on a Globe and Mail  reporter the other day;

"We believe in manufacturing." Hee hee hee! Isn't that rich? This is from a guy who has eliminated tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the US.

"Workers must adjust their expectations about wages!" Nudge nudge... you don't think he means adjust them upwards, do you?

And here's another gem, "Unions have to be realistic about wages!" I laughed so hard I fell off my chair!

Or how about this howler, "This is a moment in time when management and workers must speak to each other with complete honesty!" COMPLETE HONESTY!!! Can you believe this guy?

But wait, it gets better. Apparently he's been reading up on his Karl Marx. Good luck if you think you can get through this without wetting your drawers.

"It clearly is a challenge... how do you do a better job of creating common wealth, common good for all."

Don't say I didn't warn you.