GE Brings Bad Things to Life (Page 2)

GE's mass layoff is not the first in Bloomington in recent years, only the largest. Bill Abbott, who works the night shift in the warehouse, drives to work each day following a trail of bad omens. There's the old Wetterau site, a distribution center for IGA supermarkets that closed in 1997, taking down 114 Teamsters with it. One of Bill's workmates had made $17 an hour there; its nonunion successor, a division of Sara Lee, pays $8. Across the street a We're Hiring! sign advertises a temp agency. Catty-corner, the parking lot is padlocked and sprouting weeds at what had been Westinghouse, then ABB tool and die, both union, first one then the other slowly drained of thousands of jobs; the site was finally abandoned in 1999, another 175 workers down. Just past GE is Cook medical supplies, exemplar of the new breed of companies, fiercely antiunion, hiring at just above minimum wage; and Otis Elevator--union, $15.41 an hour, once employing over 1,000, now down to 527 and counting. Along the strip are a dozen firms with smaller parking lots and smaller wages. One of them, Griner Engineering, is exploring possibilities for producing machine parts in Mexico to meet the price demands of its big industrial customers.

Abbott, 37, began working at GE in 1987, hanging refrigerator cases in the paint department. He never marched or spoke out when those other plants closed; or when RCA, which once had the world's premier production line of color TVs and a work force of 8,000 in Bloomington, got bought by GE, changed hands again, let go of its last 1,100 workers in 1998 and moved to Juárez. He did his job, considered GE Bloomington one of life's fixtures. Cumulatively, his immediate family has given 112 years to the plant.

His wife, Jennifer, started there in 1988. Like thousands of other Bloomington workers trying to prep themselves for "the new economy," she also attends computer classes at Ivy Tech. She's a little anxious that data entry could wreck her wrists, already puffy and cystic from taping refrigerator cartons--an "easy job"--a thousand times a night. She'd prefer to study nursing, but even as it "downsizes," GE won't pay for training in anything not directly applicable to GE work.

Jennifer's mother, Judy Deckard, started at GE in 1978, in the paint department, and jovially remembers when every part of her face and hair that hadn't been masked was tinted almond or white or harvest gold. Now she installs handles and trim on the door line at a rate of 198 an hour. Her husband, Alton, worked at RCA from 1959 building TV cabinets--his mother had cut wire there long enough to get insurance for a hysterectomy, and his mother-in-law spent thirty-two years inserting radio cables--and is happy never to have worked at GE. He recalls the one time that Jack Welch visited the RCA plant, mounted a flatbed truck and told his newly acquired workers that there would be layoffs, six or seven hundred, and sure enough, there were.

Bill's sister, Fonya Chinn, and her husband, Scott, worked ten years at GE until they saw the handwriting on the wall and took lower-paid but more stable jobs. His mother, Mary, was a nonunion housing custodian at the university ($7 an hour) "for 15.981 years" before joining GE in 1988 as an electrical tester ($16.55 an hour). His father, Joe, was among the first workers GE hired, in 1967, and has spent most of his years in quality control.

"When I hired in," Joe said, "my foreman picked me up that first day, sat me down on the line and showed me how to do the job--every bit of it. Then he let me do it and watched until I got it right. He could do that job as good as anyone on that line. But GE got rid of all the old knowledge. They're setting us up to fail. Today the majority of foremen cannot do any of the jobs on the line, don't know what it takes to do that job, have no feeling for what the people are going through."

For now, the Abbott family isn't on the layoff list, but what with one thing and another--the mismanagement and the money-worship, the injuries and the noise and the sense that life's too short to tolerate disrespect--Bill Abbott says, "I can't stand apart from this anymore. At least I'll know I put up a fight."

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.