CEO Immelt Describes How GE Can Bring Good Jobs to Life

[ShockediSay]

Source: Yahoo Finance

Jeff Immelt is the CEO of General Electric and one of the nation's largest exporters and employers. He's also the head of President Obama's jobs council. So it seems like he'd be the guy to talk to about how and when large companies can directly create the massive numbers of jobs needed to put Americans back to work.

Earlier this week, I had a chance to spend some time with Immelt, who took the reins of GE from Jack Welch in the summer of 2001. (Along with several other journalists, I visited three GE facilities in three states). And what I saw and heard suggests a seeming paradox. The U.S. should — and must -- rely on GE and its fellow gigantic global enterprises for growth, for new business and products, and for innovation. By almost any measure (save its stock price over the past decade) GE is succeeding. The company founded by Thomas Edison now derives about 60 percent of total revenues from overseas, and many of its industrial units sport impressive growth rates. But we shouldn't expect this success to translate directly into large-scale hiring on GE's factory floors. And it's not simply because GE is employing more people overseas to keep up with growing foreign demand.


Read more: http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daniel-gross/ceo-immelt-describes-ge-bring-good-jobs-life-120629900.html;_ylt=ArBatpMfkOG2_BFKzMDeaDy7YWsA;_ylu=X3oDMTE1Mm04dGcxBHBvcwM4BHNlYwN0b3BTdG9yaWVzBHNsawNnZXNpbW1lbHRvbmo-?sec=topStories&pos=5&asset=&ccode=

---

This is a guy that reportedly killed 18,000 workers' jobs in our recession not to mention driving down GE stock from 40 ish to where it is now. We don't need big tax free global export business so much as we need to help real job creating small business.

[xchrom]

1. he also backs boeing against unions.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1495049

[Brickbat]

2. This "Jobs Council" is a fucking joke, and it has been since day one.

[naaman fletcher]

3. corporatism at its worst

Without its lobbyists, GE wouldn't survive.

[Cherchez la Femme]

4. And Exxon is running commercials with their CEO saying

how safe and clean fracking is!


It's allllll bullshit.


I'll be waiting to see those jobs show up... or do we have to all clap our hands in unison so the Confidence Fairy doesn't die?

--I only took a few 100/200 series courses in Economics, and I can unequivocally say that poor sales is NOT the fault of 'low confidence'.
Poor sales, which of course equals fewer jobs, is the fault of little-to-no expendable income on the part of the workers.
Manufacturers can have "confidence" out the proverbial ying-yang, but if there is no-one able to afford their goods
...what?

That's right: There will be little-to-no sales.

& I'm not even going to touch upon these same CEO's outsourcing our jobs to countries with virtual slave wages.
My gf has a bill collector calling her (she is having problems meeting her student loan payments) and the Indian accent is so thick she can barely understand them.

U.S. banks.
U.S. student loans from a U.S. university.
Indian call center(s).

Indian call center(s), no less, so poorly trained they are barely intelligible.


Heck, I don't think one even needs a Grammar School course in Economics to come to those conclusions.



We're in such a sorry State and News Flash!

It's not getting better, but worse.

[ShockediSay]

7. +

[jmowreader]

5. The guy is a toad but he's got a point

And it's one the Republicans never will have.

AMERICA CANNOT RELY SOLELY ON SMALL BUSINESS.

No country can. Not if it wants to be prosperous.

Read the whole article. Every GE job translates directly to eight small-business jobs--the eight small-business employees making subassemblies for GE. In the lean manufacturing era a manufacturer doesn't buy fifty parts from six suppliers and screw them together on the factory floor to make a machine, it requires the six suppliers to deliver finished subassemblies. It probably works out to twenty total jobs per employee--some of them in the local area, some in distant climes. Immelt isn't going to drive down the streets of Greenville and say GE is responsible for the existence of that grocer, that convenience store, that barbershop and those four restaurants, but if GE and other big businesses weren't in Greenville, the barbershop and some of the restaurants almost certainly wouldn't be and the grocer and gas station would be hurting.

Go down the list of countries that are doing okay in this economy--China and Germany come to mind--and you'll notice something: All those nations have thriving large-business communities. America is "small business this" and "small business that" and we're on the brink of financial extinction.

We can clearly see the wisdom here by looking at the Great Lakes region, specifically Detroit. When GM, Ford and Chrysler were going great guns up there, making so many cars the plants ran around the clock, Detroit was well-off. When GM, Ford and Chrysler got into dire fiscal straits, Detroit became America's nightmare. And the despair spreads to all sectors. Did you know the Lions used to be good?

When we as a nation not only realize we need large business as much as we need small business--GE couldn't operate without scores of small businesses making things for them, providing services to them and taking care of their employees--we will become whole again.

[ShockediSay]

8. point well taken, but when big business governs US

unlike Germany,
when big business governs US we are on our way to fascism

[jmowreader]

12. We'll simply have to resurrect the laws that kept them from doing this

It's no more fantasy to think, if we resurrected the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Glass-Steagall Act, among others, we could keep the banksters and megabusinesses in line than it is to think an economy this big can run with no large businesses. You'd probably also want to have some protection against LBO after LBO.

[Dawson Leery]

9. Germany has a highly respected social contract

that only the hard right fringe would dismantle. In the US, there is no such thing.
Those giant corporations are regulated and taxed (as well as given incentives) to promote growth of well paying jobs in Germany.

[jmowreader]

11. And there's a reason we couldn't do the same?

I mean, besides the fact this country is run by anti-American assholes.

[ShockediSay]

13. +

[newportdadde]

6. President announces 'Chicken Coop Readiness Council' to be comprised of top Foxes.

[KG]

10. that this guy is head of a 'jobs commission' shows just how out of touch obama really is.