The 2009 layoff wasn't the worst of it.
She began at the GE Energy plant in Mebane, North Carolina in 1991. She worked anywhere in the plant she was needed, but ended up as a wirer – assembling electrical panels for hotels, offices, and finally the Chevy Volt. She worked her way up to $26 per hour. At that rate, with good benefits, she paid her fair share of taxes while building her American dream - a house, a $200,000 mortgage, two girls in college.
After two years of unemployment, she reapplied in May 2011 to earn what she was told would be a competitive wage. She had to go through a drug test. She was offered her old job at half her old wage - $13 per hour. She took it because, after two years of unemployment, any job is better than no job. She had to work next to people who had been her coworkers for 18 years. She had to do the same tasks. She got half her salary, and none of the dream.
GE has become the poster child for tax avoidance through an aggressive strategy mixing "fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore."
I’m in Detroit to bear witness to protests at General Electric's shareholders' meeting and the consequences of tax breaks and outsourced jobs. At first glance, the city suburbs feel remarkably spacious. Streets of stately brick homes sport front porches surrounded by green lawns. Every fourth lot or so is empty, covered in the soft grass of April, a pocket park for each block. But as I see boarded-up windows among the bricks, I realize that the lawns are merely weeds, and each park was once a home with a family and an American dream, now razed to the ground.
In the Renaissance Center, oversized jewels of GM cars gleam in their display cases. Nearby, an Underground Railroad memorial statue recalls Detroit’s role in an American dream of long ago.
Outside, protesters chant "Hey, hey, GE, pay your taxes just like me." We march up to General Motors' headquarters, then shut down Jefferson Avenue for a little bit.
Inside, the GE message boils down to: “we have to go through a once-a-year-charade of a meeting, but we don’t care about you. F*ck you.” Shareholders who protest are removed.
Our protest takes place the day after Jeffrey Immelt of GE speaks at a Detroit automotive conference:
Immelt -- whose company is a key supplier to automakers producing electric cars -- said GE is "committed to long-term development" of alternative-fuel vehicles. GE, after all, has a lot riding on the success of alternative-fuel vehicles. "For every dollar invested in electric vehicles GE has 10 cents of content," he said.
Tax breaks will likely be hard-wired into these electric vehicles. But who’s going to build them? Who's going to work in the factories of General Electric, supplying parts to General Motors and Tesla?
The North Carolina worker complained to Senators Burr and Hagan and to Immelt. Both senators ignored her. She was told that the factory could be closed and all its jobs shipped to Mexico. Her concerns got her a visit from GE’s top Human Resources people, and a layoff – her second – ostensibly on the ground that the Volt was suffering from slow sales.
And I wonder: how many more like her are afraid to speak out, afraid to lose the any-job-better-than-no-job that they have? Can the American dream exist on $13 per hour?
On the way out of town, we drive past a tall building, one-time apartments or offices, 18 stories tall. New Deal-era architectural flourishes and reinforced stone last a long time after the glass shatters, the people move out, the dream dies.
Our cabdriver majored in political science, planned to go to law school, took a job in the auto industry, had new suits and new trucks every two years, thought he was living the American dream, until it all broke up. He took any-job-is-better-than-no-job driving a cab. After a little while, he bought the cab. And another. Now he has thirteen cabs and drivers. With kids in a national Blue Ribbon school district 25 miles out of Detroit city limits, he's reinventing the American dream on his own terms. But that dream can’t be found any more in Detroit, nor in General Electric's factories.