General Electric announced today that it plans to transfer all work from the Fort Edward, NY manufacturing plant to a facility in Clearwater, Florida, and close the Fort Edward plant. This action will impact 178 hourly production workers represented by UE Local 332, as well as 20 salaried employees.
“This hurts 200 families of GE employees and many more families in our community,” said Local 332 President Scott Gates. “It will have a devastating effect on small businesses in our area, costing many more people their jobs, reducing local services, harming a lot of people.”
The Fort Edward plant manufactures electrical capacitors and at its peak, the Fort Edward and nearby Hudson Falls plants employed some 2,500 workers. The plant’s workers have been represented by UE for 70 years. The plant is highly profitable and has been for decades.
As required by the national contract between UE and GE, the company is giving the union one year’s notice of its intent to move work from Fort Edward. The union will request that the company negotiate over its decision, which the union has the right to demand under the contract.
“We will fight this with whatever it takes,” said Scott Gates. “We will reach out to the community, to elected officials, to other unions, and we will fight to save these jobs. We have to fight this with all we’ve got – there are too many lives at stake.”
“The company’s announcement is an outrage,” said the national president of UE, Bruce Klipple. “Local 332 has our backing 100 percent as we fight to keep these jobs in Fort Edward.” Klipple pointed out earlier actions by GE at the Fort Edward-Hudson Falls site caused one of the biggest scandals in the company’s history. “GE dumped PCBs into the Hudson River from this plant site,” he said, referring to the company’s discharge of 1.3 million pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls from 1947 to 1977, which polluted a 200-mile stretch of the river. “Now with this announcement, they’re telling us that they intend to dump the workers who made the company successful, as well as their families and their community, again for the sake of bigger profits.” President Klipple concluded, “We can’t let them get away with it.”
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