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Lighting Worker Speaks to Membership Meetings Dave Raleigh, Recording Secretary of
Local 707, in Cleveland, Ohio, spoke at the Local After Raleigh’s presentation, members questioned how the energy required for CFL production balanced against the energy savings from their use. Also, the presence of mercury in CFL’s led to questions about whether China’s lax occupational health and environmental laws contributed to GE’s decision. Suggestions were made that the campaign reach out to environmental activists to make sure they consider the whole picture before jumping on GE’s CFL bandwagon. It’s instructive that Jack Welch, GE’s former CEO, was recently cited in the Boston Herald (4/13/07) telling a packed auditorium of students at MIT’s Sloan School of Management that “Executives need to jump on the environmental bandwagon, whether they’re personally on board or not. ‘I would try to take advantage of and capitalize on a green movement,’ Welch said, ‘whether I believed in it or not…’ Companies should make customers feel guilty for not buying products from them that are environmentally friendly, he said.” This cynical, hypocritical “environmentalism” could be seen as right in line with GE’s current CFL campaign, green window-dressing for profiteering, damn the workers. In the same Herald article, Welch bragged that “when he took the helm at GE there were about 125,000 unionized employees within the company. By the time he left, there were only around 19,000, he said. Welch said he didn’t start out anti-union but is ‘really anti-union today.’” GE’s CFL campaign, combined with its refusal to invest in manufacturing products for the future here in America, could well lead to the elimination of its domestic lighting operation, the loss of another 3,000 union jobs, and the further erosion of the CBC’s bargaining power. It doesn’t take much ecomagination to see that American Union workers are fast becoming an endangered species!
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For further information contact Local 201 IUE-CWA at (781) 598-2760 |
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201 April Membership Meetings, part of the CBC’s “Screw That Bulb”
campaign. (See flyer below) GE has been pushing their new energy
efficient compact fluorescent (CFL) light bulbs under the cover of
environmental awareness. But GE has neglected to advertise that all
their CFL’s are manufactured in China, after refusing to invest in
upgrading their American factories to produce CFL’s. That leaves GE’s
US lighting plants producing only incandescent bulbs and vulnerable to
closure if CFL’s dominate the market. Somehow the condition of the
human species, unemployment, and de-industrialization don’t fit into
GE’s notion of environmental concerns.