Community | September 10, 2010 | 12 comments

Light bulb factory closes; End of era for U.S. means more jobs overseas

source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/07/AR2010090706933.html

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DogBoy
WINCHESTER, VA. - The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison's innovations in the 1870s.
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The remaining 200 workers at the plant here will lose their jobs.

"Now what're we going to do?" said Toby Savolainen, 49, who like many others worked for decades at the factory, making bulbs now deemed wasteful.

During the recession, political and business leaders have held out the promise that American advances, particularly in green technology, might stem the decades-long decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs. But as the lighting industry shows, even when the government pushes companies toward environmental innovations and Americans come up with them, the manufacture of the next generation technology can still end up overseas.

What made the plant here vulnerable is, in part, a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014. The law will force millions of American households to switch to more efficient bulbs.

The resulting savings in energy and greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to be immense. But the move also had unintended consequences.

Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China.

Consisting of glass tubes twisted into a spiral, they require more hand labor, which is cheaper there. So though they were first developed by American engineers in the 1970s, none of the major brands make CFLs in the United States.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/07/AR2010090706933....
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12 comments // Light bulb factory closes; End of era for U.S. means more jobs overseas

  • toyotabedzrock
    • +2
      toyotabedzrock  

    • GE should have opened a new plant for CFL bulbs and retrained the workers.

      I guess they would rather they hurt their workers in an attempt to stop green legislation.

    • 1 year ago
  • NothingIsAbsoluteTruth
    • +2
      NothingIsAbsoluteTruth  

    • We could just let computers do all the jobs for us... oh wait then we would lose capitalism and monetary system that keep the rich, rich and the poor, poor. Our leaders wouldnt want a society where no one is working and all have the time to think about the world other than just trying to make it through the next day. Not just our leaders but us also are afraid of breaking this pattern of working when we dont need too...

    • 1 year ago
  • toyotabedzrock
    • 0
      toyotabedzrock  
    • NothingIsAbsoluteTruth:

      That doesn't make sense, many are proud of there work, and not everything can be automated. Those machines that automate some tasks need repair and calibration. They all need at least some level of oversight by people who have knowledge of what is being built.

    • 1 year ago
  • 24French
  • DogBoy
  • tverdell
    • tverdell  
    • This comment was removed by its owner.
  • s_peak
    • +1
      s_peak  
    • tverdell:

      Exactly. I'm so tired of hearing people complain about a car factory closing or something.

      Look, here's the straight dope: brainless/filthy/unnecessary jobs will always be lost to automation and technological development, deal with it. If you want job security, then you better become a fucking engineer and build/fix some robots.

      Jobs and needs are supposed to change. Our knowledge and skills change. There will continue to be a decline in jobs around the world, however, as more and more things become automated. But my argument is this: do we really need marketing people, and sales, and warehouse managers, and clerks at Target? Hell no. The only *real* jobs are ones that help manage finite resources or protect portions of the planet from being destroyed by us. After all... our survival hangs on these jobs. This will become painfully apparent in the future that we may or may not live through. In fact... marketers only increase the amount of waste that a company produces (while increasing profit, of course). Marketing people are responsible for you buying a new phone each year... sending your old one into the landfill. That's monstrous. Even high paying jobs don't mean shit when you can't find clean water or air.

      Stop whining about your job. If you don't like it then move off the grid and don't support the corporatocracy. Everybody wins.

    • 1 year ago
  • controlusplease
    • 0
      controlusplease  
    • s_peak:

      kinda heartless, don't you think
      regardless of whether the job was challenging or not, it is a job that employs Americans, and here we go out sourcing another job to China. look at it this way, China determines our economy because 75% of our manufactured goods now come from the country. now if they were to suddenly start an imbargo against us tomorrow, the country would go into caos, because we don't have the means to support ourselves with the goods we make anymore.

    • 1 year ago
  • simguy665
  • s_peak
    • 0
      s_peak  
    • controlusplease:

      It's definitely heartless. And I have no heart left for this system that will always equate to slavery. That's what we're seeing now. When money is made to be virtual, the value of human work can be artificially altered. Meaning that the higher classes can smash the lower classes with more and more financial woes. I'm saying the entire system... the entire economy that it's predicated upon... all of it... is a facade that can never work. In that mindset, it's not actually heartless. It's seen more as a barrier from becoming a truly modern and cooperative society. It could then be argued that I am just "Passionate" about freeing mankind from tyranny.

    • 1 year ago
  • H2O_4U
  • DogBoy
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