The answer: By avoiding tax payments and cutting its US workforce!
No corporation has surpassed General Electric’s mastery of profit-maximization, or its use of public-relations (“corporate propaganda”) to mask its true aims behind the widely-supported goals of expanding scientific horizons, “bringing good things to life” and rebuilding America’s industrial base. (Source: In These Times, March 25, 2012)
We all now know that GE generated $14.2 billion in profits in 2010 while paying no federal income taxes, even managing to collect $3.2 billion in federal tax credits. This occurred as GE continued to dramatically reduce its U.S. workforce by 32,000 jobs, from 165,000 to 133,000 over the 2004-2010 period.
On its website, GE says it has created 13,000 jobs in the United States since 2009. But it is unlikely that the figure represents a net gain, since it has closed 18 plants and made significant job cuts during the same period.
Recently we’ve seen a barrage of GE advertisements that don’t showcase GE products, but tell us what a nice, kind and responsible business they run. This new publicity offensive includes the ad aired during the Super Bowl this year, set at its Louisville Appliance Park: “See how GE employees in Louisville’s Appliance Park are changing the way appliances are manufactured in the U.S., and how it’s helping to create jobs.”
But the emperor is naked behind the curtain of reality.
A story on the blog of In These Times reveals, that GE conveniently avoided mentioning that The Appliance Park has lost about 80 to 90 percent of its jobs over the last two decades. While the company is expanding the Louisville plant by 400 jobs—it is doing so only after wage concessions by the union [IUE] and “up to $17 million in city and state incentives.”
In another ad, GE workers at the Wisconsin Medical Equipment Division are shown meeting a busload of cancer patients whose recovery was aided by GE’s medical products. The ad fails to disclose that GE has transferred the headquarters of the Medical Equipment Division to Beijing, China. While GE has claimed that the shift of its Medical Equipment Division headquarters will not result in a net loss of jobs, employment in Waukesha has been cut by about 50 percent in recent years.