While many large companies have publicly stated that it is not their responsibility to add jobs to the United States job market, GE has decided to take the initiative and start creating more jobs for the country that helped it blossom into the conglomerate it is now.
If you can remember, a couple of weeks ago in January, Spark News published an article that discussed companies sending their manufacturing needs overseas. Specifically, we discussed Apple and their reasons for choosing other countries over the U.S. In fact, nearly all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas. Although that may be shocking for a company that once boasted about their products being manufactured in the U.S. what was more shocking to some was a comment made by one of the Apple executives: “We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries. We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”
That may have been very shocking to some Americans, but in Apple’s defense, it truly is not their responsibility to save the U.S. job market. We’ll leave that job to the companies that can truly make a difference here at home, like General Electric. On the first day of a four-day conference, GE CEO Jeff Immelt was quoted saying, “We should have the confidence to act and to restore American competitiveness. There are companies and communities all across the country that are leading the way.”
What American can turn their nose up at that? While Apple decides to accept cheaper labor overseas, GE is set to hire 12,000 workers in the U.S. over the next five years. Of those jobs, 5,000 are set aside for veterans that will be hired through a special priority placement program. To boost their announcement even further, most of those jobs will be in the manufacturing industry “including 400 positions that will need to be filled by 2013 in three aviation-focused factories the company is now building.”
While GE like many other companies had to slim their employment numbers down over the past couple of years, they are now trying to bulk them back up with jobs in aerospace manufacturing. Their decision to boost hiring seems to come directly after Obama’s most recent State of the Union address where he was quoted saying, “It is time to start rewarding companies that create jobs right here in America. If you’re an American manufacturer, you should get a bigger tax cut.” By boosting their manufacturing jobs and also reserving 5,000 jobs for veterans, GE is taking advantage of the incentives Obama holds for companies that take the initiative.
SOURCE: IB Times
IMAGE: Courtesy of Business Facilities Blog
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