Main Street

Keep Green Jobs Here

Mike Elk at Campaign for America’s Future draws attention to something really important when we talk about green jobs: Making sure that those jobs stay in the U.S. Specifically, GE is sending all of their manufacturing of compact fluorescent lightbulbs to China.

Why would they do that?

Ohio could indeed be a hub of new light bulb production. Recently, a Chinese-owned manufacturer of high-efficiency light bulbs has opened a factory, citing Ohio as having some of the world’s most highly skilled light-bulb workers.

Ohio’s legacy of bulb production, and its factories that could easily be converted from incandescent production to CFL production, presents a grand opportunity to employ workers in building a green energy economy in Ohio.

The IMPACT Act introduced by Brown in the Senate would help small and medium-sized manufacturers transition to the clean energy economy. Brown’s bill creates a $30 billion Manufacturing Revolving Loan Fund to provide these manufacturers with much-needed access to credit to improve energy efficiency and retool for the clean energy industry.

The Apollo Alliance—a coalition of business, labor, and environmental groups—estimates that the IMPACT Act could create 680,000 direct manufacturing jobs nationally and 1,972,000 related jobs over the next five years.

So far, GE has shown every intention to take the American tax dollars being used to subsidize the green-energy economy and use them to build Chinese factories and pay Chinese workers.

So Ohio has the skilled workers and the factory facilities, and needs the jobs. But GE is going to China, with our tax dollars. Remember this whenever anyone gets started with rhetoric about how workers need to be retrained, learn new skills if they don’t want their jobs shipped overseas. Nope. Companies are pretty much going to ship jobs overseas even when their workers are already skilled. Bills like the IMPACT Act will help create incentives for some companies to stay. But we also need stronger regulations and trade policies, and we need to shine a light on companies like GE that talk big about the importance of manufacturing in the U.S. while moving their own production to China.

Read Mike’s whole piece for more.

Tags: green jobs, Ohio