I visited a General Electric refrigerator plant in March 2005 to talk to workers being laid off. They knew their jobs were going to a factory in Mexico. They didn’t know they were subsidizing that factory.
According to the official story, the April Fools’ Day layoffs were happening because GE planned to “discontinue production of mid-line, side-by-side refrigerator models that are not competitive on cost or product features.” While that is technically true, a very similar new line of refrigerators is being started up at the GE plant in Celaya, Mexico. All the workers in Bloomington understand that their jobs are being sent south of the border. And they all point the finger at the same two targets …
In Celaya, a General Electric joint venture named Mabe makes appliances, including the side-by-side refrigerators that had been made in Bloomington. As part of another joint venture called Qualcore, GE built a separate plant in Celaya to supply parts for the appliances made at Mabe. That’s where the U.S. taxpayers got involved.
To reduce the cost of the Qualcore factory, GE called on the Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im), a federal agency. Ex-Im provided a subsidy in the form of a $3 million loan guarantee because the new plant would include components made in California and Illinois.
