“From France,” General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt declared last May, “we can create the technology the world needs.”
“Some might even mistake GE for a large French company,” the executive told French lawmakers in Paris, “that is, of course, until you hear my American accent …”
For more than a year, Immelt and GE officials have waved the tri-color and pledged to be good partners with France in an effort to win approval for a merger with French power giant Alstom. The heart of GE’s charm offensive in Paris: the promise that GE would move 1,000 jobs to France.
European and U.S. officials finally approved the deal September 8. A week later, on September 15, GE announced 400 French jobs — but executives suddenly and curiously started giving a different reason than they had been giving previously.
“With no U.S. export financing available,” a corporate press release explained, “GE has pursued non-U.S. options to meet customer requirements.”
In the U.S., GE is blaming the French jobs on Congress’s refusal to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank, the federal agency that subsidizes U.S. exports with taxpayer-backed financing to foreign buyers.
“We do not make today’s announcements lightly,” GE Vice President John Rice said in a statement. “[I]n fact, have done everything in our power to avoid making these moves at all, but Congress left us no choice when it failed to reauthorize the Ex-Im Bank this summer.”
That’s a bit dizzying, isn’t it? In 2014, GE promised in writing to send 1,000 job to France in order to buy Alstom. Now that European officials have approved the deal, GE is claiming that the reason it is putting these 400 jobs in France is that the Export-Import Bank has shut its doors.
Let’s try to parse out what’s really going on. First of all, GE isn’t laying off a single American to send these 400 energy jobs to France. “Those 400 jobs do not currently exist,” the Washington Post reported this week. GE explains they would have put these 400 turbine jobs in the U.S. except for Ex-Im’s expiration.
And yet it seems GE may have already promised to put these jobs in France a year ago.
In May 2014, Immelt travelled to France and met with the Frence President Francois Hollande. “At the meeting with Mr. Hollande,” the New York Times reported at the time, Immelt, “sweetened the pot further, promising to hire 1,000 new employees if the deal goes ahead.”
These jobs would be in energy, the trade journal Platts reported a few weeks later, and Immelt’s “pledge will be enforced through an independent auditor and incur financial penalties if it is not upheld, the French government has said.”
In his 2014 visit to Paris, Immelt told the Economic Affairs Commission of France’s National Assembly, “President Hollande and Minister Montebourg have told me they are concerned about jobs. GE has committed to grow employment levels in France, with a focus on high-value jobs like engineering and manufacturing.”
Immelt got even more specific than that. “After several discussions, a plan emerged for our industrial project, focused on the worldclass energy business that we will locate here in France.” He bragged about GE’s plans to produce “the largest, most efficient gas turbine in the world,” telling the French “This turbine will be the flagship of our turbine fleet and we will bid it for projects all over the world … and it will be built by GE teams in Belfort.”
“As we build GE-Alstom,” Immelt said, “we will locate the global headquarters for four of our businesses in France: Grid, Hydro, Offshore Wind, and Steam Turbines. Decision-making for these businesses will be based in France. Technology decisions for these businesses will be made in France.”
Compare that 2014 promise to the recent announcement, in which GE implied that due to Ex-Im’s expiration, “Belfort, France [will] become unique Center of Excellence for 50 hertz heavy duty gas turbines.”
Wasn’t that exactly what Immelt had already promised Hollande? I asked GE spokesman Laurent Wormser in Paris exactly which jobs Immelt was referring to in 2014. Was that a separate set of jobs from the 400 just announced? Is GE now promising in public to create 1,400 French jobs instead of the 1,000 it is obligated to create by its agreement with the French government? Or will it simply create 600 more in addition to the 400, in which case it is only pretending that these have something to do with Ex-Im?
His response: “I can’t answer … your question right now; We will disclose information on our 1000 jobs commitment in France after the closing [the deal].”
A GE spokeswoman in D.C. told me that “those 400 jobs are separate from and would be created in addition to the jobs negotiated as part of the Alstom agreement.” She also added that those jobs may not actually go to France if the right deals don’t go through.
So the story, for now and on this side of the Atlantic, is that GE jobs that don’t currently exist in the U.S. may or may not go to France. And if they do, they will be turbine jobs in Belfort that are supposedly different from the 1,000 jobs promised last year as part of a deal involving building of turbines in Belfort.
It’s difficult to parse, but Immelt’s words in Paris last Spring provide some context:
“This industrial project is really about our longterm commitment to invest and grow these businesses in France. This will have benefits over many decades for employees, for small- and medium-size suppliers that serve these industries and for the people of France. In this regard, the past can be a good predictor of the future. We have been a loyal partner to France for decades.”
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
