In the past few years, the culture at GE Appliances in Louisville has changed from one where employees truly believed that if they worked hard and did right by the company, the company would do right by them, to one where we feel like we are being actively being mislead by management.
New cost cutting measures are launched so often it is hard to keep up with them, and each reduction makes the job a harder by adding a burden or removing a benefit from employees and customers. These changes are always announced with happy talk and pitched as improvements, in the form of easy to read elevator speeches that seem obviously written by a PR company.
Rather than call it what it is - when something is taken from you, it is a reduction in services, quality, benefits, and value. So why can't they just stop sugar coating everything and acting like we are stupid.
In the past week, GE and Electrolux jointly announced that GE was in talks with Electrolux to purchase our beloved appliance division, lock stock and barrel with Appliance Park Kentucky. Even that announcement was written to dance around the truth, the announcement claimed that nothing was certain and the two companies were only involved in casual discussions, when the opposite is true.
So now all the cost cutting and happy talk of the past few years makes sense: we've been running on bubble gum and rubber bands to lower expenses so GE Appliances would be worth more. With that spin removed, any fifth grader can see the truth of this situation: what will happens next is that our loyal workers, most with more than a decade of service, will get flushed into an uncertain and dismal future just so that stockholders, who own stock in GE but not in the GE Appliance division, can make a few bucks while all this is going down and GE is continuing to apply "MADE IN AMERICA" logos to all the appliances rolling out of Appliance Park, Kentucky.
This division of GE is the company that Thomas Edison formed in 1890, and Jeff Immelt is selling it to a company from Sweden that makes low quality appliances with bad service records. They want to buy GE Appliances to fix their own problems. But it never works like that, ask yourself where Maytag is after it was purchased by Whirlpool. They still make a few Maytag appliances, but it is a shadow of what it used to be.
My advice to job seekers: Unless you are coming for a few months for an internship, I think you'd be crazy to come here now. I probably don't need to tell you what happens when two companies are combined into one - but i'll give you a hint: layoffs.
