GE workers call on company to make ventilators in jet engine factories

GE workers call on company to make ventilators in jet engine factories
NewsColony

Daily Kos Staff

Monday March 30, 2020 · 12:35 PM PDT

2020/03/30 · 12:35

Hospital employees wearing a protection mask and gear tend to a patient (C) at a temporary emergency structure set up outside the accident and emergency department, where any new arrivals presenting suspect new coronavirus symptoms are being tested, at the Brescia hospital, Lombardy, on March 13, 2020. (Photo by Miguel MEDINA / AFP) (Photo by MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP via Getty Images)

General Electric is one of the nation’s largest ventilator manufacturers, so you would think that the desperate need for more ventilators would be a big business opportunity. Instead, the company has announced layoffs and workers are staging protests calling on GE to use its jet engine factories to manufacture ventilators.

“If GE trusts us to build, maintain, and test engines which go on a variety of aircraft where millions of lives are at stake, why wouldn’t they trust us to build ventilators?” said Jake Aguinaga, president of IUE-CWA, which represents workers in a Kansas factory that’s suffered major layoffs.

Workers at a GE plant in Lynn, Massachusetts, held a silent protest on Monday, while workers marched six feet apart at GE’s Boston headquarters.

GE has announced it is laying off 10% of its domestic aviation workforce—2,600 workers—and is temporarily laying off half its maintenance workers. You can see how frustrating it would be to know that you were losing your job rather than being put to work making a lifesaving and desperately needed product. Presumably there would be some retraining of workers and retrofitting of factories needed, but GE knows how to make ventilators. Surely it should put that knowledge to work at the greatest possible level.

“Our country depends on these highly skilled workers and now they’re wondering why they are facing layoffs instead of having the opportunity to use their unbelievable skills to help save lives,” Communications Workers of America President Chris Shelton said.

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