A GE spokesman Tuesday told The Daily Gazette that there are no anticipated job cuts in the Capital Region. Some other responses to questions from The Gazette:
There’s no plan to remove the towering GENERAL ELECTRIC sign from Building 37, at the foot of Erie Boulevard in Schenectady.
There’s no indication what the new name will be for the GE Power spinoff — which presumably will own and occupy Building 37 — but it won’t be “General Electric.”
GE Research in Niskayuna will remain part of General Electric; the specific details of GE Research’s interaction with former GE businesses are not known at this early point.
The GE pension plan is funded and secure; its obligations will be distributed among the businesses, and all employees will retain their accrued benefits.
GE remains an important part of the Capital Region economy, but Schenectady’s days as a company town are gone.
GE long ago moved its headquarters out of Schenectady, and more recently stopped calling Schenectady the headquarters for GE Power.
General Electric’s workforce at the Schenectady/Rotterdam campus has dropped roughly 90% in the last 50 years, and its Niskayuna workforce has shrunk by an undisclosed but lesser percentage.
Globally, the company dropped from 295,000 employees in 2020 to 174,000 in 2016, or 41%, through a combination of cuts and business sales. The four-year decrease was even greater within U.S. borders: 46%.
The domestic slide is even greater over time: The company placed its U.S. payroll in December 2020 at 56,000; IUE-CWA placed GE’s domestic workforce at 277,000 in 1989.
But the company is still a key piece of the industrial landscape, locally and around the world, and continues to position itself for the future.
Culp noted Monday that over a billion patient scans are done per year on over 4 million GE medical imaging devices, GE power equipment generates a third of the world’s electricity, and GE jet engines propel two-thirds of the world’s commercial flights. And it has cut its debt by $75 billion since 2018.