‘Jobs creator’ Jack Welch lost nearly 100,000 jobs at GE

10/11/2012 3:00am by 454

No wonder Jack Welch loves Mitt Romney so much. They both know a lot about stuffing their own pockets with as much cash as possible while chopping jobs for everyone else. In Jack Welch’s case, there have been serious questions about his magical accounting practices that highly benefited Welch but created problems for his replacement at GE, according to some.

What’s especially frustrating is that so many people and networks (ahem, CNBC) treat Welch like he’s a god-like figure and pretend as though everything he did was great. Those 100,000 workers that Welch dumped are probably not as impressed with Welch’s management style.

Does this sound like a familiar record?

GE lost nearly 100,000 jobs while Welch was at the helm of the company — a tenure that spanned two of the most robust periods of economic growth in American business history. Welch, who along with his wife Suzy has written articles for FORTUNE, took over as CEO of GE in 1981. At the time, the industrial giant had 411,000 employees. When Welch left the company 20 years later, it had just 313,000 employees.

“The effect of Welch’s massive restructuring was to put thousands of GE employees out of work,” wrote Robert Slater in Jack Welch and the GE Way.

President Obama, on the other hand, since taking office during a financial crisis appears to have been either a modest job creator, or a slight job loser depending on the data you are looking at. In January 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s survey of individuals, there were just over 142 million people employed in the country. On Friday, the BLS reported that number had risen to nearly 143 million in September, for a gain of about 800,000 jobs, or less than 1%, since Obama became president.

Print FriendlyPrint


An American in Paris, France. BA in History & Political Science from Ohio State. Provided consulting services to US software startups, launching new business overseas that have both IPO’d and sold to well-known global software companies. Currently launching a new cloud-based startup for the Microsoft market. Full bio here.

Share This Post
© 2013 AMERICAblog. All rights reserved. · Entries RSS