Thread: Light bulb factory closes; End of era for U.S.

Light bulb factory closes; End of era for U.S. means more jobs overseasLight bulb factory closes;
By Peter Whoriskey
Wednesday, September 8, 2010; 9:48 PM


WINCHESTER, VA. - The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison's innovations in the 1870s.

The remaining 200 workers at the plant here will lose their jobs.

"Now what're we going to do?" said Toby Savolainen, 49, who like many others worked for decades at the factory, making bulbs now deemed wasteful.

During the recession, political and business leaders have held out the promise that American advances, particularly in green technology, might stem the decades-long decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs. But as the lighting industry shows, even when the government pushes companies toward environmental innovations and Americans come up with them, the manufacture of the next generation technology can still end up overseas.

What made the plant here vulnerable is, in part, a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014. The law will force millions of American households to switch to more efficient bulbs.

The resulting savings in energy and greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to be immense. But the move also had unintended consequences.

Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China.

Consisting of glass tubes twisted into a spiral, they require more hand labor, which is cheaper there. So though they were first developed by American engineers in the 1970s, none of the major brands make CFLs in the United States.

"Everybody's jumping on the green bandwagon," said Pat Doyle, 54, who has worked at the plant for 26 years. But "we've been sold out. First sold out by the government. Then sold out by GE. "

Doyle was speaking after a shift last month surrounded by several co-workers around a picnic table near the punch clock. Many of the workers have been at the plant for decades, and most appeared to be in their 40s and 50s. Several worried aloud about finding another job.

"When you're 50 years old, no one wants you," Savolainen said. It was meant half in jest, but some of the men nod grimly.



If there is a green bandwagon, as Doyle says, much of the Obama administration is on board. As a means of creating U.S. jobs, the administration has been promoting the nation's "green economy" - solar power, electric cars, wind turbines - with the idea that U.S. innovations in those fields may translate into U.S. factories. President Obama said last month that he expects the government's commitment to clean energy to lead to more than 800,000 jobs by 2012, one step in a larger journey planned to restore U.S. manufacturing.

But officials are working against a daunting trend. Under the pressures of globalization, the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States has been shrinking for decades, from 19.5 million in 1979 to 11.6 million this year, a decline of 40 percent.

At textile mills in North Carolina, at auto parts plants in Ohio, at other assorted manufacturing plants around the country, the closures have pushed workers out, often leaving them to face an onslaught of personal defeats: lower wages, community college retraining and unemployment checks.

In Obama's vision, the nation's mastery of new technology will create American manufacturing jobs.

"See, when folks lift up the hoods on the cars of the future, I want them to see engines stamped "Made in America," Obama said in an Aug. 16 speech at a Wisconsin plant. "When new batteries to store solar power come off the line, I want to see printed on the side, "Made in America." When new technologies are developed and new industries are formed, I want them made right here in America. That's what we're fighting for."

But a closer look at the lighting industry reveals that isn't going to be easy.



At one time, the United States was ahead of the game in CFLs.

Following the 1973 energy crisis, a GE engineer named Ed Hammer and others at the company's famed Nela Park research laboratories were tinkering with different methods of saving electricity with fluorescent lights.

In a standard incandescent bulb, in which the filament is electrified until it glows, only about 10 percent of the electricity is transformed into light; the rest generates heat as a side effect. A typical fluorescent uses about 75 percent less electricity than an incandescent to produce the same amount of light.

The trouble facing Hammer was that fluorescents are most efficient in long tubes. But long, linear tubes don't fit into the same lamp fixtures that the standard incandescent bulbs do.

Working with a team of talented glass blowers, though, Hammer twisted the tubes into a spiral. The new lamps had length, but were also more compact.

"I knew it was a good lamp design," he recalled recently. In retrospect, in fact, it was a key innovation. The Smithsonian houses Hammer's original spiral CFL prototype.

At the time, however, the design had one big problem. Bending all that glass into the required shape was slow and required lots of manual labor.

"I used to say you would need 40,000 glass blowers to make the parts," Hammer said. "Without automation, it was economically unfeasible. It was a lamp before its time."

The company decided to make investments in other types of lighting then being developed.



Years passed. The next major innovator to try his hand at CFLs was Ellis Yan, a Chinese immigrant to the United States, who had started his own lighting business in China and then in the early '90s turned his attention to the possibilities of CFLs.

To make CFLs, he had workers in China sit beside furnaces and bend the glass by hand. Even with the low-wages there, the first attempts were very expensive, clunky and flickered when turned on, he said. But he persisted.

"Everybody [in the industry] stayed back and was watching me," he recalled. "No one else wanted to make the big investment for the next generation of technology."

The business prospered and Yan's factories in China employed as many as 14,000 - not so far off from the 40,000 glass blowers that Hammer had once imagined would be necessary. With new automation techniques, Yan is seeking to cut the number of his employees in China, where wages are rising, to 5,000 by year's end.

Today, about a quarter of the lights sold in the United States are CFLs, according to NEMA, an industry association. Of those, Yan says, he manufactures more than half.

Someday soon, Yan says, he hopes to build a U.S. factory, though he so far has been unable to secure $12.5 million in government funding for the project.

Manufacturing in the United States would add 10 percent or more to the cost of building a standard CFL, he said, but retailers have indicated that there is a demand for products manufactured domestically.

"Retailers tell me people ask for 'Made in the USA' " Yan said. "I tell them the product will cost 45 to 50 cents more. They say people will pay for it."



Sales of the CFLs began slowly, but they spiked in 2006 and 2007, when federal and state government efforts promoted their use.

The Energy Department teamed with Disney to develop a public service announcement based on the Disney Pixar film "Ratatouille" to encourage the adoption of technologies such as CFLs. It was shown on CNN, HGTV and the Food Network.

Lawmakers in California and Nevada drafted legislation calling for higher efficiency standards for light bulbs. And in December 2007, Congress passed its new energy standards.

GE balked at the standards at first, knowing that they could impact their U.S. manufacturing. But the company also saw that with restrictions gaining momentum in more states and other countries, some kind of legislation was unavoidable. They decided to support the bill as long as it didn't amount to a ban on traditional incandescents, but instead simply set energy standards.

"We obviously pointed out to legislators that the impact of an outright ban would be an elimination of some manufacturing operations," said Earl Jones, senior counsel in government relations and regulatory compliance at the company. "But it was inevitable that some kind of legislation would be coming to the U.S."

As expected, the new standards hurt the business in traditional incandescents.

The company developed a plan to see what it would take to retrofit a plant that makes traditional incandescents into one that makes CFLs. Even with a $40 million investment and automation, the disparity in wages and other factors made it uneconomical. The new plant's CFLs would have cost about 50 percent more than those from China, GE officials said.

The company also makes halogen light bulbs, which are an innovative type of incandescent, and Sylvania is transforming its incandescent light bulb factory in St. Marys, Pa. to halogen as well.

But the era of traditional incandescents built in the United States was coming to an end.

In announcing the plant closure here, GE said in a news release that "a variety of energy regulations," including those in the United States, "will soon make the familiar lighting products produced at the Winchester Plant obsolete."

"For those who make incandescent bulbs the law was bad for business," Yan said. "For people like us, it was very good."



Temperatures at the traditional incandescent plant here can be sweltering because of the heat coming from the machines that melt the glass. It's noisy, too, and workers wear ear plugs and safety glasses. And the pace of the work demands constant hustle, an atmosphere created by managers over the years who set up competitions among teams of workers striving to meet production goals. The winning line could post a black-and-white checkered flag on their machinery.

Jobs at the plant have been prized locally for years: They pay about $30 an hour.

One day after punching out recently, the workers gathered around the picnic tables by the employee entrance.

Some expressed grievances with the plant managers, who they note will get new jobs elsewhere, or with Congress for passing the energy legislation. Several took aim at the new new technology itself, noting that CFLs have mercury in them.

Some at the plant will be able to retire off their severance packages. Those with less time on the job, or those who are younger, have braced themselves for whatever comes next.

Some are taking classes at the Lord Fairfax Community College, hoping that familiarity with solar panels or HVAC might land them a job. Others scan the want-ads but don't see how they will replace what they were making at the factory.

This small town has not been terribly hurt by the recession; local unemployment is running at 7.5 percent, well below the national average.

But good-paying jobs in manufacturing, they said, have become difficult to find.

Beverly Carter, 50, who feeds cardboard sleeves into a machine and makes sure it doesn't jam, has worked at the plant for 32 years.

"It's very hard to find a job like that around here," she said.

Moreover, because many of the workers are in their 40s and 50s, some were nagged by worries that other employers would see them as washed up.

"We gave GE the best years of our lives," Savolainen said.

Matt Madigan, 40, and his twin brothers, Wayne and Dwayne, also work at the plant.

"We've always had a lot of industry here in the valley, I've never had a problem finding a job," he said. "A person really wanted to work, you could go from one factory to another. Everything nowadays is tougher."

http://americaneconomicalert.org/news_i ... ID=4328760

VIDEO:

Ted Poe discusses energy saving bulbs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv59PJ30WeM

2 Chronicles 7:14

TURN OUT THE LIGHTS--THE PARTY'S OVER


Washington, May 13 -


Madam Speaker, Congress passed an energy bill which should have been called the Anti-American non Energy Bill, because it punishes Americans for using energy, rather than finding new sources of affordable energy. But the bill does one thing, Madam Speaker, it controls the type of light bulbs that all Americans must use throughout our fruited plains.

Congress's energy bill bans incandescent light bulbs by 2014, and requires Americans to buy compact fluorescent bulbs. Those are called CFLs. Now we can say goodbye to Thomas Edison's incandescent bulb and his invention.


Madam Speaker, I have a Constitution here and, like most Members of Congress, I carry it with me. I've read it through and through, but I don't see anywhere in the U.S. Constitution that it gives the government the power to control the type of light bulbs used in Dime Box, Texas or any other place in the United States. Besides the lack of constitutional authority, let me discuss these light bulbs further.


Nothing in Congress seems to be easy, and that phrase is certainly true with these CFL light bulbs. These light bulbs contain mercury, so they have to be disposed of in a certain way. According to EPA rules, you're supposed to take them to a local recycling center. Thanks to Congress, nothing is easy.


If you throw them out at home, you're supposed to seal the bulb in two plastic bags and place them in the outside trash; otherwise, the bulb may break and pollute the landfill, of all things.


CFLs are made of glass, so they're fragile. If one breaks it or drops it, you have to follow simple rules, thanks to Congress. And according to the EPA, here's what do you if you break one of these light bulbs, and I quote. ``Have people and pets leave the room, and don't let anyone walk through the area.'' We must evacuate the room, Madam Speaker.


I continue. ``Open a window and leave the room for 15 minutes or more. Shut off the central heating and air conditioning system. Carefully scoop up glass fragments and powder using stiff paper or cardboard and place them in a glass jar with a metal lid.'' Obviously, that's readily available.


I continue. ``Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small grass fragments and powder.'' Of course we do have lots of duct tape in Texas, so that's no problem. But we're not through yet.


I continue to quote. ``Wipe the area clean with a damp paper towel or disposable wet wipes and place them in the glass jar or plastic bag. Do not use a vacuum or a broom.''


And, Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to file this 3-page, single space requirements the EPA has made all Americans follow on disposing of one of these broken light bulbs.


The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from Texas?


There was no objection.


Mr. POE. If you break a light bulb in a high rise where the windows don't open, will the EPA light bulb police haul us off to jail because of improper disposal procedures?


If I dropped this light bulb, we would have to evacuate the House of Representatives, according to the EPA light bulb law. Have we gone a bit too far with this nonsense?


Thanks to Congress, we're making what is simple very difficult. And besides, these light bulbs, are expensive, and using them may fade photographs on the wall.


Now, Madam Speaker, I'm going to carefully remove one of these light bulbs from a box that contains all these warnings on the outside. And this is one of those CFL light bulbs that Congress is requiring all Americans to use by 2014.


There's more to the requirements of using these. It says here, and I quote, ``these light bulbs may cause interference to radios, televisions, wireless telephones and remote controls.'' Now we're in trouble for Monday night football because we're going to have to turn out the lights so there's no interference with our TV.


We can also thank Congress for giving more money to China. This light bulb, it says right here, with all the warnings on it, is made in China. And Madam Speaker, they are only made in China. They're not made in the United States. We import every one of these things.


You know, over the past year we've seen Chinese pet food kill our dogs and cats; Chinese lead paint is poisoning our children, and now Chinese light bulbs that contain mercury can be harmful to our health. Doesn't this bother anybody?


Meanwhile, gasoline nears $4 a gallon, and Congress still has no energy plan except turn on these light bulbs.



Oh, I yearn for the day when America took care of Americans by developing our own abundant natural resources like coal and natural gas and crude oil to provide affordable energy to America. But those days have gone the way of Edison's incandescent light bulb. We might as well turn out the lights, the party's over.


And that's just the way it is.

(quote)

http://poe.house.gov/News/DocumentSingl ... ntID=91410

2 Chronicles 7:14

Madam Speaker, I have a Constitution here and, like most Members of Congress, I carry it with me. I've read it through and through, but I don't see anywhere in the U.S. Constitution that it gives the government the power to control the type of light bulbs used in Dime Box, Texas or any other place in the United States. Besides the lack of constitutional authority, let me discuss these light bulbs further.

Audio:

http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/americas- ... t_id=86909

Psalm 91

ACTION NEEDED HERE PLEASE
http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-212825.htm