Jack Welch

The vile former GE CEO Jack Welch died recently. History News Network asked if I was interesting in writing one of my patented obituaries for them about this scumbag. How could I turn down that offer?

Welch believed that unions destroyed the American economy, stating in a 2009 forum that there were no competitive unionized industries in the United States. Between 1980 and 1985, GE’s workforce plummeted from 411,000 to 299,000 workers. The overall percentage of unionized workers in the company fell from 70 percent when Welch took over to 35 percent by 1988. That Welch himself rose from nothing, the son of Irish-Americans who did not graduate from high school only bred greater contempt. If he could become rich and famous, why couldn’t all the other working class kids? That his personal actions foreclosed that possibility for millions of others hardly entered his mind, as it didn’t bother earlier generations of formerly working class capitalists such as Andrew Carnegie. Welch personified the survival of the fittest for himself.   

Welch’s impact on upstate New York was devastating. GE’s home of Schenectady, New York, once a thriving industrial city, became a deindustrialized shell filled with crime and poverty thanks to GE layoffs. When GE pulled out of its Fort Edward, New York electrical capacitor plant in 2013, after Welch’s retirement but with his influence still strong, Chris Townsend, political director for the United Electrical Workers, stated in fury, “It shouldn’t be easy to close a plant. The General Electric corporation has been shown every imaginable consideration. Our members have worked with the company to keep this plant profitable. Now the company decides to walk off, leave hundreds of people stranded with no jobs, no income.” That, compounded by hundreds of other closures and layoffs, is the legacy of Jack Welch. 

Welch’s entire career was class warfare: the rich against the poor. The only worthwhile value for Welch was the quarterly profit report. Anything that got in the way of that—especially an unproductive division of workers—was happily sacrificed for that goal. For all this, Fortune magazine Welch was named “manager of the century,” a symbol of how toxic American corporate culture had become by 1999. Whereas workers were placed into competitions to cull the least productive, Welch helped bring in the era of outsized CEO pay that far outstripped that of average workers, recreating the world of the late nineteenth century where obscene wealth for a few was overtly built on the poverty of the many. 

Today, we are living in the world Jack Welch made, one in which a racist, proto-fascist, self-proclaimed billionaire whose businesses have worked with organized crime figures is president, governing by the New Gilded Age principles of letting business rule itself and eviscerating labor, consumer, and environmental regulations. In fact, while Welch criticized Donald Trump’s chaotic management skills, he also loved how Trump had governed in favor of business and warned that impeaching the president would “blow the markets away.” Impeachment had no impact on the market, but Jack Welch being wrong about America was the cornerstone of his career. His life immeasurably hurt this nation and should not be mourned. Instead, his methods and beliefs should stand for the decline of America in the twenty-first century.