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General Electric to Close Ohio Lamp Plant Friday
WARREN, Ohio – General Electric is preparing to shutter its Ohio Lamp Plant on Dana Street, which will end operations this Friday.
The plant closing, announced a year earlier, follows unsuccessful efforts to preserve some 200 jobs at the plant. A Worker Adjustment Retraining Notification Act announcement giving formal notice of the plant’s closing was posted to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services website in November.
Plant management and leaders of IUE-CWA 722 had negotiated an agreement early last year that would have maintained jobs by moving all but one line of incandescent products out of Ohio to other plants and GE putting several lines of energy efficient-halogen bulbs at the Warren plant. The pact was rejected April 1 in a vote widely seen as pitting current workers against retirees, who stood to gain from the closing. Following the vote, the company informed workers April 5 that it planned to move forward with closing the plant.
"This package was mainly structured by the union leadership to save jobs and we thought we had negotiated a fair package which the union leadership supported," said Ron Wilson, general manager -- lighting supply chain, GE Lighting, in a statement issued following the vote. "This package would have allowed Ohio Lamp Plant to have a promising future by saving some of the existing production, while adding new equipment and work that would keep jobs in the Warren area."
The closing, according to GE’s initial announcement in January 2013, was due in part to “rapidly declining volume” at the plant as customers shift from halogen lamps and specialty incandescent products made at the plant to more energy-efficient lighting products that last longer and cost less to operate and maintain.
Slated to close later this month is GE's lamp plant in Ravenna.
Meantime, GE has begun demolition of its idled Trumbull Lamp Plant on West Market Street and its Niles Glass Plant in Niles.
Published by The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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