GE job posting closes after 10,000 applications received for $13/hour jobs

 bizjournals.com
General Electric Co.’s posting for jobs at Louisville’s Appliance Park closed Thursday evening after the company collected 10,000 applications through its Web site.

Hiring is expected to start in September, according to Kim Freeman, a spokeswoman for GE Appliances. It’s not clear how many applicants will get calls back.

Business First reports that the starting rate for the manufacturing positions will be $13.56 per hour. Workers hired on the second shift will receive a $1-per-hour night-shift bonus.

Freeman said company officials hope to get enough qualified applicants to take the company through all the hiring it will do through 2013.

99% Prepare to Occupy Bank of America's Corporate Headquarters

The 99% are preparing to occupy Charlotte, North Carolina, home of Bank of America's corporate headquarters, ahead of the bank's annual shareholder meeting Wednesday. Members of the 99% Power Coalition, which is organizing the events, said they expect nearly 1,000 individuals to arrive in Charlotte to protest Bank of America's foreclosure practices and its investment in coal mining, several members of the group said on a call with reporters Tuesday.

The organization has held similar protests outside the shareholder meetings of Wells Fargo and General Electric that have drawn hundreds of people. The organizers said they expect Bank of America's meeting to draw the largest crowds of all. "We see Bank of America as the worst of the worst," said Amanda Starbuck, a director at the environmental advocacy group, Rainforest Action Network, which is organizing the protests. "There's a lot of momentum around Bank of America."

In response, the city of Charlotte is beefing up police presence in a two-block radius surrounding the bank's headquarters, where the meeting will be held. Earlier in the year, the city deemed it an "extraordinary event," which allows the Charlotte police force to reallocate officers as it sees fit, according to a spokesperson for the mayor's office. More...

CEO's Earn More Than Firms Pay in US Taxes

At least 25 top United States companies paid more to their chief executives in 2010 than they did to the federal government in taxes, according to a study released on Wednesday.

The companies — which include household names like eBay, Boeing, General Electric (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft Corp. and NBC Universal, which is jointly owned by Comcast Corp. and General Electric) and Verizon — averaged $1.9 billion each in profits, according to the study by the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal-leaning research group. But a variety of shelters, loopholes and tax reduction strategies allowed the companies to average more than $400 million each in tax benefits — which can be taken as a refund or used as write-off against earnings in future years. More...

Nuclear Nightmare Getting Worse, Yet Propaganda Continues

Image via WikipediaMark Sircus
Japan said it is considering expanding the area covered by a compulsory evacuation order, with no immediate end in sight to the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. At this point we should all sit up and take notice of what is happening and what could all so easily happen.

Emergency workers were pumping nitrogen into the quake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant to prevent further explosions. Now we hear things are getting so hot inside the destroyed reactor buildings that they cannot approach. On April 6, Reuters reported, “The core at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear reactor has melted through the reactor pressure vessel,” Rep. Edward Markey told a House hearing on the disaster. “I have been informed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that the core has gotten so hot that part of it has probably melted through the reactor pressure vessel.” America’s NRC said that some of the core of a stricken Japanese reactor had probably leaked from its steel pressure vessel into the bottom of the containment structure, implying that the damage was even worse than previously thought.

Richard Lahey, who was head of safety research for boiling-water reactors at General Electric when the company installed the units at Fukushima, told the Guardian that at least part of the molten core, which includes melted fuel rods and zirconium alloy cladding, seemed to have sunk through the steel “lower head” of the pressure vessel around reactor no. 2. “The indications we have, from the reactor to radiation readings and the materials they are seeing, suggest that the core has melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel in unit two, and at least some of it is down on the floor of the drywell,” Lahey said.

On April 5, Times writers James Glanz and William Broad headlined, “U.S. Sees Array of New Threats at Japan’s Nuclear Plant,” saying: American engineers warned “that the troubled nuclear plant… is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely, and that in some cases are expected to increase as a result of the very measures being taken to keep the plant stable,” according to a confidential NRC assessment.

According to former GE reactor designer Margaret Harding, “Exposed/unprotected spent fuel rods in Units 1, 2, 3 and 4 pose extreme dangers. Moreover, explosions blew nuclear material ‘up to one mile from the units’ into the atmosphere, indicating much greater damage than previously disclosed. As a result, David Lochbaum from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) believes, “This paints a very different picture, and suggests that things are a lot worse. They could still have more damage in a big way if some of these things don’t work out for them… They’ve got a lot of nasty things to (handle), and one missed step could make the situation much, much worse.”

On March 29, Dr. Chris Busby said, “In fact, Fukushima already way exceeds Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and will get increasingly worse ahead as radiation releases continue and spread. I believe that (the array of) phony experts are criminally irresponsible, since their advice will lead to millions of deaths… I hope they are sent to jail where they can have plenty of time to read the scientific proofs (showing) their advice was based on the mathematical analysis of thin air.”

Dr. Busby cited John Gofman, a senior U.S. Atomic Energy Commission expert who resigned, saying: “The nuclear industry is waging a war against humanity.” Busby calls it “the greatest public health scandal in human history,” which can be witnessed in the present as the government and press continue to mislead the public. More...

Washington Post article that cuts thru all of Japan's Nuclear LIES

Image via WikipediaJapanese plant races to contain meltdowns after two blasts; third reactor loses cooling capacity

Chico Harlan and Steven Mufson, Monday, March 14

TOKYO — A second explosion rocked Japan’s seaside Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex Monday, this time destroying an outer building at unit 3. A Japanese government official separately said that a third reactor at the six-reactor facility had lost its cooling capacity, adding to the complications facing the engineers who try to limit the damage of a partial meltdown.

Like the Saturday explosion at unit 1, the blast at unit 3 took place after a buildup of hydrogen was vented by the reactor. The hydrogen was produced by the exposure of the reactor’s fuel rods and their zirconium alloy casing to hot steam.

In normal conditions, the fuel rods would be covered and cooled by water.

The explosion occurred as Tokyo Electric entered day four of its battle against a cascade of failures at its two Fukushima nuclear complexes, using fire pumps to inject tens of thousands of gallons of seawater into two reactors to contain partial meltdowns of ultra-hot fuel rods.

The tactic produced high pressures and vapors that the company vented into its containment structures and then into the air, raising concerns about radioactivity levels in the surrounding area where people have already been evacuated. The utility said that at one of the huge, complicated reactors, a safety relief valve was opened manually to lower the pressure levels in a containment vessel.

But the limited vapor emissions were seen as far less dire than the consequences of failure in the fight against a more far-reaching partial or complete meltdown that would occur if the rods blazed their way through the reactor’s layers of steel and concrete walls.

At the 40-year-old Fukushima Daiichi unit 1, where an explosion Saturday destroyed a building housing the reactor, the spent fuel pool, in accordance with General Electric’s design, is placed above the reactor. Tokyo Electric said it was trying to figure out how to maintain water levels in the pools, indicating that the normal safety systems there had failed, too. Failure to keep adequate water levels in a pool would lead to a catastrophic fire, said nuclear experts, some of whom think that unit 1’s pool may now be outside.

“That would be like Chernobyl on steroids,” said Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer at Fairewinds Associates and a member of the public oversight panel for the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which is identical to the Fukushima Daiichi unit 1. More...

Ten Thousand Apply for 90 Jobs in Louisville

By Hiram Lee
10 October 2009
Reflecting the increasingly desperate economic situation faced by millions, this week 10,000 unemployed workers applied for 90 jobs at a Louisville, Kentucky, General Electric (GE) plant.

The enormous response came within the space of just three days. GE had announced its intentions to add a second shift to its plant manufacturing washing machines in Appliance Park last Friday and began accepting applications on Monday. An earlier announcement by the GE plant calling for 13 maintenance workers who would receive $23 per hour drew 700 applicants.

The GE jobs promised a mere $13 per hour, plus benefits including dental coverage and eye care. The same jobs had previously paid $19 per hour until the decision by the IUE-CWA Local 761 to accept concessions in May, which included cutting wages for new workers and future hires.

Unemployment in Kentucky reached 11.1 percent in August. A total of 3,200 manufacturing jobs were lost in the state in the same month. Over the year ending in August, some 35,300 manufacturing jobs were lost in Kentucky.

Dr. Justine Detzel, the chief labor market analyst for Kentucky’s Office of Unemployment and Training, commented after the release of these numbers, “This marks the 14th time in the last 15 months industrial employment has fallen. Job losses were concentrated in the durable goods subsector, reflecting layoffs at a number of automobile parts manufacturers, the closing of another automobile parts producer, and the start of a lengthy temporary shutdown of a durable goods plant.”

The loss of better-paying manufacturing jobs will have a sharp impact on poverty in the state, which already stood at 17.3 percent for 2008. According to the latest Census Bureau figures, one in eight families and one in four children live in poverty. Foreclosures, particularly in Louisville, continue to rise due to a spike in unemployment.

A testament to the destruction of the manufacturing sector, no less than 80 percent of the workers applying for the 90 GE jobs were able to claim factory experience on their applications.

The response of the Kentucky state government to widespread unemployment and a major crisis within the state budget has been entirely reckless and shortsighted. Social programs, made all the more necessary by the economic crisis, have been slashed. Upon entering office in 2007, Governor Steve Beshear, a Democrat, almost immediately began a fight to bring casino gambling to the state, a mercenary industry that would only prey on the poor and working class population. Short-term attempts to increase tax revenue include hosting the 2010 World Equestrian Games in the state, as well as a major Nascar racing event.

As federal stimulus funds will have run out by 2012, the governor is preparing the state for further hardships in the future. Hinting at further cuts to social programs, he spoke before a Downtown Rotary Club in Louisville in September, saying the budget crises yet to be faced will “make us decide what we consider sacred and what is expendable.”

The rush by 10,000 unemployed workers to claim the small number of jobs offered by GE is a phenomenon not unique to Kentucky. All over the country, workers are desperately trying to find jobs or secure assistance under conditions in which available jobs and resources are completely inadequate.

Thousands have flocked to free, temporary clinics set up in Texas and California in search of health care they could not otherwise afford. In Detroit this week, 50,000 residents sought housing aid, of which there was only enough to assist some 3,400 people in need.

These and similar incidents around the country have made clear the inability of the capitalist system to meet the most basic social needs of masses of people.

At a time when trillions of dollars are available to bail out the banks, workers are told there is no money to provide even the most elementary necessities of life.