Quote:
Originally Posted by pj3000
Well that would be good news for Erie and PA. I seem to remember a lot (most?) of the locomotive production there was for the foreign market... mainly China and India... so rail development in those countries directly affected production/employment in Erie and in any of the other US plants which contributed (I think the Grove City plant is where they assemble the engines).
They had employment just under 5,000 in 2014-15 before production was moved to Ft Worth. There was a GE history museum at the Erie plant which was pretty cool... had an exhibit about GE's role in the WWII production effort... nearly 50k workers were employed at the Erie plant for a couple years then.. that's insane to think of. My grandfather worked there for awhile in the 1960s-70s... prior to it becoming specialized on rail/transportation. I believe there were about 12,000 employees then.
|
Full disclosure: I work for the union that represents the Erie workers.
Anyway, my general impression is although I can't describe Wabtec as being "nice" they're more willing to play ball with us than GE was. GE considered themselves in some sort of existential struggle with us, and was engaging in a process of systematically shutting down basically every high-wage unionized shop in the country and replacing it with a low-wage shop in the south. Wabtec seems more willing to let us live to see another day as long as they're getting the margins they want out of the place.
There's significantly more than 1,400 in the plant once you consider the white-collar workforce, draftsmen, managers, plant guards, etc, though I can't give you the exact numbers. Several hundred more though to be sure.
Threaded Mode