see article:

http://www.tribtoday.com/page/content.detail/id/585518/GE-union-rejects-plan-to-stay-open.html?nav=5021

if the workers approved it, they would be faced with a 15% cut in pay and no more raises. on the other hand we would have gotten usa made ge A19 halogen bulbs. they rejected because of a lack of guarantee for jobs. terrible management!

There was something similar with one of the last pieces of Tadiran a few years ago. The workers united and bought the company from the management, effectively sending the bad management home. Can they do something similar here ?

There was something similar with one of the last pieces of Tadiran a few years ago. The workers united and bought the company from the management, effectively sending the bad management home. Can they do something similar here ?

Theoretically it could be, what they are aiming for: Let GE to close it, then buy it with the machinery (the machinery would be a cost of scrap metal) and run it on their own.

But would they be able to keep the fab alive?
The problem is, the classic incandescent market go away (the bans only speed this up, but the main reason are the too low incandescent sale prices). Converting the fab to the halogens would still need quite investment (for tooling,...), while the operation life would be only few years longer (they are more expensive to make, while the sale price is dropping just a bit behind regular incandescents), so it would be practically only a longer agony.

Converting to some today's "cash cows" mean building a completely new fab anyway and then going around plenty of patents owned by the big players.

In any case it would mean establishing an engineering team for product development, I would guess the hardest part...


I guess all that conversion was already considered by the main GE and only two options remained: Either close immediately and free the workers to get other job (and a compensation), or convert to halogens and keep it for the next two years with reduced salaries. The unions decided for the first one...

ironically of the old electric lighting techs, i think incandescent/halogen will survive the led revolution, even if their use could be drastically reduced. there are a few applications that can never replace incs: food warming, reptile lighting, lava lamps, oven lighting, etc. plus incandescent bulbs are not toxic unlike gas discharge lamps.

In many colder climates it does not matter - You have a cheap and reliable lamp, and its waste heat is radiated to the room anyway

In many applications it does not matter either - where duty cycle is low, and all you want is a cheap and reliable lamp ie staircases etc

ironically of the old electric lighting techs, i think incandescent/halogen will survive the led revolution, even if their use could be drastically reduced. there are a few applications that can never replace incs: food warming, reptile lighting, lava lamps, oven lighting, etc. plus incandescent bulbs are not toxic unlike gas discharge lamps.

But the sale volume would be low, so majority of present day manufacturing capacity would have to shut down anyway...

yep thats true. for example the old fashioned flash bulbs and vacuum tubes are still made for certain applications. but there are no factories left in the usa that makes any of these. one company, meggaflash in ireland makes flashbulbs on sylvania machinery they bought from. vacuum tubes are mostly made in russia and asia for the music industry. so there would still be a few incandescent plants around the world instead of hundreds.

vacuum tubes are mostly made in russia and asia for the music industry.

You forget a JJ-Audio from Slovakia (using Tesla machinery)... :-D