GE readies for massive expansion

As General Electric Co. readies for a significant expansion in Chicago, the Fairfield-based conglomerate apparently gave scant attention to a possible carrot promoted by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy for companies that add large numbers of jobs here.

GE Capital is adding 1,000 jobs in Chicago, where it already has that many workers of some 4,000 in Illinois. The GE unit is among the larger employers in Fairfield County, with its headquarters in Norwalk and multiple other sites.

GE Capital”™s commercial distribution finance arm and its Antares Capital subsidiary are both based in Chicago, but the new jobs will support GE Capital”™s operations across the business. The company”™s third-largest U.S. site is in Dallas, where it has some 1,000 workers, according to GE Capital spokesman Russell Wilkerson.

Wilkerson indicated GE Capital considered undertaking the expansion in Fairfield County, without specifying how close a call it was.

“We looked at a number of sites for expansion, including our existing sites,” Wilkerson said. “With GE Capital growing, we are looking at smart expansion in certain core businesses.”

If the Chicago expansion represents a possible lost opportunity for Connecticut, without any public pronouncement, GE is hiring in its own backyard ”“ and liberally. Over a month”™s time starting in late April, the company has posted more than 150 jobs in Fairfield County, many of them in finance.

Malloy has asked the Connecticut General Assembly to reward large packages of tax credits and other incentives to the first five corporations to create at least 200 jobs here. At deadline, the Legislature had yet to approve the “First Five” program.

A Malloy spokeswoman did not provide official comment from the governor, instead referring questions to the state Department of Economic and Community Development. DECD spokesman Jim Watson said the department is in regular contact with GE, but in this case was not made aware of GE Capital”™s intention to expand its operations, and so could not put a specific offer on the table.

It was one of multiple large U.S. expansions revealed by GE the past few years, including a newfangled battery production plant for upstate New York and two other expansions announced in late May to add 1,000 manufacturing jobs in Pennsylvania and Texas.

Public eyes are on CEO Jeff Immelt to see if he backs up his work as chairman of the White House Jobs and Competitiveness Council with corresponding stateside hiring at GE; in late April, Immelt resigned his post as Fairfield County”™s loan representative on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, citing in part the demands of the White House council.

Just this month the company devoted an entry on its GE Reports website to “the case for making it in the USA.”

If the case for making widgets in Connecticut has been challenged by United Technologies Corp. and other companies in recent years, the case can still be made that few states are better suited for making financial products, given the large concentration of old hands from Wall Street who live here.

Still, the Connecticut Department of Labor estimated last month that the state shed some 1,100 jobs in April ”“ perhaps incredibly putting total industry employment slightly below its level of a year earlier, when banks were only beginning to rehire following the economic collapse of 2008 and 2009.

In addition to banks and financial brokers, insurance companies and real estate agencies are included in DOL”™s computations for financial sector hiring.