Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric (GE) for 20 years from 1981 to 2001. Jack transformed GE, taking a solidly profitable manufacturing company and turning it into an exceptionally profitable conglomerate dominated by service business. As such a big company who was running businesses for decades, GE has a lot of social responsibilities. Corporate social responsibility is the duty of a corporation to create wealth in ways that avoid harm to, protect, or enhance societal assets. I will analysis the social responsibilities of GE from the following aspects. First of all, GE had economic responsibilities to society and GE did well on it. GE paid taxes—5.7 billion in 2000. Taxes can be considered as the major income of government. Only
Union leaders estimate that in his last 15 years GE eliminated 150,000 jobs in USA through layoffs, subcontracting, and outsourcing to foreign countries. In 1985 the electrical worker’s union had 46,000 members working at GE, but by 2001 the number had declined to 16,000. Ed Fire estimates that two- thirds of the 30,000 lost jobs were simply transferred to low-wage countries. GE has rights that to layoffs its employees, but what did such huge number of employees can do after they lose their jobs. For the people who lost their job, they might have hard time to survive. Maybe they will become homeless, even worse they might become yegg. Although GE layoff such amount employees did not obey any laws, GE definitely did not consider well about the impact to our society. Obviously, layoff employee has nothing to do with benefits society.
What is more, the ranking shareholders over employees and other stakeholders were not good enough. Every year each GE business was forced to evaluate its managers and rank them on a vitality curve that differentiated among As, Bs, Cs. The As were committed people, filled with passion for their jobs. Cs were not worth wasting time on and were dismissed. Bs were considered vital to the success of the company and were coached so that some would become As. On one hand, the defective evaluation system is really harmful. The reasons are: firstly, forced ranking hurts the moral of employees who are not placed on top. Secondly, its