On Tuesday, GE announced that it is shipping 500 jobs from Texas, South Carolina, New York, and Maine to factories in France, China, and Hungary because House Republicans won't reauthorize the U.S. Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im), whose authorization expired in July after 81 years. "The U.S. remains the only major economy in the world without an Export Bank," GE said. "This is a choice that was forced on us," added GE Vice Chairman John Rice.
The Senate reauthorized the Ex-Im Bank in July, and a majority of the House backs reauthorization, too. But "House Republicans backers, including Speaker John Boehner, aren't willing to defend a small, esoteric agency against passionate conservatives," Politico notes. Those conservatives called GE's outsourcing of jobs a political stunt to put pressure on Congress to revive the bank, which mostly guarantees loans for foreign customers buying U.S. goods. They noted that 500 jobs is just a sliver of GE's U.S. workforce of 136,000.
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