Join us to ask GE to “Keep your promise to our community”

Campaign to Save the West Burlington Plant

Southeast Iowa Townhall Forum
Wednesday, October 23rd 6:30 PM
Memorial Auditorium, Burlington, Iowa
200 North Front Street (Banquet Room A)

In order to call attention to how corporate tax deals are hurting our economy, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, the Des Moines, Henry County Labor Council, and others are holding a forum this Wednesday, October 23 to learn more. They are asking GE to:

• Keep your promise to the community – Don’t take our money and run

• Understand that everyday Iowans want good jobs and livable wages, job security and stability, respect and dignity for workers, and companies to reinvestment in the community.

• Make a long-term/long-haul commitment to stay in West Burlington and provide good-paying jobs with decent benefits.  And treat its employees with dignity and respect.

This is part of a larger campaign for community/worker justice and corporate accountability.

Special Guests

David Osterberg, Iowa Policy Project
Cherie Mortice, Iowa CCI Action Fund
Local and state elected officials

Community forum co-sponsored by Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement Action Fund, Iowa Federation of Labor, Iowa Policy Project, Center for Worker Justice of Eastern Iowa, Des Moines/Henry County Labor Council, Iowa State Council—Communications Workers of America, and Iowa Citizen Action Network. For more information, contact Iowa CCI Action Fund at 515.255.0800 or email cciaction@cciaction.org.

Background

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to connect the tax giveaways to corporations to the decimation of city, county, state and federal government budgets.

Rather than recoup some of these lost tax revenues to a shadow of what they were in the heyday of American prosperity in the 1950s, the causal narrative of government budget woes at every level is that public spending is out control.

Public services are unaffordable, we are told, because we overpay public sector workers like librarians, janitors, garbage men and filing clerks more than they are worth. “Generous” benefits like health care and pensions are simply unsustainable in the new economy.

Mayors, city administrators, county board members and Senators explain that the only way out is for us to give more corporate tax abatements, TIFs, forgivable loans, and other tools of “economic development” that pit city against city, state against state, in a “race to the bottom”.

Cities can’t afford to fix sewers and potholes until they have given a ten, twenty, thirty-year tax vacation to a real estate developers who want to build another shopping complex or hotel.

Public nursing homes are being privatized at the same time that casinos are subsidized.

And when States like Illinois raise income taxes to pay decades-old bills and neglected infrastructure, Corporations like Caterpillar threaten to move out of state.

We cannot fully staff the library or parks department because we are subsidizing the development of yet another Walmart who will inevitably close the nearby local, smaller stores. And instead of collecting the increased property tax as we had from those smaller, often locally-owned stores, governments are put on a pay freeze by the TIF that was demanded as a trade-off for the “development.”

One of the beneficiaries of this these policies is General Electric. GE made profits of more than 8 billion dollars over the past 11 years but paid a tax rate less than most working families. The Institute for Policy Studies details it this way:

“Over the last 11 years (2002-2012), GE reported more than $88 billion in U.S. pre-tax profits and yet paid just $2.1 billion in federal income taxes, according to company filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). GE paid a paltry tax rate of just 2.4% compared to the official corporate tax rate of 35%. This huge tax subsidy cut GE’s taxes by $28.9 billion over the 11 years.”

These profits are certainly a result of the hard labor of its workers and creativity of its engineers, but it is also due to the 975 people in GE’s accounting department who have turned “tax avoidance into an art form” according to Americans for Tax Fairness.  In 2011 this resulted in a tax return more than 57,000 pages long (compare that to the Tea-Party complaint about Obamacare being 906 pages long.)

Some of this wealth could also be attributed to the sweet deal GE received here in Iowa at its West Burlington Plant. Three years ago, GE threatened to close its West Burlington manufacturing plant if workers didn’t agree to nearly $8 million in cuts to wages and benefits.  Local and state government (city of West Burlington, state of Iowa, and Des Moines County) also threw in $2.4 million in tax incentives. After the state, county, and city agreed to those tax abatements, and the workers agreed to the severe paycuts, GE agreed to stay in Southeast Iowa for 3 more years.

It’s been 3 years now, and there has been no public report on the company’s progress.

So, join us to ask GE to “Keep your promise to our community”

Southeast Iowa Townhall Forum
Wednesday, October 23rd 6:30 PM
Memorial Auditorium, Burlington, Iowa
200 North Front Street (Banquet Room A)