If distance makes the heart grow fonder then maybe it can also make Lynn’s number-one employer more profitable.
General Electric announced on Jan. 13 it plans to relocate its headquarters to Boston from Connecticut. In explaining the move, GE corporate leaders in a company statement said they want to be “at the center of an ecosystem that shares our aspirations.” That sentence referred to Boston’s status as a mecca for higher learning where GE’s best and brightest can tap the energy and intelligence of Boston-based brain power surrounding them.
There is no reason some of that blinding brain power cannot shed its glow nine miles north of Boston and onto the River Works. The West Lynn manufacturing complex is where Lynn’s heart still beats and it is where workers and management are trying to hold onto tried-and-true products while expanding into the global market.
In a move that previous generations of GE workers could not imagine occurring, GE has been tearing down River Works buildings and selling off property. Anyone taking a negative bent might say this signals a gloomy future for the West Lynn plant, but a positive perspective suggests the River Works could undergo a rebirth as its sheds 20th-century manufacturing buildings.
U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton has already pointed out the value of linking emerging biomedical and other types of technologies in Boston with the River Works. He points to the short distance between Boston and Lynn and suggests that the West Lynn plant is the perfect place for innovators and inventors to grow their dreams and businesses.
GE plans to move 800 workers to Boston and most of them, according to the corporate statement, will be people employed to figure out how they can start designing the GE products that will be sold and used in the 22nd century.
The corporation plans to open something called a “Digital Foundry” where the best and the brightest shape the raw material of ideas into new products. Ideas and innovations are great but, at the end of the day, someone has to manufacture the products and there is no reason the workers in West Lynn cannot continue being today’s builders for the future.
Moulton promised even before he took the oath of office to make Lynn’s resurgence a top priority. Making that promise a reality hopefully involves convincing GE to shine the bright light of their Boston brainpower on Lynn.