President Obama’s visit last Friday to an IUE-CWA-represented GE factory in Schenectady, N.Y., left workers optimistic about efforts to create and restore American manufacturing jobs.

In a similar vein to his State of the Union address five days later, the president told Local 81301 members that, “We’re going back to Thomas Edison’s principles. We’re going to build stuff and invent stuff.”

After years of GE outsourcing and plant closures, IUE-CWA President Jim Clark said the company has started to add union jobs at U.S. plants. In Schenectady, for instance, a new $100 million battery plant will employ 350 people, in addition to 1,200 Local 81301 members who build turbines and generators. Currently they are at work on $750 million in exports to India.

“We’ve made some headway,” Clark said. “We’ve got a long way to go, but lately, we’ve had some success bringing back some of the jobs that GE sent offshore when Jack Welch was CEO.”

Obama announced in Schenectady, the birthplace of GE, that he would name current CEO Jeffrey Immelt to chair the new White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, news that pleased Clark and 81301 leaders. “The president made it very clear that he wants to grow jobs in this country, he wants to export more than we import, and fortunately our CEO agreed with him,” said Local Business Agent Carmen DePoalo, who got to speak briefly with Obama afterwards.

More than half the president’s audience was made up of 167 members of Local 81301. They were selected by lottery to attend, along with GE managers and community leaders. “I think the thing I enjoyed most was the expression on people’s faces, the excitement that ‘the president of the United States is in our workplace.'” DePoalo said.