GE job numbers hard to figure

It’s been a tough year for General Electric Co. and especially its GE Power division, which the company used to proudly say was headquartered in Schenectady, where Thomas Edison launched what became the modern GE conglomerate.

But GE’S connection to Schenectady these days is wishy-washy at best.

GE has split GE Power into two separate divisions, one is called Gas Power and the other is called Power, and it is dismantling what it said were three “headquarters” organizations within GE Power that included three CEOS, all with their own corporate infrastructure and support systems.

And with it, the idea that Schenectady is the headquarters for something Gerelated has just disappeared.

And so have many of

GE’S employees. Just a year ago, GE was proud to say that it had 6,000 employees in the Capital Region, which included 4,000 at the Schenectady campus, more than 1,500 at the Global Research Center in Niskayuna and hundreds more at GE Healthcare manufacturing facility in North Greenbush.

Today, GE’S local public relations employees — who won’t speak on the record — say the real number is 4,000.

We knew that GE has laid off hundreds of workers at its Schenectady campus over the past year as the company tried to right-size its struggling GE Power business.

But 2,000? Either the layoffs have been much greater than previously known, or GE was for years dramatically inflating its employment figures in the Capital Region.

Perhaps it is a combination of both.

GE or Bitcoin?

The sad thing is that investing in Bitcoin — no matter that it has dropped significantly in value over the past year — is more lucrative than investing in GE stock.

In fact, they have had the inverse. At the start of 2017, GE stock was valued around $31 a share. At that time, Bitcoin was trading for around $1,000.

Today, GE is trading for $10, one-third the value of GE’S stock two years ago.

As for Bitcoin — which peaked at nearly $20,000 at the end of 2017 — it’s trading these days for around $3,900.