Home > Where Did all the Kodak Jobs Really Go?
10NBC News
Rochester, NY
Where did all the Kodak jobs go?
At the end of last year Kodak had a workforce of 20,6000
hundred in Rochester. That’s down from 2002 when Kodak
had 22,000 employees in Rochester. So, where did the
jobs go? Most of Rochester’s job losses went overseas.
Kodak says it has major manufacturing operations in 13
other countries.
At Kodak Park, you can’t help but notice the empty
parking lots. Acres and acres of them. Some of the
people who used to work at Kodak may still live in the
area but the jobs have gone elsewhere.
Just last summer, the last single use camera was made in
Rochester and 500 local people lost their jobs. Some
found other jobs within Kodak only to face further job
cuts.
Kodak disposable cameras are now made in Mexico and in
China, where workers reportedly are paid as little as a
$1.00 an hour. Kodak employs 6,000 people in China.
NEWS 10NBC has learned that the company has been
outsourcing hundreds of information technology jobs to
India. Because they are computer jobs, they can easily
be done in a country halfway around the world where the
yearly salary may only be one-fifth of what a U.S.
Worker earns.
In Guadalajara, Mexico, Kodak has a major presence. The
manufacturing plant there looks like a smaller Kodak
park.
No one apparently tracks the number of local jobs lost
overseas but according to the state labor department,
the six-county Rochester metro area had 129,000
manufacturing jobs in 1990. At the end of last
December, that number had shrunk to about 84,000. A net
loss of more than 45,000 jobs or about 35 percent.
Congresswoman Louise Slaughter late Thursday talked
about U.S. Companies shipping jobs overseas in search of
cheaper labor costs. ’The companies moved out where they
could get people at deplorable wages…I think the wages
they got there have never risen above $5.00 a day.’
As recently as the 1999 Kodak shareholders meeting, then
CEO George Fisher said the company felt it was moving in
the right direction. ’And today we’re pleased to report
as most of you know I hope that 1998 was a pretty good
year for Kodak,’
But re-structuring had already begun and Fisher
acknowledged the impact it was having on the company.
’Oh gosh, we have put people through the ringer. ’And
the unfortunate thing is, even though you downsize by
say ten percent to use a round number, 90 percent who
aren’t downsized feel the uncertainty. They see a friend
go, they see a relative go, they have a neighbor that
lost his job.’
Kodak would not share with NEWS 10NBC the actual number
of jobs that have been shifted overseas. It does say it
has brought a small number of jobs from those countries
back to the U.S. and Rochester.