To Welch and his acolytes, the proof of his methods’ glorious success was in the numbers. But the glory came at great human cost. Welch famously slashed jobs wherever possible, which created tension in a company where many workers had assumed for years that they would be GE employees for life. He slashed more than 100,000 jobs in the 1980s, one-fourth of the entire workforce of General Electric, and he moved tens of thousands of other jobs overseas, where there were no unions and labor was cheap. Critics questioned whether Welch had any other management strategy than slashing costs and worried
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