CIRCLEVILLE, Ohio — Connie Johnson is something of a celebrity.
The line worker at the GE Lighting plant in Circleville is pictured on a light-bulb display in Wal-Mart stores across the country.
She is one of the faces of an initiative by the retailer to sell more U.S.-made products, a push that has led the Circleville plant to add jobs.
“It makes me real proud,” she said.
Johnson, who lives in Clarksburg in Ross County, has been at the plant since the late-1990s. For much of that time, large parts of the manufacturing floor were empty. Today, the head count is 233, which is up about 50 from a year ago, and employees say they feel more secure in their jobs.
The jobs in Circleville are tied to the actions of two giant companies, General Electric and Wal-Mart, and a shift in the world economy that has increased the cost of making products in Asia and shipping them to the United States.
“It’s better economically and environmentally to manufacture as close to the market as possible,” said Peter T. Ward, chairman of the department of management sciences in Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business. “We do now see that there are more and more examples of re-shoring, and General Electric is a poster child for that.”
The changes come as a result of rising wages in developing countries and increases in the costs of transporting goods long distances, he said.
GE Lighting, a division within GE, has headquarters in the Cleveland area and six plants in the state. The division recently has expanded in Bucyrus and Circleville, while closing plants in Warren and Ravenna.
The Circleville plant opened in 1948 and once employed more than 1,100 people. It was a mainstay of the Pickaway County seat, and as the plant cut back on jobs, the community suffered. Some of the cuts resulted from increasing automation, while others were because of work moving to overseas plants.
“They are incredibly important to our local economy,” said Ryan Scribner, executive director of Pickaway Progress Partnership, the county’s economic-development office.
He watched as plant leaders competed with other locations to win the right to make the “Soft White” halogen bulb for Wal-Mart.
“They were just working their tails off down there to become more efficient and make the best use of an aging facility,” he said.
The light-bulb line takes up one-fourth of the manufacturing space in a plant that covers about 650,000 square feet.
“This whole area used to be completely empty,” said Steve Killion, the plant manager, standing near the largely automated processes that make the bulbs.
He grew up in Kalida in northwestern Ohio and attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., joining GE after he concluded his military service in 2005.
He started at the Circleville plant in 2008 and has been the top manager since 2011.
The plant makes a variety of fluorescent bulbs for commercial use, along with the Soft White for use in households.
The Soft White is shaped like an old-fashioned incandescent bulb, but it has a smaller halogen bulb inside instead of a wire filament. A halogen bulb produces light by using a chemical reaction, which uses less energy than an incandescent bulb.
“You may have this in your house and not even know it,” Killion said. “The technology isn’t new, but the application is.”
The use of halogen is in response to a combination of government rules and consumer demand, he said. The federal government has set energy-efficiency standards that are leading to the phase-out of incandescent bulbs. At the same time, many consumers have indicated that they don’t like a common alternative bulb, the compact fluorescent, which has a spiral shape and takes a split-second longer to activate.
Wal-Mart approached GE about wanting to find ways to shift some manufacturing to the United States. GE chose three plants — Circleville and Bucyrus, Ohio, and Mattoon, Ill. — to do the work, and then moved in equipment from plants in other countries.
The moves have led to a total of about 100 jobs at the U.S. plants.
Along with the jobs, Wal-Mart has made the initiative part of a marketing campaign. In-store displays feature a big photograph of Connie Johnson working on the line above the words Made in the USA.
Some observers are reluctant to give Wal-Mart too much credit, saying the company’s decisions have cost the country many more manufacturing jobs than are now returning.
“My concern is that I see Wal-Mart ‘red-white-and-blue-washing,’ ” said Scott Paul, president of Alliance for American Manufacturing, a research and advocacy group that has been critical of the retailer.
“It just makes economic sense to make the product in the United States now,” he said. “The trend itself is going to happen with or without Wal-Mart.”
This argument is beside the point to the Circleville employees. They are just happy to have jobs.
And Johnson is still getting used to the idea that her photo is in thousands of stores nationwide.
She can accept that her image is in the local stores. It is something else to imagine it coast to coast.
“That’s when it’s going to hit you,” she said, anticipating the first time she goes to a Wal-Mart store far from central Ohio. “It’s everywhere.”
@DanGearino
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