GE Gear Plant closing marks end of Lynn era

LYNN – General Electric’s Lynn Gear Plant, which for decades made massive toothed wheels to power U.S. Navy destroyers, submarines and aircraft carriers, quietly closed over the weekend.”It went out with a whimper,” said Tony Dunn, a Lynn-based labor organizer and coordinator of the e-Team machinist program at GE.The closing marked the end of an era in maritime propulsion device manufacturing in Lynn.William Rounseville, a former Gear Plant machinist now working at the Lynn aircraft engine factory, said the production reached its peak in the early 1970s when more than 800 union laborers were employed.Rounseville, editor of the IUE-CWA Local 201 Electrical Union News, noted that four months before the Dec. 7, 1941 Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, ground was broken in Lynn for a marine gear manufacturing facility. The Navy chose a marshy area across the railroad tracks where GE was already building aircraft engines at its River Works plant.The government set an incredible goal of starting production by June 1942, a timetable given urgency by the intensified Nazi blitzkrieg in Europe and, more so, the attack on Hawaii that catapulted the United States into World War II.By mid-1942, the Gear Plant was producing the first of hundreds of gear sets it would crank out during the war.When hostilities ended in 1945, the government mothballed the Gear Plant, but it was revived a few years later when the Navy needed more gears for its warships in the Korean War.”GE bought the facility from the government in 1971, refurbished the buildings and machines, purchased new equipment and got back in the maritime gear business,” said Rounseville.He cited a company Gear Plant history authored by unofficial GE Lynn historian and former employee David M. Carpenter.The 500,000-square-foot Gear Plant was phased out over the past few years. In late December, the 50 union workers still assigned either retired or transferred to GE aircraft engine manufacturing jobs in Lynn.Only four gear sets remained on the assembly line.Two were shipped to Newport News, Va. for installation in the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford.The final two were scheduled to ship Wednesday from the city’s industrial pier off the Lynnway.Rounseville explained that each aircraft carrier has four gear sets.”Many feel GE abandoned what could still be a thriving business,” said Rounseville.He noted that GE sold the gearing business to Philadelphia Gear, which runs a gear plant in California.As the Local 201 official who represented the Gear Plant’s union members for the past 15 years, Rounseville said GE should have kept the plant in Lynn and employed 200 to 250 workers.Since the 1980s, the Gear Plant primarily produced reduction gear sets for the Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) class guided-missile destroyers. Sixty-two of these ships were built, each driven by twin gear boxes.The Navy recently announced plans to build at least nine more Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and ordered 10 smaller Littoral Combat Ships, all of which would have meant work for the Gear Plant, Rounseville said.To express their displeasure, some former Gear Plant employees donned T-shirts emblazoned with the message: “Gear Plant II – Scuttled by GE.”Gary Poland, another Local 201 official with deep ties to the Gear Plant, said the real message is on the back of the shirt: “River Works, Lynn MA. – Proud to Power the US Navy – 1943-2010.”Rounseville said the Gear Plant was unique in the industry because the product was designed, built, and tested under the same roof.Bob Grieves, a retired Gear Plant quality control manager, put it this way: “Gear Plant built the best, most reliable gearing in the world, as validated by the fact that our gears powered all the (Trident submarines) and all of the active attack Los Angeles-class submarines (SSN, until the Virginia class).Grieves described the Gear Plant as a national treasure that can not and will not be duplicated.William Gehr, a former GE manager from 1967 to 2003,