State Workers Fear Boeing Will Send Jobs To California
For a city that became the headquarters of the largest aerospace company in the world overnight, the news Sunday of Boeing Co.’s buyout of McDonnell Douglas Corp. was an added jolt of turbulence in one of the most tumultuous years in the history of the aerospace industry in the Pacific Northwest.
Although the merger is widely expected to stabilize and strengthen the future of Boeing’s flagship operations in Washington’s Puget Sound region, it also raises worries among workers about whether future production increases could be siphoned off to Southern California - and whether the company’s hiring boom here is at an end.
The question is not an idle one, given Boeing’s historic position at the economic bedrock of Seattle and the surrounding metropolitan region: “As Boeing goes,” the local joke has always run, “so goes Seattle. And Bellevue. And Renton. And Everett. And so forth.”
Boeing accounts for one out of every six jobs in the area, and has just undergone one of the biggest one-year employment swings in the company’s history.
From an employment cut of 12,000 Seattle-area jobs during a downturn in 1995, the company has done a staggering about-face and added 13,000 jobs this year, a figure that could go as high as 15,000 by the end of the year. Boeing also employs more than 400 people in Airway Heights.
Thus, the biggest question many in Seattle have about Sunday’s buyout announcement is how far Boeing will go to transfer excess production demand to idle McDonnell Douglas facilities in Long Beach - a road already explored, at least tentatively, with an agreement earlier this month to collaborate on the development of Boeing wide-body passenger jets.
“The news is generally good, but you’d want to be worried about the extent (to which) over time they transferred Seattle-based work to McDonnell Douglas,” said David Harrison, a former economic analyst with the University of Washington’s Northwest Policy Center.
Local officials greeted the announcement with overall enthusiasm, although few had time to react on a day dominated here by news that the Seattle Mariners baseball team was being put up for sale.
King County executive Gary Locke, who will be sworn in as Washington’s governor in January, issued a brief statement, calling the merger “absolutely great news.”
“This will truly stabilize Boeing’s future in the aerospace industry,” Locke said.
“It will make for a much stronger partnership to compete against Airbus (Industrie, the Europe-based No. 2 builder of civilian airliners).”
How Boeing fares in the international commercial airline market continues to be a matter of vital interest to Seattle, despite its optimistic boasts that it has significantly diversified the regional economy.
Dick Conway, publisher of the Puget Sound Economic Forecaster, pointed out that Seattle has made important strides in developing hightech industries, “but when one out of six jobs is still dependent on a single company, then it’s hard from that point of view to say that we have a balanced economy.”