Boeing Boeing ... Gone

The Boeing Co. is threatening to leave its home in Seattle, fed up with costly demands from its workforce and an unresponsive local government.

Executives are looking south to warmer climates, where cheaper land is available and workers seem more willing to provide the flexibility the managers say they need to compete in the cutthroat airplane business.

That’s the story today, at least. It was also the story during the 1920s, when Boeing got into a fight with the Seattle City Council over building new roads connecting downtown with the airport we now call Boeing Field, and threatened to move to southern California.

 

“Like rain in winter, this is a regular feature of the Puget Sound emotional landscape,” says author and political economist T.M. Sell. “We’re coming up on the 100th anniversary of Boeing first threatening to leave. Perhaps we can all get together and have a cake.”

 

Even so, policy makers today are facing a new threat from the state’s largest manufacturer, the notion that its next new airplane—likely to be a replacement for its top-selling 737 series—won’t be built in Renton, but in some business-friendly, right-to-work state in the southeast United States.

 

“Everyone should take it very seriously,” says Linda Lanham, the director of the Aerospace Futures Alliance, an industry group that lobbies the Legislature on behalf of Boeing and the rest of the aerospace industry. “There are 78,000 reasons—78,000 good-paying, family-wage jobs.”

 

In addition, there are 10,000 more aerospace jobs in the region that are directly or indirectly tied to the presence of Boeing, not to mention the service economy that has grown up around Washington’s largest employer.

 

The issue came to a head last October, in the midst of the bitter 57-day strike by the International Association of Machinists (IAM), one of the longest in Boeing’s history. Some 87 percent of the factory workers in Boeing’s largest union had voted to reject the company’s contract offer, partly because of pay and benefit issues, but largely because of disputes over Boeing moves to use non-union workers to perform tasks traditionally done by machinists.

At the same time, contract talks with the second-largest union—the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), representing engineers and technicians—were getting off to a rocky start. Boeing had proposed to SPEEA contract terms very similar to those already rejected by the machinists, and SPEEA leadership was warning its membership to prepare for a walkout as well.

 

In Chicago,