Reading the IAM District 751 machinists union response to Boeing’s North Charleston selection for its second 787 assembly line reminded me strongly of the dockworkers union in The Wire. President Tom Wroblewski, in his wounded outrage, talking about “betrayal,” “loyalty,” and a man’s “word,” summoned up shades of Frank Sobotka.
“We remain committed to the Puget Sound,” said Jim Albaugh, president and CEO of Boeing’s Commercial Airplanes division, giving “committed” a fairly capacious meaning that could soon include “My new phone number begins with area code (843).”
And state Senate Minority Leader Mike Hewitt (R-Walla Walla) said, “I think we could have enacted some of the reforms we needed last year,” referring to reducing business costs in worker’s compensation and unemployment insurance.
It’s an education for everyone, which arrives, ironically, just as Boeing is cutting back on picking up its employees’ lifetime-learning tab. Yesterday KIRO 7 asked whether this was the “first step in Boeing leaving the state.”
It is hard to square any of these responses with Boeing having moved its corporate HQ to Chicago in 2001. For most of the decade, they have not even geographically been a hometown corporation that might be expected to “do right” by local workers, where management might share a personal “commitment” to the region, and were concerned simply with paying their fair share of taxes. They have been rent-seeking, to the evident detriment of their production line’s timeliness
Strikes don’t boost profits, and as Danny Westneat pointed out yesterday, the “average pay of the local line workers who are building the fuselage of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner in a Charleston, S.C., plant” is $14 per hour. The average pay for a machinist up here is $28. If you multiply the difference (which, arguably, Boeing may learn you can’t, in practice) by the 3,800 jobs Boeing has promised South Carolina, that’s over $100 million per year.
And consider that South Carolina reached 12 percent unemployment earlier this year (a rate that has fallen only slightly), and that the state’s unemployment insurance program is nearly $1 billion in debt. As Jon Talton notes, while Washington hasn’t been competitive with the “Southern strategy,” the results don’t look that strategic. They just look desperate.
Tom Wroblewski is probably right–Boeing would be happier to find it can make planes in South Carolina than Seattle, and the union can’t reset the Puget Sound’s economy. He thought the union was negotiating when it should have been trying for just a few more years, for the sake of the kids.
But no one has the upper hand in this story. South Carolina is all in, and Boeing is looking more and more like a managerially troubled company making a very risky mid-life move. The question for Seattle has been and remains whether an 800-lb. gorilla can be replaced–or whether we should look for eight 100-pounders instead.