787-10 going to SC

[FlightPathOBN]

Rumours and news all over Boeing land is that the manufacture of the 787-10 is going to SC...stay tuned.

(cant post link to the Seattle Time article because you have to pay)

[HEATHROW DIRECTOR]

SC? EGSC (Cambridge)? Don't understsnd your banter OM.

[JammedStab]

They have priced themselves out of a job with their strikes on a regular basis.


Boeing Accelerates Shift Of Workers Away From Puget Sound Birthplace

"When Boeing BA +1.18% relocated its corporate headquarters from Seattle to Chicago in 2001 after eight decades in the Puget Sound area, it was billed as a logical follow-up to the company’s merger with St. Louis-based McDonnell Douglas. With half the company’s future revenues likely to come from defense work, it made sense to be closer to Washington.

And when Boeing announced plans to assemble some of its 787 Dreamliners in Charleston, South Carolina eight years later, that too seemed like a reasonable step given that Boeing was purchasing the operations of a major 787 subcontractor already established there. Puget Sound looked likely to remain the center of Boeing’s commercial-transport operations for the foreseeable future.

But now people are beginning to wonder whether something more is going on. In March of this year, the company announced it would eliminate 2,000 machinist positions in the Puget Sound region. In April it said the local engineering staff would lose 1,700 jobs. Then in May, Boeing disclosed plans to eliminate 1,500 information-technology slots in the region.

All of these developments might be blamed on fluctuating demand for skills as commercial-transport programs move through the various stages in their life cycles. Except for this: as plans to cut machinists, engineers and IT workers around Puget Sound were being revealed, Boeing was also disclosing plans to add employees in each of those categories at other U.S. locations. (Disclosure: Boeing and many of its competitors give money to my think tank.)

This isn’t the usual story about domestic manufacturers sending jobs overseas. Boeing has remained the nation’s biggest exporter of manufactured goods without moving many of its workers offshore. It still has over 80,000 employees around Puget Sound alone, where the company was founded 97 years ago as the age of flight was just commencing.

However, there does seem to be a concerted effort to move jobs to other parts of the United States — places where costs are lower, unions are less cantankerous, and politicians make the world’s biggest aerospace company feel more welcome.

The latest installment in this unfolding trend came on May 31, when the company announced establishment of engineering design centers in Southern California and South Carolina. The California center will consolidate all engineering on commercial transports that are out of production, like the 727 and 757. The South Carolina engineering center will apparently focus on both airframe and propulsion features of new jetliners.

Boeing says it has been planning to set up the new engineering centers for three years. Maybe so, but some people in Seattle thought it was a striking coincidence that the move was announced only months after the company came to terms with an unusually demanding local of its engineering union in the Seattle area. As Seattle Times reporter Dominic Gates pointed out in his analysis of the May 31 announcement, Boeing executives had warned the local during protracted bargaining sessions that it was pricing itself out of the market.

The company’s 787 operations in South Carolina have already been the focus of a multi-year controversy about management’s motives for setting up production in a non-union state shortly after settling a damaging machinists strike in the Northwest. The National Labor Relations Board got involved for a while, and even though tensions have eased many of the company’s workers around Puget Sound harbor suspicions about what the company’s long-term intentions may be.

Those workers probably weren’t pleased to hear Boeing has recently doubled its acreage at the North Charleston plant, and has the option to do so again (to over 1,000 acres). The company plans to spend a billion dollars expanding the site and add another 2,000 production, engineering and IT workers by 2020 — giving it a local workforce of 8,000. The positions will pay an average of $65,000 annually, high by South Carolina standards but not so attractive compared with what machinists and engineers are making around Puget Sound.

South Carolina politicians couldn’t be happier, predicting in local media that Boeing will hire even more people than planned, and that their state will become a major aerospace hub. That could have important regional political benefits for Boeing, since it now has to worry about commercial-transport rival Airbus setting up narrow-body assembly operations in nearby Alabama. Alabama’s legislators have proven extraordinarily tractable in giving the European plane maker everything it wanted, from tax breaks to protection from lawsuits.

Which brings us back to Puget Sound. Boeing certainly has no intention of abandoning the place, where it has invested tens of billions of dollars in research, design, production and training facilities. The company’s wide-body assembly plant in Everett, WA is the largest enclosed space in the world, and moving such a facility would be nearly impossible. But when you strip away all the details of how and why Boeing is shifting jobs to other parts of America, there does seem to be an undertone of impatience about the cost and complexity of operating in the Puget Sound region.

A big part of that is the attitude of organized labor, which has a long history of being difficult to deal with in the Northwest. Seattle was the first city in America to have a general strike — it happened in 1919 — and while the Bolsheviks are long gone, some of their behavioral traits seem to live on. Other places with similarly militant union movements like Detroit and New York have seen most of their manufacturing jobs vanish over the years.

Puget Sound has been more fortunate, thanks largely to the presence of Boeing. But even Boeing may be running out of options to keep operating there as costs rise and new players like Brazil and China enter the commercial-transport market. Boeing has a track record of giving its workers better pay and benefits than other industrial employers, but the only way that can continue is if it stays competitive in core markets. Company executives will have to weigh which communities are more likely to support that goal."

[FlightPathOBN]

HD,

Manufacture of 787-10 going to South Carolina....

Jeez....

Priced themselves out all right...and the cost of living in WA is far higher than SC...

at $80K year, this is a relatively high paying job in SC, whereas in WA, they are paid about $125K.

[glad rag]

I'm absolutely certain that this will not impinge on the quality of the product.

[poorjohn]

I'm absolutely certain that this will not impinge on the quality of the product.Some dripping sarcasm seems to be shorting my LiIon batteries. Switching to backup....oh, wait....

[barit1]

Don't forget that US Military has a significant presence along the east coast, with many ex-military who learned their skills there and available for Boeing to hire. GE and others already have a significant presence in the region.

[racedo]

Don't forget that US Military has a significant presence along the east coast,

Er where don't they have a significant presence in the US ?

[FlightPathOBN]

Here is what I see them doing, like they did with flight ops.

Open or move the center to another region.
Offer the employees the jobs if they move. The younger (cheaper) people will most likely move, while the older (more expensive) people are more established, and will not.

That way, you have the trained people without the expense.

I dont really think that, given Boeing's different locations of design and manufacturing, that anyone can say that there is an inferior product coming from a particular location.

If anything, the facility in SC is the most modern, is not constrained, and incorporates the lessons learned from the other assembly lines...typically that means a faster, more efficient line (coupled with motivated workers) would appear to be a very positive move.

[PAXboy]

Doubtless all of the unions and WA workers will rounly applaud the move. It is, afterall, a superb example of supply and demand and the great American way to make more money. :}

[FlightPathOBN]

Both the Airbus and Boeing new facilities are located in right to work states.

[Kiskaloo]

The issue appears to be one of space on the LCF and the FAL rather then one of wages and benefits.

If Boeing stretches the center section, as they did to get the 787-9, then that will be too long to fit in an LCF so you cannot transport them from the CHS production facility to PAE by air (unless they build a special 787-10-capable LCF).

Also, PAE's assembly bays appear to not be long enough to support a 787-10 in each position. CHS has longer bays (since they were able to build a new FAL rather than work with an existing one).

[glad rag]

That way, you have trained people without the experience to spot the errors

EFA.