Union Busting Doesn’t Pay Off for Boeing
http://www.eoionline.org/blog/union-busting-doesnt-pay-off-for-boeing/When Boeing announced in 2009 that it would invest $750 million in a new South Carolina production plant to build the 787 Dreamliner, the airplane giant said it needed to cut down on costs being driven up by unions. After years of battling with machinists unions, Boeing moved to non-unionized South Carolina where workers’ benefits and pay are much lower. In South Carolina, for example, Boeing pays plant workers $15 per hour, almost 50 percent less than what Washington assembly line workers earn.
Privately, however, this was never the case. In an internal memo that later became the basis for a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board, Boeing bigwigs admitted that not only would the move cost them money, but “the only consistent advantage attributed to Charleston was the ability to ‘leverage’ the site placement decision toward ‘rebalancing an unbalanced and uncompetitive labor relationship.’”
But years later, Boeing is seeing another consequence to its costly move out of Washington – a less productive labor force. According to the Puget Sound Business Journal:
Washington’s Boeing machinists and assembly line workers are some of the best in the world because our state has the infrastructure to support their training, certification and long-term employment. The skills, awareness and experience from years of work in the industry are held partly by individual workers, but also in a local network of relationships, trust and everyday interactions in the workplace. This is clear to workers and managers close to the factory, but less so to executives in offices 2,000 miles away. Washington’s competitive edge in aerospace has even led Airbus, Boeing’s major global competitor, to consider opening a Washington engineering center.
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The smell of schadenfreude in the afternoon? 
Eyeman's initatives and the GOP obstruction on maintaining highways, and those who profited from shutting down mass transit and non-toll roads pushed by those who backrolled Eyeman, were cited as part of the reason for their move, as well.
Whether Boeing was being honest or not, they did come out publicly against his revenue cutting plan. And it made sense, as they said that more congestion, less abiility to transport at low cost from the state providing good transit was a factor.
That if WA wasn't going to keep up infrastructure by funding government, where once the state was one of the biggest employers, it was going to take away WA's competitive edge.
The voters are in charge of those things, and if they keep following the Island Libertarian route, the state will continue to be divvied up between the wealthy areas where they keep people from traveling through, with toll roads they can't afford to work there, and cutting down on mass transit.
IOW, screwing the poor and working class out of the opportunity for these good jobs. It's the kind of thing that is not used as a talking point nor the philosophy debated except in sloganeering about evil government, freedom, liberty and all that bullshit. The effects are no less real for the people who need to have mobility and skills. I'm sick of privatization clowns devouring what worked for everyone for so long. They're just thieves.
It seemed that Boeing was reacting to what they saw was more conservativism which works fine for those who don't need to work, just to hold onto to assets and force others out or to pay too much to get access. The problem I see is that the public sector is being attacked viciously by media for the private forces in so many ways. We had a charter school initiative pass, and the 520 bridge is a toll road, AFAIK. I used to travel that bridge to do business there, and not only myself, but others I know have been impacted by the some of the East Side's aversion to public transit and state funded roads.
What I've heard some say in essence, is that they don't want the riff raff coming out there. If you can't afford the gas and maintenance of a vehicle to traverse the area, go away. I know people who are losing hours everyday from the cuts in mass transit and even having to beg rides if their family has only one car, the Seattle based person has to drive to pick them up when they get off work making a burden on them since the buses don't run even hours.
And I know others like myself, who can't pay the tolls so I no longer go over there. This is economic apartheid. Okay, not enough coffee to make a coherent rant. But this is something we cannot take for granted. Civil government and those relationship forged by it as the OP says, are dying a slow death as this other system takes over the state.
