Boeing Moves More Jobs from Washington State to South Carolina

As first reported in The Wall Street Journal, Boeing is ending production of the 787 Dreamliner at Everett, Washington, and moving it to its newer facility in North Charleston, South Carolina. The company says this is the most efficient approach to reducing production of the jet from 10 per year to six per year in response to falling demand due to the coronavirus pandemic. 

Moving production to South Carolina means that more than 1,000 Boeing workers at its Everett plant will likely lose their jobs as they no longer have a model to build.

This development marks the latest step in Boeing's long-term assault on its unionized Washington workforce. When the state legislature there approved its $3.2 billion ($2 billion present value) subsidy deal for the 787 in 2003, legislators there were under the impression that they had “won” the project, that Boeing was now required to build all 787s in Washington. They were shocked and angered when the company announced that it would set up another assembly line in “right-to-work” South Carolina, complete with some $900 million in incentives, creating a plant that remains non-union to this day.

In large part, this new move became possible because this February, the company asked Washington to end the 2003 subsidy package, which had been ruled an unlawful subsidy by the World Trade Organization and upheld by WTO's Appellate Body (click on "Summary of key findings") in 2012. After getting hammered by the European Union in WTO compliance proceedings, Boeing decided it would clean its slate to be better positioned to attack EU-based Airbus for the subsidies it has received. The United States notified the WTO Dispute Settlement Body in May that Washington had terminated the subsidies in March. With no subsidy from Washington, the company no longer felt obligated to produce any 787s there. Note that there has been no indication that Boeing gave back the approximately $160 million a year it had received already under the 2003 subsidy deal.

According to the company, it did not receive any incentives to bring the remaining 787 production to South Carolina. That would be the right approach for Boeing to take if it wants to avoid further hassle with the World Trade Organization. Of course, we have seen plenty of examples where subsidies have been discovered long after a project was first announced. Think Foxconn in Wisconsin or Nissan in Mississippi. Call me cynical, but I wouldn't put it past Boeing to find a way to get a subsidy for the “new” jobs in South Carolina. After all, from 2003-2012, the company had net negative state income taxes overall nationally.

Between the runaway jobs and the World Trade Organization subsidy rulings, if there were ever a time and a company calling for no development subsidies, Boeing is it in 2020.

Cross-posted with Good Jobs First.

Thanks to Greg LeRoy for suggesting this article and for editorial improvements.

Wow! Boeing asks for end of Washington State subsidies UPDATED X 2

The New York Times is reporting that Boeing Corporation has requested that the state of Washington stop providing it with tax breaks that the World Trade Organization (WTO) has on multiple occasions ruled to be an illegal subsidy under the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures. On February 19, State Senator Marko Liias and co-sponsors introduced a bill at the company's request to end these subsidies.

Of course, Boeing's move did not come from the goodness of the company's heart. It represents part of its maneuvering in its WTO war with Airbus. 16 years ago, the United States challenged Airbus' EU subsidies at the WTO and the European Union fired right back with a complaint against Boeing's subsidies from the state and federal government. Both won as plaintiffs and lost as defendants. (The same was true for Canada and Brazil, which alleged illegal export subsidies to Embraer and Bombardier regional jets.) As I noted over six years ago, while the federal government had eliminated its subsidies to Boeing through NASA and the Department of Defense, the state and local subsidies were continuing merrily along. Indeed, the WTO Appellate Body affirmed this again last year (h/t NYT), with the state subsidies valued at $100 million per year.

As a result, the company wants to clean its slate in order to help the United States press its case against Airbus and the unresolved issues there with EU subsidies. (Note that in the WTO, only countries have standing to file complaints; companies cannot do so.) Airbus received billions of dollars worth of subsidized loans in so-called "launch aid." This is quite an amazing dispute: Not only has it lasted ever since the World Trade Organization came into being in 1995, but a settlement to the dispute was supposed to be part of the agreements creating the WTO.

The bill is expected to pass in the current legislative session, which ends March 12. Thus, thanks to the European Union and the World Trade Organization, Washington taxpayers will save $100 million a year going forward.

Update: CNBC reports that the tax break saved Boeing $200 million in 2018, double the amount mentioned above.

Update 2: My colleague Kasia Tarczynska at Good Jobs First reminds me that Boeing also receives subsidies in Missouri and South Carolina. This led me back to the WTO's report on U.S. compliance as modified by the Appellate Body. While the dispute, for whatever reason, did not include Missouri subsidies, it also covered a variety of subsidies beyond Washington state, including Industrial Revenue Bonds (IRBs) from Wichita, Kansas, and 11 subsides that comprised the South Carolina package. If I have this correct, the Dispute Panel found that the United States had not removed the state and local subsidies in Washington, while the Appellate Body added that only some of the subsidies in South Carolina were in violation of the rules, and it was unclear if Wichita's IRBs constituted a "specific subsidy" that could be sanctioned. It is possible, therefore, that Boeing may have some more cleaning up to do to get to the blank slate it wants to have when it presses against Airbus subsidies.

Boeing moving 2000 jobs from Washington state

Via @BlogWood, I learned that Boeing is going to move 2000 skilled jobs away from Washington state, despite just receiving $8.7 billion (with a B) in subsidies for the years 2025-2040. Really, I'm speechless. "Chutzpah" is one of the more printable words I can think of to describe this.

You will recall that the state's legislators were angry when their $2 billion (present value of $3.2 billion over 20 years) 2003 subsidy for the Dreamliner did not stop Boeing from putting a Dreamliner assembly line in South Carolina. So the 2013 subsidy was supposed to guarantee that Boeing couldn't do this again.

Boeing's response no doubt will be that these jobs are in the Defense division, not in civil aircraft. Thus they are not covered by either the 2003 or the 2013 subsidy. This has already been hinted at by a commenter on the Business Week article, wraiths13@yahoo.com. This is true, but cold comfort: It's still a reduction of Boeing's footprint in Washington.

Let's take a similar example in North Carolina. In May 2010, American Express announced that it was building a $400 million, 50- to 150-job, data center in Greensboro, without incentives. Why would it not want incentives? Take a guess.

Here's mine, which seems to be pretty widely shared: American Express already knew that it was going to close its call center in Greensboro, at the cost of 1900 jobs, which it announced in January 2011. Thus, it would have been subject to clawbacks of any incentives it received for the data center, so why bother negotiating for incentives it couldn't keep?

What American Express knew it couldn't do in North Carolina is exactly what Boeing is now doing in Washington. This suggests the Washington has weaker job creation requirements than North Carolina, which ties subsidies to the total number of jobs in the state, not just at one location. So Washington has combined the nation's largest-ever subsidy with weak performance requirements. Meanwhile, Boeing has done nothing to earn the benefit of the doubt regarding its motives. This is just one more indication that the company will try to find a way to worm its way out of commitments directly covered by the incentive packages. When that happens, try not to act surprised.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear. 

America's Most Wanted: Boeing

Boeing is America's Most Wanted Corporation in two senses. First, now that the Machinists' union in Washington state has refused the company's contract demands, it is shopping production (h/t Pacific Northwest Inlander) of the 777x aircraft nationwide and lots of states are making offers for it. Second, it is emblematic of everything the 1% is doing to destroy the middle class: despite being highly profitable, it pays virtually no taxes; it accepts billions of dollars in government subsidies; it is trying to eliminate pensions and cut salaries for its highly skilled workforce; and it is trying to move production away from its unionized workforce, something it has already accomplished in part.

The first part of the story is nauseating enough. With Boeing already threatening to leave its home in Washington state if it didn't get what it wanted from both the state and the union, Democratic governor Jay Inslee called a special session of the state legislature that took three days to approve subsidies for Boeing. The incentive package is the largest ever in U.S. history for a single company, according to Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First, an astounding $8.7 billion over 16 years (2025-2040). By my own back-of-the-envelope calculations, this looks to be the largest-ever U.S. subsidy on a present value basis as well as in nominal terms.

By the way, this represents a huge jump from Boeing's current tax break package for the 787 Dreamliner, passed in 2003, which was $160 million a year for 20 years ($2.0 billion in present value, by my calculations). Under the new package, this would more than triple to $543 million annually.

Also of note, the World Trade Organization ruled that the 2003 subsidies are illegal under WTO rules, a finding that was upheld by the WTO's Appellate Body in April 2012. While the U.S. government has eliminated some of the illegal subsidies provided by NASA and the Defense Department, the state and local subsidies found to be in violation of the WTO's Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures have not been eliminated. As noted in the last source, the European Union was seeking permission from the WTO to apply $12 billion worth of sanctions on U.S. exports. The EU will certainly file a new complaint against whatever state and local subsidies Boeing ultimately receives for the 777x, and on the basis of the last case there is every reason to think the EU would again prevail.

But just days after the legislature approved the subsidy, the union rejected the proposed contract by a 2-1 margin. Though the company described it as a "contract extension," there were major changes involved, including replacing the defined benefit pension with a 401(k) (continuing an economy-wide trend contributing to the coming middle-class retirement crisis), increased health care costs for employees, a lower wage structure for new hires, and smaller raises than in the current contract, all in exchange for a one-time bonus of $10,000 for current workers.

After the contract offer rejection, Boeing announced that it would entertain offers from 15 states that might be interested, including Washington state. The proposals were due in less than a month, with the company imposing a December 10 deadline on prospective suitors. As Good Jobs First reported in its January 2013 publication, The Job-Creation Shell Game, we see a two-sided use of the corporate mobility conferred by a location decision to (as I like to describe it) extract economic rents (superprofits) from governments: Job blackmail directed at Washington state and the Machinists' union; combined with an offer to the other 14 states to engage in job piracy by subsidizing the firm's potential relocation. This is an exercise in raw corporate power.

And to what end? We have already seen the details on how Boeing wants to terminate true pensions, reduce other worker benefits, and create a two-tier employment structure. As Greg LeRoy highlights in a recent post, Citizens for Tax Justice has shown that over the decade 2003-2012, Boeing made $35 billion in pre-tax U.S. profits, yet paid negative tax to Washington state of $96 million and a whopping $1.8 billion in federal income tax refunds over that same period! To put the new deal in perspective, LeRoy points out that should it eventually be approved, the $543 million annual subsidy would be "more than twice what the state provides to the University of Washington." So not only are the labor provisions a direct assault on middle class living standards and retirement security, the opportunity cost of the deal will no doubt further imperil public education in Washington at all levels, undermining one of the very factors that gives the state a trained workforce that is attractive to employers in the first place.

Boeing has already shown its willingness to move work away from Washington state, when it built a  787 Dreamliner assembly line in South Carolina despite the billions in subsidies it received from Washington. However, the South Carolina site has been plagued with production problems, which some see as strengthening the bargaining position of the Machinists in Washington.

Personally, I tend to believe that the Machinists do have a strong negotiating position. It is hard to imagine other states coming up with some 20,000 highly skilled workers to take on the job. While I think it is possible that part of the production could be moved away from Washington state, for instance the wing assembly only, I think the company will have to leave most of the work in Washington. Moreover, Boeing only gets the $8.7 billion in tax breaks if it produces the entire project there. Missouri, by contrast, has only offered $1.7 billion in subsidies to attract the facility, which I consider to be unlikely to be successful because Boeing workers in St. Louis are also Machinist union members. But really, there is no way to tell for sure whether the company's desire to weaken the union will overwhelm what looks like a compelling case for staying in Washington.

We do know, however, that Boeing is displaying everything that is wrong with corporate America today. As I wrote recently, there needs to be a federal law against states providing subsidies to move existing jobs out of another state. Banning job piracy would also weaken companies' ability to engage in job blackmail by reducing the economic viability of actually relocating to another state. With Boeing's auction sure to set a new standard in the annals of job blackmail, the sooner we can get action on relocation subsidies, the better.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

Update on Boeing: Union to Drop NLRB Complaint, but Will Subsidy Shoe Drop, Too?

As I reported in September, Boeing and the Machinists' union were in a big dispute about awarding the second Dreamliner assembly line to South Carolina, rather than keeping it in Washington state, where the company had received $2 billion in tax breaks (present value) for the original production line. The battle reached the National Labor Relations Board because Boeing officials made public comments suggesting their decision was prompted by labor strife in Washington -- a prima facie violation of the National Labor Relations Act, because it is illegal to retaliate against workers engaging in their legally protected right to strike.

After rumors yesterday afternoon, it was officially announced late last night that a pact had been reached (h/t Talking Points Memo): in exchange for locating production of the new Boeing 737 MAX in Renton, Washington, Boeing and the union would sign a 4-year contract extension, and the union would drop its NLRB complaint against Boeing over the South Carolina plant. The company also said it would relocate defense work from Kansas to Washington if it closes what is reported to be a money-losing Kansas plant. The contract provides for a $5000 signing bonus for Boeing workers, 2% annual increases, and potential bonuses that could reach 4% per year. Boeing workers vote on the agreement December 7.

I can't help asking: what about subsidies? Basic bargaining theory in international political economy would say that if Boeing has no choice in where it locates the 737 MAX facility because of the union contract, it should not have any bargaining leverage over Washington state. Assuming the contract is ratified next week, Boeing can no longer tell state and local governments in Washington that it could move the plant somewhere else. It would be under a contractual obligation to put them in Washington, which should put the state in the driver's seat in subsidy negotiations. As we all know, that would be a very unusual outcome here in the U.S. After all, Boeing got a package for the Dreamliner equivalent to a $2 billion cash grant, more than twice the cost of the $900 million factory (see my new paper I mentioned in my last post). Are we going to find out in a couple of weeks, or a couple of months, that the state guaranteed subsidies as part of this deal? I'd say it's very possible, but if the Boeing-Machinists' union deal really did tie down the company, there is no reason for the state to give away the store again. As President Bush so eloquently put it, "You can't get fooled again."