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Comment by holler

5 years ago

related article from local Seattle newspaper: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/09/09/44441906/the-dea...

"So, Seattle finds itself where Pittsburgh was in the 1970s and Detroit in the 1960s. The city is about to lose a central part of its industrial base. Today, Pittsburgh, the "Steel City," has no steel plants at all." ... "Seattle will finally become fully post-industrial in the third decade of the third millennium."

24 comments

holler

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dralley  5 years ago

Seattle is still in a better position than those cities due to Microsoft and Amazon, which will soften the blow, but it will still be quite painful.

  • vaxman  5 years ago

    Those avionics assembly people can go to work in the tech companies....doing what?

    • CountSessine  5 years ago

      They’re not going to be working at Amazon but likely smaller companies building parts for the aircraft industry supply chain. I think what the parent poster meant was that the lay-offs won’t wipe Seattle’s tax base out because they’re a proportionally smaller part of Seattle’s workforce than steel workers would have been in Pittsburg in the 70s.

      1 reply →

  • rtkwe  5 years ago

    Yeah the Everett plant only employees 30k according to the Boeing site which is 1% of Seattle's population even if the whole plant went away. It'd hurt to lose for sure but I doubt it will be disastrous the same way it was when steel and cars left other cities.

    • klyrs  5 years ago

      Everett is an hour's drive from Seattle, and afaik its population is not included in the "greater Seattle area." While many commute, that 30k is nearly a third of the population of Everett.

      And Boeing contracts a lot of components that feed that plant. Many of them local, small businesses, spread throughout the region, with that one customer.

      3 replies →

brightball  5 years ago

That feels like a scare piece. It’s a big leap to go from moving production of one type of plane to the other facility where that plane is produced...all the way to assuming they are shutting down everything.

I live in SC and worked for a company in Seattle when the Charleston plant opened. From day one this type of scare tactic talk has been circulated. My cab driver from the airport told me “they are moving everything to South Carolina! Can you believe that!?”

It’s a narrative to rile people up. That’s it.

xxpor  5 years ago

The 777x and 767 will still be here at least.

  • sanguy  5 years ago

    The plan is if the 787 ramp up in SC goes well the 777x will be the next to get moved, and 767 will end its run in Everett and then the lights turned off.