Comment by 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.
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.
Those avionics assembly people can go to work in the tech companies....doing what?
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.
Those companies now are largely in low cost of labor areas not near Seattle.
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.
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.
Those contractors don't have to be colocated though and only 1 plane is leaving. On top of that it's the 787 which isn't exactly in a good spot. Last I heard there was still an open question of how much work would be involved in getting them flying again.
2 replies →
30k Boeing employees, but I'd like to know how many local contractors, shops and restaurants ultimately depend on this workforce.
Local shops can ship parts to Boeing's other plants and there are other aircraft that will still be made there. For things more tangentially related like restaurants the most threat would be to the ones right there that depend on work lunches, outside of that very local area are at much lower risk because as big as the factory is (and again it's not leaving just losing one plane) it's a small percentage of the local population.
1% of population is substantial. Cumulative US COVID-19 cases are like 2% and deaths are 0.062%.
FWIW, the # of actual COVID cases in the US population is better estimated at ~15% [1]. Only counting verified cases drastically undercounts, because testing has always been very constrained, and many people don't have severe symptoms and therefore don't get tested.
1: https://covid19-projections.com/us
4 replies →
Most of the disruption has been the containment efforts not the dead or sick themselves though. The damage has come from the 12 percentage points of growth in the unemployment rate. It was attenuated a lot when there was the additional unemployment money.