It’s been a long day and I’ve got to go get me some dinner (at 9:21 p.m.), but before I do I thought I’d give y’all a place to celebrate some good news, it’s been so long since we’ve had any here in SC:
Boeing Co. said Wednesday it will open a second assembly line for its long-delayed 787 jetliner in South Carolina, expanding beyond its longtime manufacturing base in Washington state.
The Chicago-based airplane maker said it chose North Charleston over Everett, Wash., because the location worked best as the company boosts production of the mid-size jet, designed to carry up to 250 passengers.
Boeing already operates a factory in North Charleston that makes 787 parts and owns a 50-percent stake in another plant there that also makes sections of the plane…
So, yea us!
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Because we don’t have a union or any other worker protections to speak of….swell.
I know we need the jobs and I’m really glad they’re coming, but the coverage I read so far emphasized the worker-crushing angle so heavily….sheesh! Not that we have great workers, great anything–we’re just exploitable.
The question is will it be worth the benefits package.
This is great news for SC, particularly if we play it right and start encouraging clusters of suppliers, not just in the Charleston area, but in some areas like Walterboro and Kingstree that badly need jobs.
Look, we’re cheap; that’s our advantage. That, and the fact that (thanks to Fritz Hollings back when he was governor), we have a tech system that can guarantee an employer such as this one that we can train workers for them.
Y’all know how we got Tech system, don’t you? Sen. Edgar Brown didn’t want it, but Fritz went to see him with a bottle of whiskey, and they talked into the night, and when the bottle was empty, we had a tech system.
Which brings us to our current governor’s contribution to this coup, which, from what I’ve seen so far, consists mainly of having agreed, just this once, not to be an OBSTACLE to ecodevo, in that he said he would sign the incentives bill in spite of all he’s said in the past against such packages.
Big of him.
Not to be a buzz kill or anything but just remember all the hoopla about Mack Truck coming to Winnsboro. That didn’t amount to much. Small business is what drives employment. SC is a very poor state for small business. Until that changes I doubt we’ll see much relative improvement in the overall unemployment rate compared to the rest of the USA.
Greg–
USC Biz School did a study back in the 90s that purported to show that the investment in BMW had a huge multiplier effect. As someone who grew up in Aiken, probably SC’s first economic development site, it sure seems like there is a multiplier effect there compared to a similar small horse town like Camden, that is actually better located.
Now, Charleston is already well-situated in many ways, so maybe the multiplier won’t be so great. Steve Gordy is right that a better place to “give away the store” is somewhere that has little to begin with. When I did “ecodevo” a plant located in Allendale in effect became the tax base. Without some relief, no sane business would locate there. By giving the relief, you bring jobs and do in fact float boats that would otherwise be drydocked because the tide would never rise again. (Block that metaphor.)
The Boeing arrival is a good thing, but the decade-long tax holiday for them means we’ll be funding their infrastructure without reimbursement for quite a while. Also, we probably need to wait for this chicken to actually hatch before getting too excited. I’m thinking of the JAFZA thing at Santee, heralded as the answer to unemployment in that area but now on indefinite hold (maybe 2012, maybe not, “market driven” . . . ). South Carolina and Orangeburg County promised JAFZA $60 million in road improvements. They promised SC and the county, let’s see, hmm . . . nothing.
South Carolina “leaders” have kept themselves in power off cheap labor since 1670. Same stuff, different day.
I’d like to know how the SCGOP feels about Boeing’s family values.
http://boeing.com/aboutus/diversity/groups.html
I understand the principal Kathryn, I am just curious about the magnitude if the benefits. I too have a good amount of experience in economic development. Studies have shown that Alabama will probably recoup what it put on the table for the Mercedes plant some years back. Competition between states has driven incentives through the roof for large industrial projects. I don’t say that we are doing a bad thing, only that we often lose let our excitement stand in the way of a true cost/ benefits analysis.
Whether it is worthwhile to impose costs upon the entire State in order to get jobs to a depressed area when those jobs could be lured to other areas of the State more cheaply is another question altogether.
Snead, your point is well taken, but remember, we are talking about Charleston, not North or some other area not as socially and culturally diverse as Charleston. About the only item on the list that might be controversial even for Charleston is the one for lifestyle.
And, I suspect the Boeing corporate people understood there is a socially conservative majority in South Carolina before making their final decision, especially since they already have a presence in the Charleston area. No surprises there.
Snead, one more thing. I think you and I share the same viewpoint about the “leaders” who have exploited the poor and undeducated for the purpose of cheap labor for over three centuries. Keeping the educational system at MMR has been a mainstay or at least in my take on the issue.
Lynn– I wonder if there are clawbacks in the provisions or not, so that if certain benefits aren’t received, the company has to pay back some of the goodies.
I suppose the benefits of putting something in Charleston/North Charleston may be that there is already a lot of infrastructure there, maybe.
Bart and Snead–
I wonder how much of the keeping educational system subpar was directly connected to keeping the underclass underclass, and how much was just the general distaste for education throughout the state. I’m not so sure the upper classes are overly well-educated either, on average (of course some are very well educated), in comparison to their peers in the Northeast or elsewhere. At least the stereotypical antebellum SC aristocrat was not an egghead.
Keeping blacks undereducated has been perhaps as much about stinginess as anything, in recent years.
Kathryn, I don’t know how the state could establish clawback provisions for the highway improvements planned to facilitate JAFZA. The company would doubtless argue that improving the I-95/301 interchange is a good thing with or without their presence. It probably is, but it wouldn’t have anything like the priority that it does if not for JAFZA. In terms of general highway maintenance and construction, and without a large truck-based distribution system at the JAFZA site, there are much greater needs in South Carolina.
Good point, but I have seen provisions for payments in the event of failure to complete a project that could offset such concerns–I just don’t know what was put in place.
I think a lot of times, as Greg and Lynn have highlighted, the leaders are too busy high-fiving and not putting failsafes in. It looks like Henry McMaster did put in caps in the contingency agreement with the Xyprexa attorneys, so kudos there. Sometimes clawbacks are written into deals, and sometimes not. Sometimes that is a conscious gamble taken to get a valuable project, and sometimes it’s just sloppy dealmaking. When Sanford & Co. resist making terms public because “it’s a business deal,” we can’t know much.
Maybe such secrecy is warranted, and maybe it’s just a cover-up for “business as usual.” I worked in the field and I don’t have a good feel for which it really is.