Seattle Outrage Over Boeing's Move Will Pass

S E A T T L E, Wash., March 23 -- News that the Boeing Company is preparing to relocate its corporate headquarters outside the Seattle area has rattled the Pacific Northwest with the psychological intensity of the recent earthquake.

Not that residents of the area haven't become rather hardened to dramatic swings in Boeing's employee rolls; unemployment figures often rise and fall with the changing fortunes of the world's preeminent commercial airplane builder.

It was Boeing, after all, whose monstrous layoffs of the late 1960s prompted the infamous billboard on Interstate 5 heading south: "Will the last person out of Seattle please turn off the lights?"

But in this latest shocker, employment numbers are hardly the issue.

Farewell to the Head Shed

Boeing Chairman Phil Condit suggests that only half of the 1,000 or so headquarters folk will be invited to follow the "head shed" — how Boeing workers refer to headquarters — out of town. At least some of those left behind will transfer to other positions within Boeing's sprawling operations throughout the Puget Sound region.

A layoff of less than 500 people, while certainly undesirable, will send barely a ripple across the diversified economy of the Pacific Northwest.

Nor does it especially terrify the nearly 80,000-strong local work force, many of whom are just as happy to have the "big guys" working at a greater distance.

Some members of that heavily unionized work force, however, suspect that Condit's motives are somehow related to the often-difficult relations between the unions and the corporation. But that remains to be seen.

Outrage

Why, then, the seismic response from Seattle's Mayor Paul Schell, Washington Gov. Gary Locke and assorted politicians and pundits?

The answers may be more emotional than economic. To Northwesterners, Boeing is a symbol of what Seattle is all about, as important as the famous Space Needle or the NBA's Supersonics (named in honor of Boeing's SST, an abortive attempt to build a supersonic commercial airplane).