Former Boeing workers’ job strategies differ

  • Bryan Corliss / Herald Writer
  • Saturday, April 17, 2004 9:00pm
  • Business

Gary Cannon couldn’t wait to leave the Boeing Co. in winter 2001.

"My spirit was crushed," he said.

Thousands of his co-workers had received layoff notices since Sept. 11. Morale was shaky even before that. He personally was bored and feeling like Boeing had lost its edge.

Recently divorced, he decided that rather than wait around for his own blue folder with the layoff warning inside, he’d leave on his own, go back to his hometown of Spokane and start over again.

He was confident he would be able to find work.

"You go in with that attitude that ‘you’ve got a brain on board, you can find a job over here,’" Cannon said in a recent telephone interview. "It’s a little rougher than I planned."

Boeing has slashed its Washington state workforce by almost 37,000 employees since September 2001. The total includes tens of thousands of Puget Sound workers laid off from factories and support offices in Everett, Renton, Auburn and Seattle, and hundreds of former Boeing workers who were uprooted when the company sold its former Spokane plant to Triumph Group Inc.

Many of those people have entered job-retraining programs. Others have moved out of the state to take jobs with Lockheed-Martin or other aerospace companies that have big government defense contracts.

And some, like Cannon, have quietly slipped away from the Puget Sound area, looking east of the Cascades for a place where housing costs less and their unemployment benefits will buy more.

They’ve found that life on the dry side can be as harsh as a Palouse winter and the job market for skilled engineers as spotty as rain on the Hanford Reach.

"There is no future on this side of the mountains," Cannon said. "I call it a black hole."

Mike Roberts took an early retirement from Boeing in May 2002. Doing that, he said, allowed him to take advantage of the health insurance benefits that Boeing offers its retirees.

The former Everett resident and his wife packed up and moved to Pullman. Manufacturing seemed stuck in a prolonged slump, he said, so it made sense to go somewhere housing was cheaper to ride it out. According to the Washington Center for Real Estate Research, the median home price in Whitman County is $130,000, and $121,000 in Spokane County — both far less than $235,000 for a similar house in Snohomish County

Pullman was a natural for Roberts because his daughter is a student at Washington State University. He said he didn’t think about going back to school himself.

"I didn’t see any sense, at 58, of pursuing any four-year degrees," he said.

But Roberts did pursue a new career. He’s a manufacturing engineer, and felt he could parlay his experience in product development into a job outside aerospace.

It hasn’t worked out that way.

Roberts has found occasional work building trailers and as a construction manager. But he’s had no luck finding a permanent job.

In the almost two years since he left Boeing, Roberts said he’s had four interviews. For the most part, he said, companies are advertising and interviewing but not hiring. Instead, they’re making lists of qualified candidates "for the prospect of employing someone in the future."

None of those companies are in Eastern Washington, Roberts said, and when his daughter graduates from WSU this spring, it’s likely he and his wife will leave Pullman, too.

"The market is tight," he said. "It has not been good for the last year to two years, for anyone I’m aware of, anyway. I suspect people who have found jobs have not found jobs equivalent to what they had at Boeing."

Taken as a whole, the Eastern Washington job market is not that bad, said William Dillingham, a state labor market analyst in Spokane.

Spokane County, in fact, has continued adding jobs the past few years, in contrast to the counties around Puget Sound.

However, "that doesn’t mean everyone who wants a job can find a job," he said.

Much of Spokane’s economic strength lies in the fact that it’s a regional health care center that has continued to expand even as other industries have shrank.

Spokane-area technology and manufacturing businesses have suffered along with those in the rest of the nation, Dillingham said.

While Pullman does have a few small manufacturers building products spun off from WSU research, "that doesn’t mean it’s a vibrant job market," he said.

Dillingham said it’s a general rule that workers laid off from high-pay, high-skilled jobs are going to find it hard to "find work at that same level after they’ve been laid off."

Cannon would agree.

He’s a 50-year-old avionics engineer who had most recently worked in Everett on 777 flight data recorders — the "black boxes."

His original plan was to take advantage of federally funded job-retraining programs to go back to school for retraining in computer networking. But he quickly found that the state of Washington wasn’t authorizing that kind of training.

He also found out the hard way that Eastern Washington pay scales don’t compare with what he was used to make at Boeing.

The average salary for an engineer or architect in Seattle, Bellevue and Everett is more than $31 an hour, according to state labor statistics. In Spokane, the average is less than $24 an hour, the state says.

Cannon said even that seems high. "Most of their jobs, even for what they consider a technology position, range from $7 to $8 an hour."

He spent more than a year "applying relentlessly" for work, and finally landed a job across the state line in Post Falls, Idaho, with a small technology company, where he’s paid $16 an hour but doesn’t get benefits.

Spokane companies do pay less than those around Puget Sound, Dillingham said, and pay in Idaho tends to be worse.

"It’s a different economic world over there," he said.

Roberts said he’s not likely to be called back to Boeing, and he has no desire to work there again anyway. "Quite candidly, I can’t even spell the word ‘Boeing,’" he said.

But Cannon is hoping to be hired again by Boeing to work on the 7E7.

"I’m am now a Boeing evangelist, and can’t wait for the opportunity to return," he said.

Union leadership may complain about conditions at Boeing, Roberts said, but "all they need to do is quit their union job and try to find employment in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene."

Reporter Bryan Corliss:

425-339-3454 or

corliss@heraldnet.com.

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