‘Southern strategy’ doesn’t hold water

In the Thursday editorial, “Now turn the focus to Boeing’s future, here,” The Herald has bought the false assertions by Boeing and their financial analyst lap dogs that southern states are a business utopia of low cost workers. Designed to threaten current employees, these self-serving assertions overlook the issues that southern states have poor education systems, and little recent experience producing products with critical quality demands.

Even if Boeing won’t admit it, the aerospace industry has learned from Boeing’s recent experiences. An article on Dec. 3 on Flight Blogger quotes Airbus analysis indicating that Boeing’s 787 difficulties are partly due to “low-wage, trained-on-the-job workers that had no previous aerospace experience” working at supplier partners.

Never mentioned when suggesting a move to the South, is whether the engineering and support organizations would also move. Boeing discovered during the headquarters move to Chicago that many salaried employees with transferable skills won’t move with them when they move across the country. Recruiting new salaried employees to many of these southern states won’t be easy.

I won’t hold my breath waiting for Boeing to admit that their quality issues with suppliers in South Carolina are due to a poorly trained and inexperienced workforce, but maybe The Herald can do its own thinking rather than drinking Boeing and Wall Street public relations Kool-Aid.

Greg Casey