Union vote makes Boeing threat real

BOEING has been complaining about its relationship with the Aerospace Machinists union here, and threatening to set up a production line in South Carolina. Last week's vote by Boeing workers in Charleston, S.C., to go nonunion was an invitation — and one with ominous possibilities for people here.

Boeing has strong reasons to decline that invitation. The plants are here, the suppliers are here and the workers are here. There is, as the union says, "a tribal knowledge" in the Puget Sound area that does not exist in South Carolina. Boeing management has created enough trouble for itself with its global supply system for the 787.

Furthermore, the company and the union can be successful here. Earlier this year, Boeing's P-8 Poseidon, a Navy anti-submarine plane based on the 737, came in on time and on budget, using Aerospace Machinist labor.

Yet an out-of-state assembly line for the 787 feels more possible than six years ago, when former Gov. Gary Locke and legislative leaders hustled to keep the first 787 line in Everett. To management, last year's strike was one too many. The company wants the Aerospace Machinists to agree on a system of binding arbitration that would forestall the possibility of a strike in 2012, when it hopes to be rolling out 787s.

Boeing has said it will decide by the end of the year whether to put the second 787 line here, in South Carolina or somewhere else.

That's 15 weeks — not a long time. And yet there have been few talks between the company and the union, and not much progress. We don't feel the same sense of urgency as six years ago.

Is the threat not real? We think it is.