YESTERDAY, we started to talk about the Boeing Co.’s stunning news that it would set up a new, slimmed-down head office–which would be located away from the offices of any of its main operating groups (i.e., not in Seattle).
And yes, the media were right to give the story the big play they did (including NY Times and USA Today front page stories as well as wall-to-wall local coverage).
Only 500 or so of Boeing’s 78,000 Washington state staffers will go away or be laid off (local dot-coms alone have collectively topped that in some weeks this year). And Boeing’s vast Commercial Airplane Group (with all its own execs, engineers, salespeople, and assemblers) is staying put.
But a corporate HQ, even a rump holding-company HQ, still means something. It symbolizes an organization’s commitment to an on-the-ground community. Its removal to some neutral site, as we’ve already mentioned, is Boeing brass’s (expensive) statement that it’s turning its back on that “old economy” heritage, that it’s just another player on the global-corporate stage, untied to anyplace, anything, or anyone other than the transnational elite of financiers and dealmakers.
Of course, the idea that Boeing doesn’t want to be associated anymore with any one specific place doesn’t make things any nicer for the civic-leader types at this specific place.
Seattle, as you may know, has cared a lot more about Boeing than Boeing has about Seattle. True, the company continued to build planes here when it might’ve constructed plants in the home states of important defense-appropriation Senators.
But in return for that, the company sought, and almost always got, total subservience from local politicians, media people, and ordinary citizens. (The cover of the late Bill Speidel’s book The Wet Side of the Mountains: Exploring Western Washington included a cartoon image of hard-hatted workers kneeling and praying at the gates of a Boeing hangar.)
Seattle’s civic-development establishment has spent the past half-century or so trying to make sure this town became, and remained, the kind of town Boeing would want to keep calling home.
A place where top executives could retreat to their waterfront dachas, unbothered by the outside world.
A place where level-headed engineers could enjoy sane, tasteful leisure opportunities in sane, tasteful surroundings (with the hardhat workers and their rough-hewn ways exiled to the outskirts, a la Soweto).
A place of quiet intelligence and modest personal ambition, but also a place that would do anything within (or slightly beyond) reason to become “World Class.” We’ll build World Class stadia and convention facilities. We’ll host World Class trade confabs. But we’ll pretend we’re still an overgrown small town, where everybody’s laid-back and mellow and ultra-bland and ultra-white. This schizophrenic drive to be simultaneously big and small, aware and innocent, world-wise but not worldly (similar to the New Testament ideal to be “in the world but not of the world”) served Seattle, and Boeing, relatively well for many years, until its contradictions started becoming too apparent in recent years.
Now, Boeing–the company that made the International Jet Set possible, thus spawning today’s rootless global financial elite–is redefining itself as neither in nor of the world, but as belonging to the Everywhere/Nowhere of that aforementioned elite.
The New Boeing will supply aircraft and satellite-communications equipment to keep the elite’s members in actual or virtual contact with one another and their assorted fiscal empires, while treating the rest of Planet Earth as one big “flyover zone.”
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