C2 THE BULLETIN • SUNDAY, JANUARY 10, 2021
Amazon surpasses Boeing as
Washington state’s biggest employer
KATHERINE KHASHIMOVA LONG
The Seattle Times
M
ove over, Boeing.
Washington state is
now Amazonia.
Last year, Amazon — which
in the 26 years since its found-
ing in CEO Jeff Bezos’ Clyde
Hill garage has emerged as a
major player in retail, logistics
and cloud computing — sur-
passed Boeing as the state’s
largest private employer, usurp-
ing a title the airplane manu-
facturer had likely held since
the post-World War II era, said
aerospace historian Cory Graff.
The milestone speaks to
the new economic realities
wrought by the pandemic,
experts say, but also to the in-
creasingly tenuous nature of
much blue-collar work, em-
ployers’ changing relationship
with labor and the rise of a
class of highly paid technology
workers whose preferences are
remaking the Seattle area.
Amazon thrived during
the pandemic, due both to
booming online shopping
and increasing reliance on its
cloud-computing services,
which power many of the tech-
nologies behind remote work
and life under lockdown. In its
most recent quarterly earnings
report, Amazon charted re-
cord-high sales and profits; its
share price rose 72% last year
while Boeing’s dropped 36%.
Alongside Amazon’s re-
cord-setting financial perfor-
mance was a record-setting
hiring spree. Globally, the com-
pany added more than 400,000
workers in 2020 in what it says
is the largest peacetime worker
mobilization in history. More
than 16,500 of those new hires
were in Washington state,
where Amazon ended 2020
with more than 80,000 em-
ployees, according to a com-
pany spokesperson, a nearly
25% increase over 2019.
Boeing, meanwhile, slashed
its Washington workforce by
nearly 13,000 people last year,
as the travel industry’s plunge
into the red compounded Boe-
ing’s pre-pandemic financial
pain from the lengthy ground-
ing of its 737 MAX aircraft.
At the start of 2020, 71,829
Washingtonians worked for
Boeing, according to disclo-
sure forms filed with the state
Department of Revenue. By
year-end, a combination of
voluntary buyouts, layoffs and
attrition reduced that number
18% to roughly 58,800 people,
with analysts warning job cuts
could continue in 2021.
Boeing and its employees are
no strangers to cycles of boom
and bust, and the effects of the
pandemic and reputational
fallout from faulty engineer-
ing that caused two 737 MAX
plane crashes are likely to re-
cede eventually.
Nonetheless, Amazon’s
emergence as Washington’s
top employer signifies more
enduring changes to the
state’s economy, said Margaret
O’Mara, a professor of history
at the University of Washing-
ton, where she researches the
high-tech industry.
“These two companies are
shorthand examples of the
changing contours of Ameri-
can capitalism,” O’Mara said.
Boeing and Amazon, she said,
are “emblems of ... the bigger
trajectory of labor, of what
opportunity is afforded to an
American worker.”
Companies’ relationships
with labor
“Boeing and Amazon are
such stark contrasts. It’s two
models of the U.S. economy,
one based around manufactur-
ing, one around consumption,”
said Andrew Hedden, the as-
sociate director of the Harry
Bridges Center for Labor Stud-
ies at the University of Wash-
ington. “It’s fascinating that Se-
attle has been headquarters for
both of them.”
Another major contrast,
translating into a gulf of dif-
ferences in how blue-collar
workers are paid and treated,
Hedden said, is the companies’
relationship with labor.
It’s not that Boeing supports
unions, said Jon Holden, the
president of the local represent-
Amazon »
Ken Lambert/The Seattle Times
Employees at Amazon’s Kent fulfillment center, where parts of the company’s coronavirus response have been tested, on June 11.
Boeing »
Mike Siegel/The Seattle Times
A new Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, built for American Airlines, is seen moving along the runway at Paine Field in Everett, Washington, in November
2020. Boeing is moving all 787 production from Everett to its plant in Charleston, South Carolina.
Kjell Redal and Mike Siegel/The Seattle Times
LEFT: Amazon’s growth has changed Seattle’s economic and physical landscape, and its Spheres downtown are just one example. RIGHT: Boeing’s
Everett, Washington, factory, known as the largest manufacturing building in the world, has produced the 747, 767, 777, and the 787 airplanes.
ing Seattle-area Boeing ma-
chinists. He believes Boeing is
moving the 787 to South Car-
olina, a right-to-work state, in
part due to the company’s tur-
bulent relationship with orga-
nized labor in Washington.
But the company has been
forced to negotiate with unions
for most of its 104-year history
after voluntarily recognizing
the International Association
of Machinists and Aerospace
Workers in 1935 — resulting
in famously sturdy wages and
ample benefits for union mem-
bers, who at one point consti-
tuted 60% of Boeing’s work-
force but now make up roughly
one-third. Last year, Boeing
machinists earned, on aver-
age, $35.88 an hour, said union
spokesperson Connie Kelliher.
Charlie Grieser, who worked
for 37 years as a Boeing ma-
chinist, quality-control in-
spector and in experimental
flight testing and robotics be-
fore retiring in 2016, said the
job brought him a lifestyle
of plenty: A golf- and fish-
ing-filled retirement in sunny
Sequim. Educational benefits.
New trucks. An adage Grieser
is fond of repeating about his
time at Boeing: “Come for the
fun. Stay for the money.”
That money, as well as pref-
erential hiring policies for se-
nior union members, birthed
generations of Boeing “lifers.”
On average, machinists work at
Boeing for more than a decade,
Kelliher said.
Meanwhile, in a reflection
of falling union membership
nationwide, as well as chang-
ing legal standards that make it
easier for employers to thwart
union organizing, none of Am-
azon’s American warehouses
are unionized. The company
has employed a suite of tactics
to keep worker organizing at
bay, including closing job sites,
training managers to extol
the merits of a non-unionized
workplace, monitoring ware-
houses for pro-union senti-
ment and firing employees who
speak out about safety condi-
tions at warehouses.
In a statement, the company
said it respects employees’ right
to “join, form or not to join a
labor union or other lawful or-
ganization of their own selec-
tion, without fear of retaliation,
intimidation or harassment.”
In contrast to Boeing’s “lif-
ers,” a job at an Amazon ware-
house for most workers is a
temporary gig, one whose
rhythms are oceans removed
from the technical complexity
of assembling an aircraft — and
from the wages commensurate
with such high-skilled work.
We
hear
you.
Pay starts at $15 an hour, or
more in some places. About
813 full-time Amazon work-
ers in Washington use food
stamps, the fifth-highest num-
ber of any employer in the
state, after Safeway, Wal-Mart,
Uber and McDonald’s, the
federal Government Account-
ability Office estimated in No-
vember.
Starting pay at Amazon
warehouses is higher than
Washington’s minimum wage,
and many workers are afforded
a suite of benefits, including
health care, upskilling and paid
parental leave, the company
said in a statement. That some
Amazon workers rely on food
stamps possibly reflects that
Amazon hires a large number
of seasonal and temporary em-
ployees who may have quali-
fied for assistance if they only
worked at Amazon part of the
year, the company added.
The churn of tens of thou-
sands of temporary workers
through Amazon warehouses
underscores, O’Mara said, the
increasingly precarious nature
of blue-collar work.
The company employs so
much seasonal labor that tak-
ing into account all of Am-
azon’s short-term hires —
brought onboard for a few
months during the holidays
— Amazon actually surpassed
Boeing as the state’s largest
employer in 2019. That year,
81,897 Washingtonians worked
for Amazon.
By the end of 2019, though,
Amazon employed 63,380
workers, according to tax in-
centive disclosure forms filed
with the state Department of
Revenue — meaning roughly
18,500 people, one-third of
Amazon’s workforce, didn’t fin-
ish the year with the company.
That turnover rate has likely
stayed high during Amazon’s
coronavirus staffing push: A
recent Seattle Times analysis of
Amazon’s hiring patterns found
that turnover at its warehouses
during the pandemic was at
least twice that of industry av-
erages.
Certainly, not everyone at
Amazon’s warehouses leaves
quickly. Some thrive on the rig-
ors of the job, and earn enough
to afford to live even in the
Puget Sound region, where
home prices have increased
faster than nearly anywhere
else in the country for much of
the past five years.
David Romero, a safety man-
ager at Amazon’s Kent fulfill-
ment center, has been with the
company for five years, starting
as an entry-level associate after
serving two tours of duty with
the Air Force in Iraq. He owns
a home in Spanaway, goes kay-
aking with his two children on
weekends, and said much of
his time is consumed by com-
munity service projects with
an Amazon affinity group for
veterans.
“I call them my family,” he
said. “We’re able to have that
sense of camaraderie.”
Most blue-collar Amazon
employees, though, won’t stay
with the company as long as
Romero — like Max, who
asked not to use his last name
because he didn’t want to be
seen as criticizing his former
employer.
Between 2015 and 2019,
he worked two stints at Am-
azon facilities in Seattle and
New York. Like many of his
co-workers, Max cycled in and
out of employment with the
commerce behemoth because,
he said, it paid the bills and
seemed to be one of the only
places hiring.
Max described his work, in
photo studios producing pic-
tures for Amazon listings, as
fast-paced and repetitive, with
closely tracked performance
metrics. He most recently
earned $18 an hour.
“You could make the argu-
ment that’s what people want in
the gig economy,” he said. But
his experience generated a pro-
found sense of malaise, he said,
that he was entirely replaceable.
Now living in Idaho, Max
drove 300 miles to a recent Se-
attle protest advocating Ama-
zon return a greater portion of
its record 2020 profits to op-
erations and warehouse work-
ers — some of whom, he said,
feel so surveilled and anxious
about affording necessities like
rent that they’re afraid to take
bathroom breaks on the job.
He also pointed to reports that
Amazon warehouse workers
suffer on-the-job injuries at
rates exceeding industry aver-
ages, according to Reveal from
The Center for Investigative
Reporting. (Amazon has said
Reveal’s calculations are inac-
curate.)
Similar concerns prompted
workers at one Amazon ful-
fillment center in Alabama to
signal their intent to unionize
last year, possibly forecasting
future upheaval at Amazon job
sites, including in Washington,
O’Mara said.
“The state has a long history
of doing well by working peo-
ple,” she said. “To be the son or
grandson of a Boeing machin-
ist whose whole family’s eco-
nomic trajectory was steadily
moving upward, and now the
best job you can have is work-
ing in a fulfillment center for
$15 an hour? It fuels a lot of po-
litical discontent.”
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