Boeing’s job impact should start in just weeks

COLUMBIA — Boeing is planning to have its new 787 Dreamliner production plant running in South Carolina in 2011, but state Commerce Secretary Joe Taylor said the plant will start having an effect on the state’s job situation in a matter of weeks because Boeing plans to break ground in November.

“I would suspect we’re looking at 1,500 to 1,700 construction jobs that’ll be coming online almost immediately,” Taylor said. “And those will be people from Charleston, really, and throughout the state of South Carolina and some from the Southeast, and I mean we should see an immediate employment impact and economic impact in the state just from the construction alone.”

Taylor said building the plant will require just about every kind of construction skill, from earth moving to concrete finishing to masonry and steel fitting. But until Boeing names the contractor, which should be soon, there’s no way he can say how people can go about trying to get one of the construction jobs.

“I’m sure there’ll be some type of public awareness made of the jobs that are available down there,” he said.

Once the plant is finished, Boeing will have at least 3,800 people working at the plant, about 1,000 of them on the production line, Taylor said.

“You’ll have engineering and administrative and clerical and shipping and receiving,” Taylor says. “The Trident Technical College and readySC, which is something that we all should be very proud of in South Carolina, played a critical role in landing this deal, will be coordinating the training and the recruiting and the screening for all those jobs. So you want to consistently check with your technical college system, because I think they’ll be your first source as those opportunities at Boeing become available.”

But there will be thousands more jobs created outside of the Boeing plant. State officials said it will be very similar to the BMW plant in Greer. A 2008 University of South Carolina study of BMW’s impact found that, while the factory employed 5,400 people, there were 23,050 people employed by suppliers and other companies that support BMW.

“There’s a spin-off effect of possibly even 5-to-1 ratio when you count in the suppliers,” Berkeley County state Sen. Larry Grooms said of the Boeing potential. “Suppliers from around the world will now be beating the doors down to locate in South Carolina and they will locate all across our state and in every county.”

“This is an excellent time to take advantage of the programs offered by your local work force board and get in a training program, because these are high-paying, good, stable jobs,” Taylor said.