Boeing Co. cut the ribbon Friday on its 787 Dreamliner final assembly building in North Charleston, a plant that has also become the center of a national fight over federal labor law.
More than 1,000 Boeing employees joined elected officials, community and business groups, suppliers and subcontractors at the ceremony, the company said.
“In this building, our talented Boeing South Carolina teammates are going to assemble the finest, most technologically advanced commercial widebody airplane in history,” said Jack Jones, vice president and general manager of Boeing South Carolina. “Airline customers from around the world will come to the South Carolina Lowcountry to take delivery of their 787s, and we look forward to demonstrating what ‘made with pride in South Carolina’ is all about.”
Gov. Nikki Haley called Boeing a great American company and said its workers make all South Carolinians proud, The Associated Press reported. U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham drew loud cheers from the crowd when he said Boeing is in South Carolina to stay, according to the AP.
The AP described the $750 million plant as the largest single industrial investment in South Carolina history.
Built ahead of schedule
Boeing’s Site Services Group and the design-build team BE&K/Turner finished the building six months ahead of schedule, the company said. The BE&K/Turner team worked 3.7 million labor-hours without a lost-time incident, according to Boeing.
The building has 642,720 square feet of covered space, roughly the size of 10.5 football fields, Boeing said. Builders used more than 18,000 tons of steel and about 1 million cubic feet of concrete. Thin-film solar panels on the roof, announced in April, will supply up to 2.6 megawatts of electricity for the site. Boeing called it the largest solar installation in the Southeast by production capacity.
Employees began moving into the building in May, and final assembly of the first South Carolina-built 787 will begin later this summer, the company said. At full production, the plant will turn out three 787s a month.
“Our partnerships with state and local government and industry have made today possible,” said Marco Cavazzoni, vice president and general manager of final assembly and delivery at Boeing South Carolina. “Every person who steps through these doors is making history, and that’s something we should all take pride in.”
Over the long term, Boeing plans to build three 787s a month in South Carolina and seven in Washington state, NPR reported.
A complaint hanging over the plant
The opening came seven weeks after the acting general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint against Boeing on April 20. The complaint, pressed by the International Association of Machinists, claims Boeing put the plant in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, because it was concerned about strikes by union workers in Washington state, the AP reported.
Boeing has said the complaint seeks to force it to place its second 787 final assembly line in Puget Sound instead of North Charleston. The company called the claim “legally frivolous” when it was filed.
“Boeing has every right under both federal law and its collective bargaining agreement to build additional U.S. production capacity outside of the Puget Sound region,” J. Michael Luttig, Boeing’s executive vice president and general counsel, said in April.
Boeing has said none of the production jobs created in South Carolina came at the expense of jobs in Puget Sound. The company said in April that Machinists employment in the Puget Sound region had grown by about 2,000 workers since it chose North Charleston in October 2009, and that it had hired more than 1,000 new workers for the South Carolina factory.
The union sees it differently. David Campbell, an attorney representing the Machinists, told NPR that law enforcement cases should be settled “in the courts,” not in politics. Haley has criticized the complaint sharply. “It really is very offensive,” she said on Fox News, according to NPR.
Boeing spokeswoman Candy Eslinger told NPR that she could not discuss the complaint but that it had not changed anything at the plant. “Our plans are still going forward,” Eslinger said. “We will be starting production here in July of 2011 and we’ll deliver our first airplane out of South Carolina in 2012.”
A hearing on the complaint is scheduled for June 14 in Seattle, NPR reported. Boeing officials have said that if they lose, they will appeal to the federal courts, where the case could remain for years.
How North Charleston got here
Boeing selected North Charleston for its second 787 final assembly line on Oct. 28, 2009, after state lawmakers approved incentives that required the company to invest at least $750 million and create 3,800 jobs within seven years, The State newspaper reported at the time.
The company already builds 787 fuselage sections at its North Charleston campus, where they are joined and then flown to Everett, Wash., for final assembly. With the new building open, airplanes will be completed in North Charleston as well, and airlines will be able to take delivery here.
