Good Jobs First Blog

South Carolina is a state that’s given large subsidies to big companies – Boeing, Michelin, Volvo, Continental Tire, Google to name a few – and it’s also been one of the worst in the country when it comes to revealing the full costs of those deals.

This is Arlene Martínez, communications director with Good Jobs First, with a quick update on some things we’ve been up to. Let’s start with this explosive piece on Amazon that found the company’s massive Chicago-area expansion involved $741 million in taxpayer funds, largely from Black and Latino communities. 

Just four days after I mentioned that Boeing did not repay the billions it had already received from the 2003 Washington state subsidy package, the World Trade Organization approved EU retaliation for these subsidies in the form of $4 billion per year of tariffs on U.S. goods.

Boeing is ending production of the 787 Dreamliner at Everett, Washington, and moving it to its newer facility in North Charleston, South Carolina. The company says this is the most efficient approach to reducing production of the jet from 10 per year to six per year in response to falling demand due to the coronavirus pandemic. Moving production to South Carolina means that more than 1,000 Boeing workers at its Everett plant will likely lose their jobs as they no longer have a model to build.

Good Jobs First talked with education expert Dr. Kendall Deas about the role corporate incentives and subsidies play in South Carolina, which in fiscal year 2019 cost the state’s public schools $423 million – a $99 million increase in two years, according to our analysis. The findings raise a key question: do newly arriving companies that get big tax breaks pay their fair share for the public services they and their employees utilize?