Bombardier duty puts Belfast on high alert
Hundreds of jobs in Irish city threatened after ruling supports 219-per-cent tariff on aircraft
BELFAST— The industrial district that is home to Bombardier Aerospace in Belfast is one of the most storied in Europe.
In 1911, the Titanic was launched from the vast, now silent Harland and Wolff shipyard next to Bombardier’s main plant. Short Brothers, a company bought by Bombardier in 1989, was the first to manufacture production aircraft back in 1909 and was headquartered here for decades.
But a preliminary decision by a U.S. court made in favour of Seattle-based Boeing to raise import tariffs on Bombardier aircraft to 219 per cent could bring calamity to both the company and Belfast.
“Bombardier generates about £400 million ($667 million) a year for the Northern Ireland economy. It’s the last major manufacturing employer (here),” says George Bernside, a 27-year veteran of the company.
Bombardier employs more than 4,200 workers at five sites across Northern Ireland, 1,000 of whom are currently working on the CSeries, Bombardier’s newest commercial aircraft program, which has yet to reach full production here.
Hundreds more Belfast-based supply jobs are threatened as a result of the ruling, too. “East Belfast in particular, but all of Northern Ireland could really feel the hit,” says Bernside, whose wife is also employed by the corporation.
Bombardier’s now-precarious presence in Northern Ireland also carries significant political concern: U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May’s coalition government is propped up by 10 MPs from the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Northern Ireland’s biggest party. The DUP is expected to put more pressure on May’s government to secure Bombardier’s operations, though the government already has its hands full with difficult Brexit negotiations. “What we must do now is to continue to work with our own government, with the American government, with the Canadian government, in trying to get Boeing to see sense,” said Arlene Foster, the leader of the DUP.
May failed to drive home to U.S. President Donald Trump the importance of Bombardier’s continued operations in Belfast during a meeting in New York last week.
Britain’s defence secretary Michael Fallon, who visited Belfast this week, said, “This is not the behaviour we expect of Boeing and could indeed jeopardize our future relationship.”
Boeing claims Bombardier has been unfairly subsidized by the U.K. and Canadian governments.
“Boeing didn’t compete for the Delta order,” says Haley Dunne, Bombardier’s director of communications and public affairs in Belfast. “Boeing hasn’t built an aircraft in that category for years — they abandoned that section of the market.
“Why did we launch the CSeries program? Because there was a gap in the market for it.”
The state-of-the-art CSeries is currently in use by Swissair and airBaltic, and Korean Air is expected to take delivery in the coming months. In April 2016, Delta Air Lines ordered 75 aircraft from Bombardier that are due for delivery in the spring. It has called the tariff hike “absurd.”
“If anything were to happen to damage the CSeries production, that would be critical for us,” says Dunne, who added that there had been no discussions with the U.K. government regarding what would happen should the ruling, which would see a tripling in the cost of Bombardier planes sold to U.S. airlines to around $61 million (U.S.) per unit, stand.
Belfast is today a cosmopolitan city that’s home to a large student population and several major corporations, but it wasn’t always this way. The second-largest city on the island of Ireland was wracked by unrest during the decades of the “Troubles,” a conflict involving the IRA, unionist paramilitary organizations and the British army that was ended by the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Northern Ireland’s economy remains fragile. At 1.6 per cent, growth lags behind the U.K. average of1.8 per cent.
Belfast residents are closely watching the situation at Bombardier, Northern Ireland’s biggest high-tech employer and donator of tens of thousands of dollars to local charities, and how a major loss of jobs could affect the city’s socio-economic stability.
“I know guys who are planning to get married shortly and obviously they are in a very precarious situation,” says Noel Gibson, a senior representative of Bombardier workers who has previously worked on a number of its aircraft projects. “This has put a doubt in everybody’s head.”
Workers’ representatives say they have met with the Northern Ireland secretary of state, James Brokenshire, and the U.S. consulate in Belfast, to air their concerns. “We’ve just celebrated100 years of aircraft building in Belfast, but this is not just about the workers, it’s about the broader Northern Ireland public.”