business backgrounder | industry
Some of their key findings:
• The 11 businesses in the zone employ 2,200 people, about 2.5
percent of all jobs in Whatcom County.
• Alcoa Intalco Works, BP Refinery and Phillips 66 Refinery,
account for 86 percent of Cherry Point employment.
• The average wage paid by the Cherry Point employers is
$114,000 per year, well above the average wage of $39,400 paid
by employers outside the zone.
• The refinery jobs, about three-quarters of the total, pay roughly
3.8 times the county average.
Yet, these economically vital industries are now ensnared in a
fraught deindustrialization debate. Industrial advocates warn of
a concerted, conscious effort to limit or reduce manufacturing in
the industrial zone. In the last part of the 20th century, economists
and political leaders fretted about deindustrialization in terms
of declining American competitiveness,
offshoring, and a disappearing goodsproducing sector.
Today those worries are fading. Manufacturing in America is back.
the new deindustrialization
County industrial ‘good neighbors and corporate citizens’ with a
more critical eye…”
“It is time,” Wechsler writes, “to stop doing the easy thing
—
talking about jobs” and to address the environment.
is any activity appropriate?
Craig Cole, a long-time