Tanker Contract Would Create 44,000 Jobs in United States

by Tula Connell, Oct 24, 2009

Remember the efforts by the Bush administration last year to tilt the competitive bid process in favor of giving a $35 billion contract to Airbus over Boeing?

Only after the Government Accountability Office (GAO) upheld Boeing’s protest of the Air Force’s decision to award the contract to EADS/Airbus and Northrop Grumman did Defense Secretary Robert Gates cancel the competition for the Air Force’s refueling tankers.

John Olsen, president of the Connecticut AFL-CIO, alerts us that the issue is back. In an op-ed in the Hartford Courant, Olsen points out that the French use billions of illegal subsidies to low-bid their contract proposal—and the Obama administration should insist the total value of any such Airbus subsidies are taken into account in the bidding to build the new tanker.

At stake: 44,000 jobs across the United States that the tanker contract will support. Olsen quotes candidate Obama:

“When we’ve got such an enormous contract for such a vital piece of our U.S. military arsenal, it strikes me that we should have identified a U.S. company that could do it.” The revelation that Airbus is engaged in an illegal subsidy scheme would seem to put an exclamation on the point.

Maybe the nearly 26 million unemployed and underemployed workers in the nation also should be taken into consideration? As Olsen writes:

There is now bipartisan support for using every tool at our disposal to protect the high-wage, high-skill workforce that builds the tools and equipment our military requires. Giving U.S. companies a level playing field to bid on American taxpayer-paid federal contracts would seem like a good place to start.

Read the full article here.

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