In 2009, the corporate office stunned workers with the announcement of its first jet assembly plant outside the Seattle area. Boeing was moving some Dreamliner assembly to a facility in South Carolina formerly owned by a supplier that made fuselage parts for the plane. The workers there voted to abandon their own union to secure the purchase. This came after the state of Washington, only six years earlier, had awarded Boeing $3.2 billion in tax breaks for the Dreamliner, then the largest state tax incentive ever granted.
