DHL's headquarters move to siphon off 500 Seattle jobs
More than 500 local jobs at express-mail company DHL will be shipped out of town over the next 15 months as the company consolidates its home offices in South Florida, the company said.
DHL, which acquired Seattle-based Airborne Inc. in a $1 billion deal in August, will move all 368 information technology jobs to Scottsdale, Ariz., while 160 jobs in marketing, finance, human resources and other departments will be transferred to Plantation, Fla., said Kim Levy, a DHL spokeswoman based in New York City.
“A large number of these employees will be offered relocation packages, but it has not been decided how many,” Levy said.
About 500 employees who work in billing, revenue collection and claims processing will remain in Seattle until DHL decides whether to cut, move or leave those jobs where they are. A decision is expected in the first quarter of next year, Levy said.
Some 300 sales, pickup and delivery employees will stay in Seattle, Levy said.
Roberta Pauer, an economist for the Washington state Employment Security Department, predicted the loss of another Fortune 500 company, just two years after The Boeing Co. ditched Seattle for Chicago, will have a ripple effect throughout the region. For every professional job lost, she said, another is lost elsewhere in the region’s economy.
“We are still in the Seattle metro area, 78,000 jobs below what we were before our recession began,” Pauer told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “So, the idea of good quality, administrative, managerial jobs moving, and technical support jobs possibly, is news we don’t need.”
Nathan Tubbs, a Seattle delivery worker, said he was relieved to hear he won’t be uprooted. Then again, he said, “I never really worried about it. If it happened, it happened.”
DHL, a unit of German postal service Deutche Post AG, has not decided exactly where it will locate its headquarters. The company has 170,000 employees worldwide.
