Pittsburgh_Patrika_October_2015

The Pittsburgh Patrika, Vol, 21, No. 1, October 2015
legheny County’s population dropped from 1.63 million in 1960 to around
1.25 million today. Will today’s youngsters believe that only a few decades
ago, Pittsburgh was the second city with the largest number of corporate
headquarters, next only to New York?
With the steel industry’s rise and fall, the lesson for us is that a diversified
economy is necessary to manage with less pain the unavoidable
societal transitions when each segment of the economy goes through cycles
of growth and decline, ultimately even death.
US Airways Flying Away from PIT: The Pittsburgh International
Airport as it stands now was built in the early 1990s for the needs of US
Airways, then headquartered here. At the peak of US Airways’ presence
at PIT, we had nonstop flights to over 90 destinations (now only to 40
destinations); PIT at one point had over 600 daily departures (including
to cities in Europe); US Airways accounted for over 75% of the flights.
Now PIT has around 150 departures, with US Airways accounting for
only over 30% of the flights. US Airways filed for bankruptcy twice and
eventually shut down its hub at PIT, moving it to Philadelphia. At the peak,
US Airways had over 12,000 jobs here; now it is more like 1,200.
In the heydays of US Airways’ presence at PIT, its executives had
disproportionate influence not only on the airport administration, but also
on our elected officials. US Airways officials never hesitated to use this
for getting financial concessions, dangling the threat of moving the hub
out of PIT, which they eventually did in the mid-2000s.
Granted, even in the heydays, PIT was mainly a transit airport for US
Airways’ passengers for making connections to their final destinations.
It took a long time for our region to realign itself to the loss of tens of
thousands of air travel-related jobs as a US Airways hub. The region never
really recovered from it.
This change was gut-wrenching to the airport authorities, elected officials,
and to our entire region as we were transitioning from the smoky
Steel City image. Our elected officials and airport authorities are struggling
to get more air carriers to PIT. It will be an uphill task.
So, we are not only intellectually, but also viscerally aware of what
the choke hold of monopoly or near-monopoly does to a region.
Today, as shown in the table in the next page, the biggest employers in this
region are the healthcare industry, retail, governments, higher education,
and financial services. In healthcare, UPMC dominates. The University
of Pittsburgh and CMU take all the limelight in education.
If you take employers with more than 2000 people on their payroll in
our region today, the number of jobs (rounded off to the nearest ‘000) in
different segments are as shown in the table below. Source for the data:
http://tinyurl.com/SW-Penna-Jobs-SnapShot
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