The Pittsburgh Patrika, Vol, 21, No. 1, October 2015legheny County’s population dropped from 1.63 million in 1960 to around1.25 million today. Will today’s youngsters believe that only a few decadesago, Pittsburgh was the second city with the largest number of corporateheadquarters, next only to New York?With the steel industry’s rise and fall, the lesson for us is that a diversifiedeconomy is necessary to manage with less pain the unavoidablesocietal transitions when each segment of the economy goes through cyclesof growth and decline, ultimately even death.US Airways Flying Away from PIT: The Pittsburgh InternationalAirport as it stands now was built in the early 1990s for the needs of USAirways, then headquartered here. At the peak of US Airways’ presenceat PIT, we had nonstop flights to over 90 destinations (now only to 40destinations); PIT at one point had over 600 daily departures (includingto cities in Europe); US Airways accounted for over 75% of the flights.Now PIT has around 150 departures, with US Airways accounting foronly over 30% of the flights. US Airways filed for bankruptcy twice andeventually 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 haddisproportionate influence not only on the airport administration, but alsoon our elected officials. US Airways officials never hesitated to use thisfor getting financial concessions, dangling the threat of moving the hubout of PIT, which they eventually did in the mid-2000s.Granted, even in the heydays, PIT was mainly a transit airport for USAirways’ passengers for making connections to their final destinations.It took a long time for our region to realign itself to the loss of tens ofthousands of air travel-related jobs as a US Airways hub. The region neverreally 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 smokySteel City image. Our elected officials and airport authorities are strugglingto get more air carriers to PIT. It will be an uphill task.So, we are not only intellectually, but also viscerally aware of whatthe 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 thisregion are the healthcare industry, retail, governments, higher education,and financial services. In healthcare, UPMC dominates. The Universityof Pittsburgh and CMU take all the limelight in education.If you take employers with more than 2000 people on their payroll inour region today, the number of jobs (rounded off to the nearest ‘000) indifferent segments are as shown in the table below. Source for the data:http://tinyurl.com/SW-Penna-Jobs-SnapShot6
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