More EADS $$$ = Less US Jobs

Given that in 2007 EADS was supposedly hard at work engineering "America's New Tanker" and was ramping up production of Army's light utility helicopter (a contract they won in June 2006 worth up to $3 billion for 352 helicopters), one would expect the numbers for US workers at EADS to be skyrocketing.

You would be right to expect this, but you would also be very wrong. It turns out that the exact opposite has happened. In EADS's newly released 2007 Annual Report (Book Three) on page 73, EADS list its US employees for the past three years as follows:

Dec 31, 2005.......1877 US employees

Dec 31, 2006.......1932 US employees

Dec 31, 2007.......1777 US employees

While we at Tanker War Blog expect these numbers to go up in 2008 (how can they possibly go down?), we find it more than a bit curious that after their previous billion dollar DoD contract EADS ended up cutting its US workforce.

So until their Dec 31, 2008 statistics are released, we would warn the American public to be very sceptical of EADS's proclaimed commitment to "in-source" U.S. jobs.