Fall, When RTW Jobs Flourish

The Foundation is tracking announcements of expansions, relocations, and greenfield investments published on Area Development‘s website. Founded in 1965, the publication “is considered the leading executive magazine covering corporate site selection and relocation. … Area Development is published quarterly and has 60,000 mailed copies.” In an explanation to the Foundation, its editor wrote that items for Area Development‘s announcements listing are “culled from RSS feeds and press releases that are emailed to us from various sources, including economic development organizations, PR agencies, businesses, etc. We usually highlight ones that represent large numbers of new jobs and/or investment in industrial projects.”

In September, of 14,498 projected jobs, 10,591 — 87.1 percent — were slated for RTW states:

As for the sub-metrics the Foundation scrutinizes:

* Sixteen domestic companies based in non-RTW states announced investments in RTW states. Five announcements went the other way.

* RTW prevailed in foreign direct investment, too. Eleven projects are headed to RTW states, with six to occur in a non-RTW state.

* Domestic relocations were tied, with Velocity Resource Group moving from Illinois to Florida and Solid Gold Pet moving from South Carolina to Missouri.

* One foreign-owned firm relocated its headquarters — moving from Pennsylvania to North Carolina.

Marquee RTW investments included NCR’s expansion of its Atlanta campus (1,200 jobs), Finland-based Huhtamäki’s selection of Arizona for a manufacturing and distribution center (300 jobs), and UPS’s pick of Utah for an operations facility (195 jobs).

Methodological specifics:

* All job estimates — “up to,” “as many as,” “about” — were taken at face value, for RTW and non-RTW states alike.

* If an announcement did not make an employment projection, efforts were made to obtain an estimate from newspaper articles and/or press releases from additional sources.

* If no job figure could be found anywhere, the project was not counted, whether it was a RTW or non-RTW state.

* Non-border-crossing relocations were not counted, border-crossing relocations were.