The local news just interviewed a guy on the picket line in front of the Boeing factory in Portland. Said he was financially set up to stay on strike for 9 months if necessary.
intercst
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Management would point itâs finger at that machinist and say 'see? that proves they are overpaid. how many other working people have enough money in the bank to live 9 months?" Because playing the envy card against union workers often works. A coworker of mine, whose husband was a union carpenter, had an interesting bumper sticker on her car âfight for your own pay and benefits, instead of taking otherâs awayâ.
Steve
I hate to say it but it does sound , what weâd call today, tone deaf
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In a bit of a twist, the union did recommend accepting the 25% wage increase (plus bonus, reduced healthcare costs, enhanced retirement, etc).
By the way, who actually build the sometimes shoddy aircraft? There is some shared responsibility here.
DB2
The country would say pay her more.
We are unintersted in the Chairman of the Board at Boeing having his job. We are done. Pay workers or go out of business.
9 months of savings wiped out is not a joke.
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By the way, who actually build the sometimes shoddy aircraft? There is some shared responsibility here.
Nice try. Actually transparently desperate try. Thereâs nothing shared about it. The workers do as the management says. They donât get to vote on the quality of the work submitted by the engineers or decide what management should find acceptable. They are handed the pieces and told to âbuild to specs.â
The country would say pay her more.
You would think wouldnât you? Not in this country. Yes everybody thinks they should be paid more but some other guy? Lazy. Communist. Socialist. "We canât find enough qualified workers! "
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So you think that management told some worker to not put in the four bolts that were missing on that door plug in the Alaskan Airlines 737 Max?
DB2
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iirc, that was a documentation failure. Documentation takes time. Time is money. Documentation wastes money.
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Another bad try. Nobodyâs talking about that. Talking about generally shoddy design and build. One or perhaps even a cabal of workers looking to turf an airplane? Thatâs a criminal act. Arrest them and execute them for murder.
But perhaps more to your point (see, Iâm easy) if some slug of a blue collar malcontent (I know the type. Wonât find the Working Class wearing white any more often that the Owning Class) in fact did that, The âBoingâ Airplane company is still responsible for QC. Anybody giving these things a going-over before they get sold to an unsuspecting customer? Well, âBoingâ wasnât.
Existing contract probably lacked cola clause. So contract was not prepared for inflation. Contract time is time to correct that. Tough negotiations and possible strike should be no surprise.
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The crashes were caused by the automated MCAS [Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System] system software.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/22/18275736/boeing-737-max-plane-crashes-grounded-problems-info-details-explained-reasons### *What is MCAS?
Boeing says the decision to include this change to the flight control operations wasnât arbitrary. When the company designed the Max jets, it made the engines larger to increase fuel efficiency, and positioned them slightly forward and higher up on the planeâs wings.
These tweaks changed how the jet handled in certain situations. The relocated engines caused the jetâs nose to pitch skyward. To compensate, Boeing added a computerized system called MCAS to prevent the planeâs nose from getting too high and causing a stall.
Pretty sure engineers & programmers are responsible. Doubtful they are even unionized let alone part of machinist union.
Many of the engineers at Boeing are unionized. But, like the rest of us Proles, are forced to do what management demands.
Steve
The dips are dying off and not soon enough
No, but I bet the Jack Welch-trained Management decided to skimp on inspections.
Traditionally in aircraft manufacturing and repairs, one mechanic does the work, and a second mechanic (the Inspector) checks it thoroughly to insure itâs done to the checklist and the specs.
There was apparently only one guy on the factory floor certified to do an inspection of the door plug installation. I wonder how many planes left the factory the two weeks that guy was on vacation?
{{ Targets for completion came and went before employees escalated the situation to âTier 3â priority, a move intended to get high-level attention at the factory, according to an internal Boeing log of employeesâ push to finish the jetâthe same one that would later lose its door plug panel in a near tragedy in flight just months later.
Punctuating how the situation was escalating with dollar signs, an internal message read: â$$TIER-CHG: 2 â 3 $$,â according to a Sept. 17 entry in the Shipside Action Tracker, or SAT, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The SAT is like a factory Slack channel for fixing a production problem.
The communications of the Boeing employees working on the door plug, previously unreported, help illuminate why it blew off during an Alaska Airlines flight on Jan 5.
The factory was in disarray. Crews were unable to keep a schedule and apparently didnât follow procedures, and production pressure mounted as delays piled up, according to entries in the SAT, people who have reviewed the logs and interviews with Boeing employees who worked on the plane.}}
https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/disarray-boeing-factory-door-plug-blowout-f063e27e
intercst
And that is why I wrote there is some shared responsibility. The inspector didnât catch the mistake, but the mechanic didnât do the work in the first place.
DB2
One of managementâs jobs is to create a culture such that when and if a failure happens the problems can be corrected.
In this case, Boeing says it canât find any documentation regarding who was responsible for reattaching the door plug. If you donât know who was responsible then you canât fix the problem. Either Boeing management destroyed the documentation (criminal) or it never existed in the first place (incompetent).
Either way, management created a culture such that problems cannot be fixed until it is too late.
Similarly, an FAA audit found workers were using hotel key cards to measure gaps during the 737 assembly process. That is fine for rebuilding your Camaro, but absurd for aerospace. There needs to be a drawing and a part number for the spacing tool. Is that the fault of the machinists?
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True enough, and that is why I used the phrase a shared responsibility.
DB2
94.6 percent rejected the proposed contract and 96 percent voted to strike. Pay was the main sticking point.
Weâll use a new Wall Street Journal story on the impact on Boeing of this strike as a point of entry. The Journal account, not surprisingly, takes a management/investor perspective on how the strike has worsened the mess that Boeing is in. Based on some nuggets in this account, it seems likely that this strike will not be resolved quickly. The piece describes how ratings agencies are warning that if the labor action extends beyond a week or two, the resulting cash crunch will lead to a ratings downgrade to junk (as in below BBB-). Each ratings grade drop increases the manufacturersâ costs by roughly $100 million per year.
If we are correct (admittedly relying on the imperfect lens of reading tea leaves from a major story) and that Boeing will not make the concessions needed to settle the strike quickly, one might infer that a hardball stance is the result of Boeing (despite the wobbly rating) relying on a too-big-to-fail status. It is not simply that commercial aircraft have been a cozy duopoly. Too many major carriers depend on Boeing surviving so they can get parts. That is before considering that airlines also concentrate their buys on certain aircraft models so as to simplify training, maintenance, and inventories. If the US was willing to bail out airlines during Covid to the tune of $54 billion, they would surely rescue Boeing if its financial conditions worsens markedly. The model could be government guaranteed borrowing, the form of lifeline extended to Chrysler in the early 1980s.
However, back then, CEO Lee Iacocca took a salary of $1 (although my recollection is that he got cash and prizes after the carmaker recover. One somehow doubts the new CEO or any of his C suite peers would make such a sacrifice. By contrast, it seems likely that any Federal rescue would be accompanied by an attempt to cram down uncooperative unions. The high pay levels of the top brass was one of the issues that stuck in the craws of the rank and file
I suspect CEO Ortberg would rather drive Boeing into bankruptcy & receive a golden parachute than take a pay cut.
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Could be, but not relevant to Boeingâs solvency. I have heard estimates that a settlement with âonlyâ a 30% wage increase would cost the company some extra $1.3 billion. You can ask Steve about the present cash flow conditions of the company and then add on the extra.
DB2
Keep in mind, Boeing no longer cares about the commercial market. They have lost about half of their commercial market share in recent years. What does management do about it? They move HQ to DC, to cozy up to DoD, because DoD tolerates the sort of sloth that goes on at Boeing. Open market competition is too hard for Boeing.
Steve
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