A lot of people here seem justifiably angry at Boeing management's total destruction of an engineering corporate culture. It's unclear to me if fixing that is what the machinists are demanding or if they just want normal union things like being paid more and working less.
No hate if they are optimizing for that, unions don't exist to serve corporate culture. Just want to be clear-eyed about what the union is seeking and (potentially separately), what it will take to make Boeing an American great again.
It's not totally clear to me, but it is telling that the union members specifically say boeing needs to "stop breaking the law" and that the rejected deal included an allegedly large pay increase. 96% turning that down doesn't feel like the increase just wasn't enough to me
It goes with the perception of corporate greed. Boeing stocks have shot up, profits are not being shared, and those profits came at a cost of safety, and it isn't as if market share had not still declined against Airbus.
I wouldn't be surprised if a machinist used to be able to go home, proud of the work they have done, and now, it is not so.
I’m curious to know if you think unions are bad for the economy now, after everything they/labor have accomplished for worker rights in the last century, or if it’s those very things you consider bad for the economy?
Is child labor good for the economy? Maybe short term.
Are 16 hour workdays and subsistence pay good for the economy? That doesn’t make good consumers out of the employees.
Unions exist because people were subjected to brutal conditions and it seems very unlikely to me such conditions were conducive to a healthy economy.
> A lot of people here seem justifiably angry at Boeing management's total destruction of an engineering corporate culture. It's unclear to me if fixing that is what the machinists are demanding or if they just want normal union things like being paid more and working less.
Let's not be naive here. People are going to strike on what they are incentivized to strike on. Not the goodness of their hearts.
They should want to influence the company to ensure they can keep their jobs, at the higher pay they want, indefinitely. There's a clear incentive: without the corporate culture fixed, they'll go from on strike to laid off when Boeing goes bankrupt before they can get the full raise.
Any Boeing engineers who may be looking for alternate paths, please know that I've known many great aerospace engineers who have made a pivot to medical devices very successfully and many of the best medical devices to come out in recent years are due to such. It seems very different but really it's very similar.
I'll echo this and have done something of this path. It's a very similar field surprisingly. Quite rewarding too. The timelines for products are also about the same (years-decade).
The one tip is to not bother applying to Medtronic. They don't actually hire anything outside of interns. All the job postings are for internal roles (but required by federal law to be ... blah blah blah). Suffice to say, don't bother.
Conversely, I've seen a lot pivot from aero to auto and flounder. They are kind of opposite industries in terms of pacing and design compromises, as well as the fact that most of a car has to plasticize in crash events which is not a primary consideration in aero.
Boeing engineers should leave and start their own company.
"American dynamism" is hot right now and there should be ample funding available. Lots of the old dinosaurs are being nipped at by nimble upstarts like Anduril.
On one hand I can't blame any engineer that wants to flee, but on the other Boeing really can't afford any more brain drain. We are already seeing the results of years of forcing experienced but well paid engineers out and outsourcing their jobs. Planes literally falling out of the sky, but some nice fat executive bonuses.
Anecdotal, but out of my graduating class in chemical engineering from a University in Seattle, the top 20 students went into tech and finance. The worst performing students (by academic metrics) went to Boeing. Over time, I expect decisions to be made by engineers which are not stand outs. Coupled with the MBA trainwreck prioritizing profits and cost cutting, I expect Boeing has a very rough patch ahead.
There is literally nothing actually preventing Boeing from:
1. Firing 100% of management between CEO and lowest level supervisors that make things happen. All of middle management should go.
2. Promote supervisors into middle management.
3. Promote ground level employees into supervisor roles.
4. When human problems happen (and they will), spare no expense with resources and training. Remember, the reason for firing management is because they had the interpersonal talent, but fundamentally lack aeronautical talent. Interpersonal talent is of minimal value at Boeing.
That is a feature of capitalism and effective market. If a company falls a little bit below competition -- market forces it do dive even deeper, die quicker.
I'm not saying it's good or bad. I've seen communism, and it's much worse to help failing companies -- they tend to fail even more instead of improving.
The problem now is that international market is not really fair, trade treaties help too little.
Good. Jim McNerney absolutely shredded the culture, and eroded decades of good will. It's far past time workers for Boeing pressed for things to go back to being an engineering and manufacturing led company.
Striking is one way to get closer to that, good on them.
The union-busters from MD are a cause of Boeing's woes, and it would be difficult to maintain a high-discipline, high-quality culture in a right-to-work plant without external oversight. The plausible deniability of production mandates with records falsification make zero-tenure employment toxic to a safety-critical program.
Am I the only one seeing a bit of naivette from the union? While I've been observing the whole Boeing debacle I don't know their financials, but I can only assume they are bad. Couldn't such a large strike take the company to the brink?
I know during turmoil you can usually negotiate better terms, but...
Just watched a documentary on Boeing an hour ago. It’s incredible that they avoided criminal prosecution despite two planes crashing, door popping out and then paperwork somehow going AWOL. Also Boeing knew about wiring issues since 2022 and the FAA only issues an inspection order in ‘24.
Gonna try and avoid Boeings of all types going forward
> Boeing’s lead corporate criminal defense law firm is Kirkland & Ellis.
Cox, the lead prosecutor in the Boeing case, left the Justice Department earlier this year.
And last month she joined Kirkland & Ellis as a partner in its Dallas office.
It looks like the firm bought the prosecutor, resulting in a win for its client. How could this be prevented, though? Politicians can't be trusted with oversight like this--they would use it to punish prosecutors and would inevitably further politicize the Justice Dept.
Once you start thinking of Boeing as a government agency with less oversight that poses as a for-profit corporation, a lot of things start to make more sense. Including what you wrote about.
This is just malicious. Boing is the exemplar capitalist enterprise, traded, where the sole objective is profit above everything else, including safety and following regulations obligations, something that they can do because they bought politicians (lobby aka legal corruption).
Not defending Boeing here. They have lost engineering focus as everything has become financialized in the search for ever-higher profits.
But there's also a recency bias here, as in fatal defects aren't new. Example: there were several fatal accidents with the 737 rudder in the 1990s [1].
One valid area of criticism is how the FAA has essentially allowed Boeing to self-certify to safety since ~2009 [2].
Executives nearly always avoid jail time despite egregious lawbreaking, because we have a culture of corporate permissiveness in the US (and arguably many other countries as well of course).
Only the absolute worst of the worst of the worst will get jail time for doing something illegal in the course of doing their job at the company, if it's something that nominally benefits that company (as opposed to, say, stealing from the company themselves). And even then, probably only some.
This creates a perverse incentive to commit crimes as an executive, because the upsides are huge -- big bonuses/promotions/pay raises as a part of cutting costs, even if you had to compromise on safety or otherwise do something illegal -- but the biggest downside is usually only having to resign or get fired.
Imagine if the worst result of repeatedly putting someone in the hospital or robbing a bunch of banks with a gun was just losing your job. That's how executive crime works in the US.
Not really, the negotiation team gets the best deal that can get that doesn't involving going on strike and they present that to the union which is then better informed for their vote.
Correct rejecting the companies "best and final" contract is basically par for the course in union negotiations. The company is banking on being able to outlast the strike to get a better deal than the union would otherwise agree to or betting on the government coming in an kneecapping the union and forcing the workers to accept a deal like happened with the ATC and train operator unions when they struck (striked? struck doesn't sound right in the context of a union strike for some reason...).
During national neighbor night out few weeks ago I met a couple who just moved to the neighborhood, wife is a doctor and husband is a Boeing engineer in the material science something rather. Me being a huge Boeing fan we've immediately connected on the topic of Boeing's issues. His view from inside echoed mine - too many MBAs, too much focus on financial engineering and stock buybacks and shareholder returns (he was LIVID about Boeing having no cash now because they sent it back to shareholders), too little focus on engineering. I touched on the nextgen (79?7) program and he just shook his head. And the CEO based out of wherever but not Seattle is just a huge spit into everyone's face.
I don't think Boeing is going down due to it being well, Boeing, but it will likely need to get bailed out if it goes on like that.
Um, they are one half of duopoly of widebody aircraft makers, they are a huge portion of high technology export from USA, they are in every state (for better or worse), they are a defense provider of insane importance with planes, rockets and satellites. Yeah, they're strategically essential to this country's abilities in airspace. I have no doubt they'd get bailed out. With a huge stink but they will.
Readit News
No hate if they are optimizing for that, unions don't exist to serve corporate culture. Just want to be clear-eyed about what the union is seeking and (potentially separately), what it will take to make Boeing an American great again.
I wouldn't be surprised if a machinist used to be able to go home, proud of the work they have done, and now, it is not so.
Is child labor good for the economy? Maybe short term.
Are 16 hour workdays and subsistence pay good for the economy? That doesn’t make good consumers out of the employees.
Unions exist because people were subjected to brutal conditions and it seems very unlikely to me such conditions were conducive to a healthy economy.
Sod people. Won't somebody think of the LLCs!!!
The sheer impudence of workers demanding money for their work and whining about rent.
There are shareholders over here who don't even have a megayacht to sit around on all day.
Let's not be naive here. People are going to strike on what they are incentivized to strike on. Not the goodness of their hearts.
The one tip is to not bother applying to Medtronic. They don't actually hire anything outside of interns. All the job postings are for internal roles (but required by federal law to be ... blah blah blah). Suffice to say, don't bother.
"American dynamism" is hot right now and there should be ample funding available. Lots of the old dinosaurs are being nipped at by nimble upstarts like Anduril.
1. Firing 100% of management between CEO and lowest level supervisors that make things happen. All of middle management should go.
2. Promote supervisors into middle management.
3. Promote ground level employees into supervisor roles.
4. When human problems happen (and they will), spare no expense with resources and training. Remember, the reason for firing management is because they had the interpersonal talent, but fundamentally lack aeronautical talent. Interpersonal talent is of minimal value at Boeing.
I'm not saying it's good or bad. I've seen communism, and it's much worse to help failing companies -- they tend to fail even more instead of improving.
The problem now is that international market is not really fair, trade treaties help too little.
The strike in question is the machinists' union, engineers aren't involved.
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Striking is one way to get closer to that, good on them.
Good luck, Boeing. (And I mean that.)
I fear this will do the exact opposite: vindicate the union-busters who wanted to move out of Washington in the first place.
The union-busters from MD are a cause of Boeing's woes, and it would be difficult to maintain a high-discipline, high-quality culture in a right-to-work plant without external oversight. The plausible deniability of production mandates with records falsification make zero-tenure employment toxic to a safety-critical program.
I know during turmoil you can usually negotiate better terms, but...
Gonna try and avoid Boeings of all types going forward
It's the American way.
It looks like the firm bought the prosecutor, resulting in a win for its client. How could this be prevented, though? Politicians can't be trusted with oversight like this--they would use it to punish prosecutors and would inevitably further politicize the Justice Dept.
https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/lead-boeing-...
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Dead Comment
But there's also a recency bias here, as in fatal defects aren't new. Example: there were several fatal accidents with the 737 rudder in the 1990s [1].
One valid area of criticism is how the FAA has essentially allowed Boeing to self-certify to safety since ~2009 [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues
[2]: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/b...
Unless you're not in the US, you want Boeing to get better, not fail (or root for a competitor, but I see no such thing)
Only the absolute worst of the worst of the worst will get jail time for doing something illegal in the course of doing their job at the company, if it's something that nominally benefits that company (as opposed to, say, stealing from the company themselves). And even then, probably only some.
This creates a perverse incentive to commit crimes as an executive, because the upsides are huge -- big bonuses/promotions/pay raises as a part of cutting costs, even if you had to compromise on safety or otherwise do something illegal -- but the biggest downside is usually only having to resign or get fired.
Imagine if the worst result of repeatedly putting someone in the hospital or robbing a bunch of banks with a gun was just losing your job. That's how executive crime works in the US.
Deleted Comment
I don't think Boeing is going down due to it being well, Boeing, but it will likely need to get bailed out if it goes on like that.
So go machinists!
The news reported that the new CEO said he chose to be based in Seattle.
From Seattle Times:
Kelly Ortberg, the new CEO of Boeing whose appointment was announced Wednesday morning, has chosen to be based in Seattle.