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.
And if the culture destroys Boeing and its reputation in the end, the machinists are going to be struggling to find new jobs. "Sorry, we don't want someone who built bad airplanes to work on this other safety critical thing."
The larger economy just doesn’t have enough similar positions to absorb all of the Boeing employees without them having to significantly reskill. Not to mention after you build airplanes going to build most anything else might feel like a downgrade.
Unless you are talking about a very specific period in the last ten years, Boeing's stock has not "shot up". It is barely up over the last decade in a period when the total US market has nearly tripled.
>Boeing stock is worth 4x what it was 15 years ago.
The S&P 500 is worth 5.4x over the same time period. There might have been some enthusiasm back in 2018, but in the past 5 years they've definitely underperformed.
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.
I suppose the theory is that people won't see significant pay increases if they stay with the same company (but also presumably that if everyone leaves after training, the company will just stop training workers).
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.
I seriously wonder how long it would take for a team of engineers to produce a competitive commercial airplane, from planning to the first prototype, if they started right now. Also, is it viable to produce something like the A320 in low quantities when airlines need fleets in the hundreds?
Designing an airplane and producing a prototype isn't terribly difficult and many thousands of companies have done this.
The tricky part is designing the massive manufacturing apparatus around it that can produce them in volume (ask Elon how easy building cars is), satisfying the varying demands of hundreds of different airlines, many from developing nations, helping them set up financing, supporting the design in the field for 30-50 years, AND turning a profit. Each widget produced has an MSRP of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Ask yourself why Lockheed permanently exited the commercial aircraft business 40 years ago, despite having what was regarded as the most technologically advanced design of the era, ahead of its time. Douglas went bankrupt and got bought out, Convair and everyone else failed and closed up shop.
You can't throw some engineers - they could be the smartest on the planet - into rented office space and become the next airplane company. There's more to it than designing the next WiFi-enabled food processor and slapping it together in Shenzhen.
Actually, thinking about Tesla is appropriate. No one really thought starting a new automotive manufacturer from scratch was possible, but Tesla did it. Yes, it's very hard and you'll probably fail, but if you do things different you might actually have a chance. The reasons all the old aircraft companies failed is probably the same reason Boeing is struggling. Don't copy what they've done in the past, make your own way. Yes, I know that building aircraft is a much higher hill to climb, but I think it might be worth it.
They could also join some of the small aircraft startups that are trying to gain a foothold. Maybe a cadre of experienced aircraft engineers would help them raise money and get a product to market faster.
I see this one as the saddest - if you are making good products the company will finally die.
VW (with Audi and Porsche) failing to deliver quality products is the top group. Apple crushing iOS release after release and becoming trillion dollar company.
Maybe that’s just the way to live and lead the company and market and I just should stop dreaming about quality.
> I seriously wonder how long it would take for a team of engineers to produce a competitive commercial airplane.
About 20 years for a fully-certified new commercial airliner design. They could have experimental prototypes flying much sooner of course. Even in China, their state-owned effort to develop a new narrow-body airliner took about 15 years and that's very likely with the CCP greasing the skids for them as much as they could. They are still not certified in Europe or North America.
And some of the problems we've seen with Boeing have nothing to do with engineering, but problems with subcontractors, materials, and assembly.
I remember reading that one engineer spent 6 years designing „ventilation for seats 40-80” on one of the larger Airbuses. It seems like the amount of design and engineering work required for a prototype of a complete aircraft (assuming you buy the engines) is just immense.
How much of that time was actual engineering-tradeoff decision-making and how much of that was working in a large corporation with abundant communication overhead?
For a safety critical system, the work documenting, explaining, testing, validating, etc. a decision outstrips the work it took to make the decision. It is that way for a very good reason. The problem with it requiring so much work and time isn't that there's BigCorp bureaucracy that needs disrupting, it's that there isn't a problem with the amount of work and time required.
I'm aware of that, but the proportion of overhead varies per company. Six months seems like a long time for a ventilation system, and the point being made in this thread is that the runway available for some spun-off group of former Boeing engineers would need to accommodate the very long schedules of the design stage.
I'm just curious how much inflation there is in those schedules because I'm sure it's not zero.
But you make a good point that these long runways are because the overarching tradeoff is one that prefers taking as long as it takes.
I'm betting a lot of that is reviews, approval, documentation, testing, re-testing etc - but it may be required for building a safe aircraft, and for getting it licenced to fly.
Why? Have the government step in, nationalize Boeing, give the union a board seat, and keep shipping. The problem is Boeing management and their board enabling the train wreck; don't build from scratch, refactor.
Lottery tickets are not policy. SpaceX took decades to get to the success they realize today, having been founded in 2002, and it took a lot of luck to build a rocket shop from scratch. We must realize that companies are not built out of Legos, but ecosystems that require care, feeding, and are fragile systems.
PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX,… how many times does someone “win the lottery” before it’s not actually chance? Not saying anyone can repeat it, or a random IC could leave and succeed, but that space seems ripe for disruption. (Maybe not passenger planes, but cargo with less liability.)
If 90% of startups fail, why would you think winning wasn't mostly chance? Regardless of how many people work hard and grind, you can still fail (and most do, that's just life). Some are more lucky than others, and capital begets capital. Once you've "won" enough, it becomes much harder to lose, even if you make terrible forward decisions and run off the inertia of past wins (Twitter). Bezos built Amazon, but also has sunk somewhere between $10B and $20B into Blue Origin and it is still not terribly successful, for example, and demonstrates that even with resources and skill that success is potentially out of reach.
So, while I think the startup model is a fine way for investors to get exposure to an asset class that is the equivalent of 0DTE options, for the startup ecosystem to enable participants to play in the fiat that falls from those investment decisions, and perhaps some value to be generated, I would hazard that the model would not scale to meet the needs of the aerospace and defense marketplace at this time. All that is needed is skilled engineers and manufacturing practitioners to be enabled to do their best work, while keeping out of their way. Airbus demonstrates this, imho. They employ almost 150k workers, and successfully deliver products to customers that aren't fraught with manufacturing defects. They also have a book of work into the next decade, demonstrating customer confidence in the product and the org.
I don't entirely understand this logic. 99.9% of players that play competitive chess will never make master, but of course nobody would then say that becoming a chess master is just down to chance. What percent of startups are just bad ideas, outright cons, hair brained money-first schemes, or people entering into competitive domains (like eateries) without sufficient skill? IMO you're probably pushing 90% there!
To me the main thing that the failure of Blue Origin demonstrates is that the notion of "business" as some generalizable and all-applicable skill is nonsense. Bezos has done an amazing job of overseeing a digital marketplace, but that doesn't somehow mean he'd be amazing at overseeing an aerospace company. To me this just seems like it should be obvious.
The vision, talent, and other such things are just so radically different. For instance Musk picked up his first engine engineer [1] based on engines the guy was literally building in his garage. Bezos just staffed Blue Origin with a bunch of people from old space, and so it seems quite unsurprising that you just end up with another Boeing, but without the legacy hardware and political cronyism to use as crutches.
Musk has had 3 huge successes - Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX. Having one such success might be luck. But when it's 3 times, dismissing it as luck is not very credible.
The same goes for Steve Jobs. 3 enormous successes.
And Bill Gates: 1. dominate 8 bit microcomputer software 2. pivot to 16 bit DOS. 3. pivot to 32 bit Windows. 4. pivot to internet. If you don't think that was a big deal, none of the other microcomputer software companies survived. Lotus, for example, muffed the pivot to 32 bits.
Pivoting to internet didn't work great for Bill Gates. Nobody really used MSN other than for chat and possibly hotmail, the browser wars were lost, and the bulk of the revenue was done on Windows at the time Nardella took the helm. However Microsoft was big enough to afford a failure.
Microsoft pivoted to the internet very successfully in the 90s under Gates, and the stock went up like a rocket.
Nadella didn't arrive until a full 10 years later.
I appreciate the value Nadella brought to the company (as I own some MSFT), but have pivoted away from Windows to Linux for development work. I remain with Windows 7 for other uses, so much so I bought a complete set of spare parts for my Win7 box for when it inevitably fails.
In the 90s what made MSFT shoot up was Windows becoming a household name, and Windows NT becoming the standard enterprise setup (often at the expense of mini-mainframes like the AS/400, rather than Unix); not Microsoft network.
The (almost successful) EEE strategy with Internet Explorer was the only part of Gates's internet strategy that survived the 90s.
This also explains why Ballmer went full in on Windows: there had been no pivot to speak of.
Sure, but can you not hire people who are good at hardware with billions of dollars of investment? Or, is it culture and an intangible ability to procure and orchestrate great people doing great work that leads to success? Think in systems. If you have the resources, and the physics demonstrate it can be done, the system is not properly configured, no?
can you not hire people who are good at hardware with billions of dollars of investment?
Clearly not in Bezos’s case.
There is no magic involved here, some people have the skill/experience to lead the design, build, and selling of innovative hardware, others don’t.
For example, for designing new rockets, one of the major things Musk innovated at SpaceX was the traditional aerospace design cycle. Instead of spending 5 years on countless analyses and few actual tests, like the incumbents did/do, SpaceX built and destructed as many prototypes as possible, learning rapidly and innovating. Musk knows what innovative design truly requires.
What did Bezos do? He hired a bunch of ex-Lockheed and Boeing engineers/leads (from an industry that for decades has not felt market-driven pressure to innovate), and those engineers/leads just kept doing things the old fashion way.
When the person in charge (Bezos) misses this detail, no amount of money or wishful thinking will fix this.
Obligatory repeat of this detail, since you're talking about PayPal as a Musk success story:
Musk had very little to do with the success of PayPal. I'm not even talking in terms of the "Gwynne Shotwell is the real genius of SpaceX" naysayers. I'm talking:
Musk had an attempt at an online bank that was ... not going well.
Confinity had done what Musk couldn't - had built a prototype/MVP of PayPal. They'd already got it running. They had trademarks, everything. At this point, they'd created PayPal having nothing to do with Musk.
So Musk and his company architected a merger with Confinity. As a result of this merger, Musk was the largest shareholder, and was made the first CEO.
He remained CEO for only four MONTHS, most of which he spent trying to be stubborn about throwing away the entire prototype to rewrite it in Windows/IIS and Classic ASP (i.e. Visual Basic) because he didn't understand Solaris and Java.
The Board got so sick of this that a couple of days after his four month anniversary, when he'd just left for two weeks off on his honeymoon of all things, they fired him in his absence.
Think about how badly you have to fuck up as a CEO of a company that you're the major shareholder in that they fire you (no "concentrating on my family", no "exploring other opportunities"), AND do it while you're on your honeymoon.
Following that, Musk's "contribution" to PayPal was mostly collecting shareholder dividend checks.
I despise Musk. But I will give him credit for his contributions to Tesla and to SpaceX. PayPal, though? That's just another rewriting of history to support the Musk idolatry.
He also has his long and obnoxious obsession with x.com.
This spanned back to PayPal and he had to try this crap again with the Twitter rebrand, that frankly hasn't worked all that well, because most within my circle still call it by the old name Twitter.
There is not one union, there are multiple employee unions, all fighting for their piece. Not only are there multiple unions, but even within a union, the older members usually vote against younger members.
It’s not a terrible idea, but also not a simple panacea to aligning interests in a business where payoffs happen decades in the future.
> Also, is it viable to produce something like the A320 in low quantities when airlines need fleets in the hundreds?
Bombardier thought so, and did so! They developed and introduced the C-series aircraft to compete with smaller 737s and A320/A319. After introduction, Boeing fucked them over so hard that they sold the aircraft program after introduction to Airbus for a token sum. Airbus now builds and sells the C-series as the A220.
Trying to translate your last sentence to English gives "Mauldite in itself very all the ligny". Trying to autocorrect it gives "Maudit soit toute la ligne" which apparently means "Damn the whole line". So... am I close? :D
Well, Boom is not any aerospace company, they want to make supersonic planes.
Supersonic travel is expensive and environmentally unfriendly, and it will probably always be, because it requires more energy, because physics. All that for the minor advantage of saving a couple of hours on select flights. What it means is that it is a privilege for the wealthy (because it is expensive for what you get), at the expense of everyone else (because of the environment). So of course it is going to be unpopular, except to the wealthy in question.
It doesn't mean Boom can't be successful because the public opinion is negative, if the rich can pay. I am still not convinced though, after all, Concorde didn't fail technically (and it still flew after that one accident), it failed commercially. Boom is not taking the easy path here, since it is a technically hard problem with a dubious market.
As I am currently sitting on a flight from Tokyo to SFO I would greatly appreciate the flight taking half the time. Boom should be as efficient current aircraft. They will operate at 60K feet where the drag is much less and fly for less time. Their engines are being designed to run on 80% biofuels. But let's see how it turns out in the end.
If you are not, then you are probably not making the right comparison. Supersonic travel will absolutely not be for those who are flying economy right now and complaining about reclining, legroom, and crying babies. The kind of things that make flights feel very long, and yet, that's how most people fly despite much superior alternatives, because it is cheaper.
Judging by how much it cost to fly on Concorde, it is reasonable to assume that a supersonic ticket will be equivalent in price to first class, or at least a very good business class.
It means a seat that can recline 180°, good enough to sleep on, an internet connection suitable for remote work, as I expect it to become standard in the near future, a decent meal and some privacy. In these conditions, saving a few hours may not be as desirable as it is in economy class. Knowing that in order to shorten your trip, you will be sacrificing some of that comfort, or pay even more, maybe getting close to private jet territory.
In this case, yes, upgraded with miles to first. I have made this fight ~500 times over the last 15 years, in coach, premium, business and first. While first is nice, the hours back are still worth more.
I have always traveled coach, and should I fly first class, I would definitely want my flight to last as long as possible, for the experience, but I guess the novelty wears out.
But 500 flights is crazy, one flight every 10 days for 15 years... I certainly understand why you would want to fly supersonic. But now I am curious... why would someone fly that much with the remote communication abilities we have now? I heard that in order to do business in Japan, it is important to be there, so I guess that if you want to come back home sometimes, it is hard to avoid, but still, that's a lot of time flying.
One bit of clarification, I am counting the flight both ways. On average I would fly to Japan from SFO one a month, sometime twice. I would always have some work in Japan then half the time I would need to also fly to Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Australia, NZ, etc.
1. The remote calls have gotten better but 15+ years ago not so much.
2. Timezone and remote calls are hard.
3. Face to face is very important to be able to build understanding and also judgement (you need to read the room, which you cannot do over a call).
4. Building relationships requires time not in a meeting, dinner or drinks with a client.
5. Having a relationship with your local team requires the same.
6. In Asia the foreigner flying moves the needle. It is a sign of respect for the customers that you value and will support them.
7. Languages. Unless you are fluent in the local language remote meetings are difficult.
8. Nature of the company. Im my case all 3 companies were startups. They are a risk for the customer. Your willingness to be there helps them feel more comfortable with the risk.
Durning the pandemic there was no flying of course and it was great to be home. I now have a new startup and we just started doing business in Japan at the start of this year. I have hired the same local team that I have worked with at 3 companies. They are amazing! However by the end of this year I will have visited 6 times. Reestablishing the connections lost durning the pandemic has already moved the needle enough that it will materially affect the success of my startup. To be fair, come next year I do not feel I will need to visit every month, but once a quarter is going to be required.
For me cutting flights times in 1/2 is a major win.
As to first class, yes the novelty goes away. It is just another segment of a very long day.
> Boom should be as efficient [as] current aircraft.
Don't know where this so-called efficiency should come from, but this is a statement that doesn't seem to be based in reality.
Except for the techno-bro startup take that the incumbents are so imbued with themselves that they dropped the ball, which rational explanations are put forward to explain how the current manufacturers are doing a bad job?
To fly at Mach 2 (or 1.8 as boom now seems to be targeting once they realised the difficulty of the task ahead) you still have immutable laws of physics you need to overcome, and that's going to cost an unreasonable amount of fuel.
If it's only for the rich then the prices will be high. Meaning the capitalist mechanism of resource distribution will be even higher (more paid by the rich received as income by the non-rich). It will also take demand from existing airlines making fares lighter for everyone else. It also employs people. It also drives technology forward. And ultimately it does let people travel in less time, and why wouldn't we want that? To some extent emissions are not as bad as you'd think since they are being emitted over less time in the course of a shorter journey. Success in this category will also drive competition in every metric and work to bring cleaner, shorter flights to everyone over time.
There is a lot to love about the idea of supersonic flight.
> It will also take demand from existing airlines making fares lighter for everyone else.
That's not how airline economics work. The first class passengers (the ones who could afford to leave for supersonic) subsidize the economy seats[1]. If they left you would probably see worse prices, worse amenities or both.
There are airlines that don't have business or first class seats (e.g. Spirit), and they're generally a terrible experience.
On the other hand demand for premium seats would be down, lowering their price and making a nicer ride more accessible. Overall this would net to lower prices for the same distribution of amenities on a given plane ride. Supply and demand theory would seem to suggest that equal supply with lower demand leads to lower prices overall. Supply could of course adjust as more people move to supersonic, but that means more people are now getting a better product than before. And if supply of regular jets remains (they're pretty expensive to just have sit there and not try to use for income), lower-end fares and seat availability invite people at the lower end of the resource spectrum to now buy more plane tickets.
Not fully convinced by the "will make fares lighter for everyone else" argument. The economics of planes are heavily weighted towards the passengers up front - business & premium economy make more profit per sqft for the airline than seats at the back. So I'd imagine that a reduction in demand for premium seats could actually increase prices.
The flipside of this is that the passengers in the back, while not as profitable in the "$/sqft" equation, are what merit the airline buying a 777-300 or A350.
If all your focus is on those premium passengers, then you don't need as big an aircraft, and you end up with things beginning to approach JSX's (https://www.jsx.com/home/search) mode of operations.
Computers used to be very, very expensive. Residential telephone lines were acquired through mortgage a couple decades ago in my country so being expensive now doesn't mean expensive forever.
unlike with computers, there's some pretty obvious barriers that limit the efficiency of supersonic airplanes. your volume has a strict lower bound from the size of passengers and luggage, your engines have a lower bound since there's only so much air you can push against, and your drag has a lower bound of a perfectly smooth aerofoil that produces lift and can fit the people and luggage. Even if you take the most optimistic assumptions that didn't violate physics, your fuel burn isn't going to be reasonable.
That's a thing called a rocket. Those have different constraints (e.g. energy proportional to mgh to get out of the atmosphere, dramatically less efficient engines since you now need to carry your oxidizer, etc. It seems vaguely plausible that for very long distances (e.g. New York to China), a rocket could be more efficient than an airplane, but it does seem pretty unlikely that a rocket can be as efficient as a normal airplane.
A ballistic missile flight to go from New York to Sydney would take 40 minutes. The Concorde, travelling at Mach 2, if it had the range to do that flight, would take 7.5 hours, or 16 hours on a regular jet, if you can get a direct flight (except there currently aren't any).
Plus the added benefit of looking exactly like a ballistic missile attack on radar. :D Hope nobody with a twitchy trigger finger ever mistakes your flight for one! And also hope that no enemy will try to disguise their incapacitating strike as a scheduled flight.
No, but there are nothing I'm aware of changing the economics. Electronics were coming down in price for decades before computers reached the average house (of course when they reach the average house is debatable - on one extreme the Atari 2600 had a CPU, on the other there are still remote villages that are just adopting phones )
What’s expensive, largely, is the fuel to shove something through the air faster than the speed of sound. Short of sci-fi frictionless materials cheap enough to cover an aircraft, I don’t think you’re going to see a big breakthrough there.
I agree but not because "boohoo people aren't nice enough to us" – because it's a tough market to break into with (justifiably) high regulatory scrutiny, high R&D costs and few investors who know what they are doing.
It's very natural that any company be subject to scrutiny – this doesn't mean that you shouldn't set up a company or that the environment for setting up a company isn't favourable.
Engineers always over value their ability to start companies on their own. There is a lot to building a successful company and needs irrationality and risk-taking (not exactly traits of a median engineer).
Engineers like Musk, Zuck, Gates are outliers than the norm. If you are a Boeing Engineer and had above average risk-appetite, you wouldn't be stuck in Boeing for 10+ years.
Yes but Toulouse is way cheaper than any Tier 1 city in the US and you have to include insurance/health, school cost in the US (I'm from Toulouse and living in the US for more than 10 years). If you make 250k/year in Tier 1 city in the US it's probably as good as making 80k/year in Toulouse.
Don't Boeing engineers also get insurance and 401k from their employer?
Plus, they'd have to learn french also. France is not very accommodating to non French speaking foreigners. Trying to get around in life with just English there outside of Paris is not easy.
My experience, although 20ish years ago now, was that France was very accommodating to people who were trying to make an effort to speak French, however badly, and would help correct pronunciations and other little errors, whereas their patience for foreigners who thought that the locals English would get better if they just spoke more loudly and slowly was thin.
> France is not very accommodating to non French speaking foreigners. Trying to get around in life with just English there outside of Paris is not easy.
I don't really get this kind of comments... Usually people also say the same thing when visiting Japan. "This restaurant only has menu in Japanese and staff only speaking Japanese!!".
That's true a bit everywhere in the world, isn't it? In the US, apart from places with say huge Spanish speaking presence, you better interact in English.
Try "getting around in life" using only say French, or Portuguese, or Japanese in a random US city like Portland, NYC, or Chicago.
I didn't sense any judgement there, just a statement of fact. Learning a new language as an adult is doable, but not trivial, so it's certainly a factor in making a decision to relocate to another country for a job.
> That's true a bit everywhere in the world, isn't it?
No it's not, western Europe for example has a bunch of countries where English is almost as good as native. But obviously that's not the common case across the world, and like you say there's nothing wrong with expecting people to know the local language.
>That's true a bit everywhere in the world, isn't it?
That has not been my experience. I'm not arguing it should be this way, but for better or worse I've gotten by very well with english virtually anywhere with tourists and most places without. I lived in east ukraine for two years and learned russian - enough people spoke english there that at times it could be hard to get practice time in russian. This was with a younger student crowd, most non-students and older people did not speak english, but the point stands that you can find english speaking people and get by in most situations.
Not really, the world isn't either black or white but various shades of gray. Everything North of Benelux is a lot friendlier and open to speaking English and doing things in English outside of capitals, compared to places like France where not speaking it gives you a severe handicap in life and career.
There are quite a few employees in Toulouse that don't speak French, the company is very international. That being said I agree that daily life is much easier if you speak at least a little bit.
- Engineering jobs in the US tend to come with health insurance benefits
- There are several state programs in the US that make attending an in-state public university very affordable. For example, in GA I attended university for $0 in tuition (only paying for room and board + a couple hundred bucks a semester on bs “fees”). The requirement for that grant is getting a 3.0 or higher high school GPA.
- Not sure how cheap Toulouse is, but at least in the US you’re probably better off making 200k+ in HCOL than 100k in LCOL. At that level of income, you don’t have to spend much of your income on essentials even in an extremely HCOL area like SF ($3000 a month gets you a nice apartment).
You can buy houses outside of Toulouse for 300k with swimmingpool and 4000 square meter land. 20 min drive from Airbus. Winter time you can ski in the mountains, summers are nice and cities like Barcelona can be reached in 4,5 hours. 80k is more than enough to have a super comfortable life.
That's who went on strike. "Tens of thousands of machinists voted Thursday to reject a proposed deal between the company and the union." This was the IAW manufacturing folks rejecting a contract, not the SPEEA engineering folks.
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.
I always wonder who these folks who graduate with excellent STEM degrees are who can't land a job.
I had a similar experience with my graduating class in undergrad computer science at a no-name state university. Of the graduating class (significantly smaller than when we started), I don't know of a single person who couldn't find some kind of gainful tech related employment - including the few folks who somehow could not code! by the end of our program. My experience is circa 2014, so only shortly after the great recession.
Where are these people who just can't get any kind of work with real CS degrees? Even the many hardcore cheaters I know of found ways into the FAANG (some have been promoted several times now too!)
Things are a bit sketchy at the moment. Had a recent get-together including a former co-worker who was an obvious hire-this-person. They got hit in a layoff and they're still essentially out of work after a year.
Job postings that don't respond to inquiries about the role are a waste of your time, and it's possible to spend all day every day applying to them. Job postings without a method of contact are probably some kind of scam.
The easiest step, IMHO, is to start by ignoring employers who use a service to filter applicants.
Top 20 students in chemical engineering went into tech and finance.... two professions that at the first sight have nothing in common with chemical engineering... Tech and finance must really be looking for a lot of employees....
If Boeing was paying $500K+ TC for engineers in their early/mid career, you'd see a lot more expertise enter the field. Instead you basically have to go into tech or PE/IB to see that type of compensation fresh out of school. Especially when students are taking on hundreds of thousands in debt, the payback period becomes really important when considering career paths.
I completely understand graduates would choose higher TC from tech/finance vs TC from Boeing. What I do not understand is why tech/finance companies would want to hire chemical engineering graduates.....
I know a few people who changed careers from biology to finance - but that was only after going back to school and getting some business degree....
No doubt, Big Tech prints money and absorbs all available talent. Boeing's troubles are surely compounded by having all the best new talent hired away from them, because Big Tech pays much better.
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.
3. Never do this! Good engineer should get paid better over time and do good engineering. Being for a long time in a role doesn’t make you better at different ones like supervising from engineering.
Few bigger companies in EU wasted a lot of tech talents this way and people most often leave job after being leaders for a moment.
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.
The problem is that the "competition" aspect assumes low barriers to entry. We're not talking about the corner diner or a bank or even a large insurance company. There's very little substitute for what Boeing does, and the barriers to entry for new competition are (quite literally?) astronomical. Boeing can't just be replaced; even to allow it to fail would be a major problem for the western economy.
Solution: for e supremacy of compliance with regulations over fiscal performance. You have to be able to check all of the boxes reliably before we can talk about innovating or optimizing.
This is true and I wonder if it's going to put them even more into a zombie state of existence. Their bad business practices will keep getting bailed out and they'll never really improve until a better company comes along.
Why would a manufacturing company - who is clearly having manufacturing problems - pivot to a remote-first culture? What problem would that solve? It's hard to build airplanes in your driveway, but I can't say that I've tried.
That door-blowing-off thing wasn't a design issue. "It's hard to forget to install the bolts when you're working from home" is a bit of a logical fallacy.
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.
There is no company called GE anymore. Most of its engineering units were sold off to other companies which just license its brand. GE appliances, for example, are actually Haier. GE Lighting was sold to a home automation startup.
GE's biggest value creator today is its brand name, not its engineering.
This is not correct. There are three companies formed from the splitting up of GE that all do serious engineering. GE Aviation, GE Vernova (power), and GE Healthcare.
Do you have any more information on that? I worked for GE in the past and would like to do so again; however, I'd avoided them because it seemed like they'd been run into the ground.
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.
Can't a law be passed that states prosecutors legally cannot consult or assist in cases or for defendants they were involved with during their tenure as a prosecutor for X years after they leave their position?
Restricting them too much is a double edged sword because a lot of people use government work as a stepping stone even if they don't go to work for people they directly deal with. Making it too hard to find a job after can make good lawyers never go into public service because they couldn't get the cushy private gig afterwards.
Politicians don't have much incentive to do this since plenty of them get cushy jobs at bigco benefactors of the spending bills they voted on. Trying to target prosecutors would cast a eye on themselves.
It's like trying to separate church and state in England back in 1600-1700s.
Or firms could trade hires ("if you hire this person, I'll refer a client to you"). Or they could "persuade" a client's legal dept to hire her ("We're looking for a new partner and we like your experience... On a totally unrelated note, I know a talented young woman who's looking for a job...")
Ah so the implication is not that the prosecutor gave them inside info on the government's case's weaknesses but the prosecutor intentionally played the case suboptimally in hopes of being paid after the fact? If this was done with prior assurance that sounds already illegal no? If it was done simply on the hopes of securing "payment" afterwards with no prior deal then that seems like a large risk for the prosecutor to take.
If the whole legal system protects and even encourages such actions, maybe...wait an UPS guy is knocking the door, strange I don't remember ordering anything...hold on.
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.
So, yes. All have deep ties with government through their regulatory apparatus (some would characterize this as "capture"). Also of note: people might be confused by tobacco's inclusion here if they don't realize that North America was essentially settled as a tobacco agribusiness (Spanish gold-hunting and death-trap religious colonies notwithstanding). Tobacco's role in shaping America's socioeconomic nature is massively underrated.
Take a nice drive through the Midwest/south, you'll see all kinds of branded barns used for drying tobacco... assuming they're still standing
I say this more to reminisce than anything. It used the big industry, not anymore. People either adapted or they didn't. Kentucky and Ohio for example used the be Big Tobacco. Now, in large parts - nothing.
There must be a billion corporations out there. What % can kill customers on the scale of Boeing and get away with it?
A tiny number.
And for the ones that can, it’s likely that there are strong ties to the same government that’s supposed to prosecute them. For Boeing, there are significant financial and contractual ties to the US government.
Having a steady stream of ultra-reliable government cash surely reminds you of a state department?
> What % can kill customers on the scale of Boeing and get away with it?
100% of the ones that are at, or near, the top of their domain. As the US and other developed nations move more towards Oligarchy, this describes a vast majority of the economy.
If you pick a domain, any domain, there's typically < 5 companies that represent almost 100% of the value in that domain. There're some exceptions, like tech, but not many.
Losing even just one of those companies therefore has catastrophic economic effects. So you can't lose them, or even really hurt their profit much, because what's good for them is good for you (you being the US economy).
Bayer Pharmaceutical famously gave thousands of people HIV, knowingly, instead of clearing their inventory. Who knows how many of those people went on to unknowingly spread HIV to their future children or partners. We literally can't measure how many people died of AIDS because of them.
But they're one of the most important pharmaceuticals out there. And we need drugs.
The root problem is that the rich and powerful[1] face no consequences for wrongdoing. It's endemic to every part of life, and nothing gets done about it because the rich and powerful make the rules. It really doesn't matter if they happen to be aligned with "Team Corporation" or "Team Government". They are equally unaccountable to justice.
1: Rich and Powerful are both the exact same thing since money is frictionlessly convertible to power and vice versa.
> the rich and powerful[1] face no consequences for wrongdoing.
Bernie Madoff. Jeff Epstein & Ghislane Maxwell. Sam Bankman-Fried. Elizabeth Holmes. Harvey Weinstein.
I get that sometimes you'll see things like Hunter Biden's tax issues being allowed to pass the statute of limitations, but a universal "the rich never face consequences" is just plain false.
can you list how many financiers were jailed after 2008 GFC ?
can you find any?
can you list how many people were jailed for engineering SARS-CoV?
heck, government hasn't even acknowledge that it was engineered and still pushes fairy tale about bat infecting pangolin who infected a chain of few other animals and then ended up in wet market - but no signs of viruses in 1000 miles between caves and wet market were ever found
Well, disregarding the bankers - generally we require evidence to be presented in a court of law and then those findings to be found true for people to go to jail - repeating stuff you read on the internet doesn't really rise to that level.
BP and Exxon have killed entire ecosystems including people. They lied for decades about the environmental effects of fossil fuels. Air pollution alone has conservatively killed hundreds of thousands of people. While you can't blame them for air pollution existing, you can blame them for intentionally suppressing the ability of people to mitigate it and improve air quality.
Are you joking? Once a corporation gets large enough, the worst they can get is a fine, which is usually a fraction of their income. This is how the system works.
For example, depending on how you calculate it, Merck killed between 3,000 and 500,000 people with Vioxx, and they knew the risks prior to releasing it. They got a fine. And now, the company is now doing just fine. No one was individually prosecuted.
If you have a corporate charter and billions of dollars, you have a license to kill.
I am European (left FWIW, which I guess in the US is "far-left" or something alike), been influenced by Reagan for sure (against most of his stated policies and views) and I do believe the government should exists to help people among other things. The government should not aim to generate profits but instead spend that overflow money on improving more lives.
Lat time I went to an American DMV it was in a small town in Colorado to get a license renewal. I was in and out within 10 minutes.
My next license was in Canada. Made an appointment and it was about the same, maybe a bit more to get all the paperwork scanned to convert my US license.
The DMV doesn't have to suck. Government services don't have to suck, and a lot of them actually don't. Frequently they suck because they are tasked with doing far more than any similarly resourced private company could accomplish.
In my experience living in California, government services such as the DMV and the post office tend to be more pleasant in small towns compared to in large metro areas. When I lived in San Luis Obispo and in Santa Cruz County, it was generally a smooth experience running errands at government facilities. In fact, I remember people smiling and being friendly in San Luis Obispo. In larger metros such as Sacramento and the Bay Area, though, I often have to contend with long lines and surly service.
I know this is just anecdata, but this is something I’ve noticed over the years.
It depends on the country, though. I love Japan, where I lived for eight months and where I frequently travel to, but dealing with government services there can be stressful. Granted, the clerks are professional and cordial, but be prepared to deal with long waits and perplexing bureaucracy. The United States is not unique when it comes to the stereotypical “DMV experience.”
I actually lived in Japan for some years and was thinking specifically of them.
People that care at the post office, even if they have a litany of questions, and deliver your package in pristine condition is the preferred result over crap service where nobody in the entire chain cares at all if it even shows up or if it's beat up and stuff fell out.
The only government service that felt purposefully bad, like many American government services, were the immigration services in Shinagawa, conveniently located next to the garbage processing facilities.
Back in November I spent half a day at the Shinagawa immigration office to obtain a trusted travelers program pass since doing it at the airport would’ve been inconvenient for me due to my super-early arrival at Haneda and my super-late departure. It wasn’t too bad, but I spent half a day there and there were unclear instructions regarding which area I needed to wait in. Thankfully it’s all taken care of, and the reward for spending half a day at Shinagawa is using the automated kiosks whenever I enter and depart Japan, which saved me tons of time in July when I arrived at Narita, bypassing a very long visitors’ line. I go to Japan frequently and so I’ll make up for the hours I spent in Shinagawa by the time my pass expires.
The Reagan-era conservative propaganda is so unbelievably strong that even when a private corporation kills hundreds of people, people will STILL use the opportunity to point at the public sector.
No, they don't operate like the public sector because they're actually in the private sector. But the propaganda is so strong that it's literally unthinkable for a private actor to do something bad on a large scale - only the public sector can do something bad on a large scale.
Therefore, in this reasoning, Boeing must be like a public actor. It's really remarkable the mental effort people will go through to avoid any type of narrative that MIGHT imply the private sector needs more accountability.
> Therefore, in this reasoning, Boeing must be like a public actor. It's really remarkable the mental effort people will go through to avoid any type of narrative that MIGHT imply the private sector needs more accountability.
Maybe it wasn't very clear but I'm making (trying to make) the opposite point. Boeing pays out bonuses to executives like they're a for-profit company, but considering Boeing is too big to fail and NASA using them as a partner to push their other partners and won't drop them no matter what happens (one of the press conferences about Starliner made this very clear) makes it seem like Boeing is a government agency.
Seems weird to immediately jump to "Reagan-era conservative propaganda" when I'm probably as far away from anything like that as humanly possibly.
I didn't read the OP as saying, "Private sector good; public sector bad." I read him as saying, "Unregulated monopoly bad."
I think a more charitable read of the OP is that the FAA hasn't done a good job regulating Boeing because the FAA is in Boeing's pockets. Boeing is so critical to national defense that the regulators don't want to rock the boat and risk getting fired. Both Boeing and the FAA need to be cleaned up.
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).
> How is that an exemplar of profit making capitalism?
They still exist and are regularly pumping out millionaires from their executive suites.
It's helpful to think about corporate America as a gigantic factory, but instead of a factory that makes gadgets or appliances, it's a factory that makes millionaires. On one end of the factory, the raw materials come in: Able-bodied workers, money from customers, and capital from investors. On the other end of the factory, the finished product--millionaire executives--fly out on golden parachutes into retirement. In the back, the waste from the manufacturing process gets discarded: The broken lives and bodies of all the rank-and-file workers, and all the negative societal and environmental externalities that were also destroyed in the process.
Profit for shareholders and [temporary, conditional] employment for workers are mere side effects of the process, and they'd do away with the second one if they had the technology to.
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.
Maybe in this contract they both can have provisions in for poor workmanship and poor engineering decisions. Both for the shop floor as well as the management.
You ship defects, you get salary or bonus deductions and vestments pulled.
Typically quality improvement programs don't rely on punishing mistakes. Doing so results in people hiding mistakes, pressuring QA people to do a worse job etc.
Now if the issue is malice and not mistakes - then you can apply discipline. And indeed most union contracts do still have a process for discipline.
The practice alone of organizing labor power against owners, irrespective of the demands, given the existing state of the world, is what is needed to show Class solidarity.
Simply showing class solidarity in order to kick off other strikes is valuable in and of itself.
Y’all really have to understand a general strike is coming.
A general strike means the labor class (you most likely), which is the group of people who do not primarily gain their income from passive investments, and are reliant on contracts that they don’t create or control which provide them very little control over their economic future, stop working in order to put extreme pressure on the group of people who do control those contracts and who do control capital.
Such a system is foundationally unethical, and should be Deconstructed as rapidly as possible with the expropriation of all that capital to the rightful owners: the people actually producing the value, and done in a way that’s not under duress, such that you do not have to take whatever dog shit contract is put in front of you
In your profile it says you work for some company, do the founders know you want to expropriate their company? Those damn kulaks, feasting on the fruits of your labor.
No, because calling for a communist revolution from your position is a suicide wish then, any entrepreneurs or owners of pretty much anything were considered a class enemy and you being in a leadership positions of any kind is a guaranteed ticket to a gulag.
Why is it so hard to imagine worlds other than the ones that you currently live in? as though there’s no possible way to resolve this concept, ergo something like syndicalist anarchism *gasp* who would’ve ever thought something so well understood long described could be implemented someplace imagine that. *faints*
As they say, it’s easier for most people to picture the end of the world than the end of capitalism
Maybe do more drugs or something
Read about Mondragon etc… and explore the idea of living completely differently
I grew up in russia mate, I've seen the alternative to capitalism, and I can tell you that capitalism is a damn paradise compared to what that alternative was.
Instead of doing drugs just read some history on how those things go. Once you start expropriating anything you'll get a violent pushback, that's either a coup or a civil war, during those you will get violent people take charge, then if your side looses you get Pinochet and a helicopter ride, if your side wins, you get Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc that will exterminate anyone remotely like you as class enemies.
>The anarchist movement lived on during the time of the Soviet Union in small pockets, largely within the Gulag where anarchist political prisoners were sent, but by the late 1930s its old guard had either fled into exile, died or disappeared during the Great Purge.
Why? I have zero interest in yet another utopian idea that will probably result in millions dead, as they always do. The current system works well enough and seems like a miracle to me coming from where I grew up, the fact that you can work hard on anything you want, take risks and get rewarded for it, and no one is gonna arbitrarily take it all away is magical.
This is an ancient and universal idea, that has failed to deliver prosperity and growth, and often drives societies that were once flourishing into starvation.
Capitalism is the new, cool, unique idea that has actually delivered prosperity for society. Not perfectly evenly, but certainly more evenly than other ideas like socialism, fascism and feudalism.
Labor action isn't contrary to a free market. Labor action is precisely labor using its negotiating power in a market to secure concessions, the same way that employers use their market power to secure concessions from employees, customers use their market power to secure concessions from businesses, or businesses use their market power to extract profit.
I'm a business owner. I believe in business, and I like participating in a competitive market. I like that it keeps me honest and forces me to really try to do my job. But that doesn't imply that I have to be hostile to the interests of laborers in principle! They're sticking up for their interests, just as much as I stick up for mine. That's how a market works. And just as with my customers, we can have a mutually beneficial working relationship while still negotiating in the knowledge that we're all adults with some degree of self-interest.
As long as we're working within a system where we don't expect businesses to show loyalty to employees beyond self-interest (and it seems that we are), why should we expect employees to behave any differently? You can't make employment an ethical question for one side and not the other: either we're all in this together (and thus that businesses have a responsibility that Boeing has clearly failed to uphold), or we believe in a ruthlessly competitive market (and labor has every right to play hardball).
You're conflating political and economic systems here. Capitalism is fully compatible with fascism. And it emerged out of and is an evolution of manorialism, the economic system used under european feudalism.
Not just compatible, but capitalism requires fascism because by default it alienates the person doing work from capturing the value via exploiting the variability in standard of living and environmental sustainability.
Economists call this “arbitrage” which is a fancy word for, “Someone can dominate you economically and you have no legal avenue to avoid it.”
Proudhon covered this thoroughly in “What is property”
> A general strike means the labor class ... stop working in order to put extreme pressure on the group of people who do control those contracts and who do control capital.
> Such a system ... should be Deconstructed as rapidly as possible with the expropriation of all that capital
(emphasis added)
The result, predictably, is that unions lose all their leverage against the investor class (which no longer exists) and management (which is now the government). See, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_unions_in_the_Soviet_Uni... ("[S]trikes were still more or less restricted... Unions remained partners of management in attempting to promote labor discipline, worker morale, and productivity.").
How much of the Soviet Union was owned in any functional, practical or legal way, by the proletariat?
Oh zero? Did they have communal decision making? Oh also no?
How is state ownership of everything in a dictatorship relevant here at all?
It remains mind-boggling that the only thing people can fathom as an alternative to nightmare capitalism is state centralized, economic controlled bullshit dictatorship.
Depends on if you are a shareholder for the long terms (many years) or a short-term trader. I don't own stock in Boeing (or any of their main competitors), but when there is a strike like this in a company I hold stock in I generally get more bullish for the long term because it means that:
1. It signals employees still care about the company enough to not just quit and go elsewhere. And employees who care make a better product.
2. Negotiating better benefits generally helps retain the solid "middle class" who make the brunt of the work in a company. It might not entice the "rock-stars" or so, but they generally are not dis-incentivised by their colleagues getting better benefits either.
3. The C-suite gets to know they are not untouchable, this also helps keep them level when answering to the board of directors.
> There are very few good stories with unions but most of them are tragic especially long-term.
Since unions helped to end practices like child labor and what amounted to indentured service, I’m not sure you know what “tragic” or “long term” means.
If what you mean is more like “what have they done for us lately”, you should probably just say it and start that conversation instead
That's taking something that happened about a century ago and using it as an argument for the current situation.
If you're looking for something much closer to home, look at how in the past half century unionized corporations were forced to take over pensions, and how they're doing now because of this. Pensions are a financial product, which should be paid for by each employee - quite likely with supervision and safety net from the state. Putting it on the employer's tab turned out to be more or less giving away the future of the company. And that's pretty much 100% on the unions.
The alternative view is that, left to themselves, people don't save enough for retirement and, for better or worse, social security in the US really isn't enough for a comfortable retirement.
That said, there are a lot of reasons why traditional defined benefit pensions aren't a good match for a lot of jobs today. I have one (for a non-union job) but it's mostly a positive because I'm sure I never gave it a second thought early career when I was earning into it.
This is patronizing and broadly not true for a majority of people. This myth was created during the Great Depression to sell Social Security. Some people do not save for their retirement, but vastly most of us do. Should I be forced to pay for those who waste their money on entertainment and high living?
One of the reasons it's broadly not true in the US is that, between social security and medicare, people are provided for at some level upon retirement based in no small part on their own contributions. I paid into both those pools so I'm not sure why you think that money (along with other savings) constitutes being "forced to pay for those who waste their money on entertainment and high living."
Your first paragraph was pretty much true. Unions don't exist to be nice to the executives and shareholders. That's not their purpose. Their purpose is to act as a balance to the outsized power that corporate management and shareholders wield in the employee-employer-shareholder relationship. They only care about the "health" of the company to the extent that the company is healthy enough to provide good compensation and working conditions to employees. They're not there to add shareholder value. This is working by design.
You're getting hot backlash for framing this as tragic. Doubly so since you identify as "part of the worker class" but your entire post is simping for the executive and shareholder class who don't care about you and would lay you off without even thinking about it if it would increase the stock price.
Sure, but companies and shareholders are the most destructive forces on earth. I have a hard time seeing investor tears as anything but a glimmer of hope.
I live in Hamburg, Germany and there is a major Airbus-site nearby. By US standards these employees basically live under "socialism" and their union definitly did not hurt them in comparison to Boeing. Quite the contrary, certain safety violations wouldn't even remotely happen here, as the employees cannot be pressured into accepting them as easily. You know, when your boss can fire you with the snip of a finger and potentially your health care is on the line, it takes a special kind of guts to still do the right thing.
Unions can can be bad if abused by powerhungy people, but the same is true for literally every other organization.
And we found the Jack Welch understudy comment here.
The only thing that's delusional is how backwards this comment is with respect to the customer. While, yes, Boeing has different buyers than most organizations we can see things like tertiary customers being affected by Boeing's "health" in terms of the quality of it's products. And by that I mean the 737 MAX scandal.
Shareholders shouldn't be afforded to drive the direction of the company, even though they have tools like voting rights. The purpose of a shareholder is that they provide capital because they trust Boeing will make great products that sell and potentially profit from. What a shareholder shouldn't be is someone who gets to tell Boeing to cut quality to artificially inflate the stock price. The shareholder doesn't matter in the case of Boeing employees and if it does then Boeing is not a company you should want to buy products from.
Unions are interested in protecting employees from greed, in its simplest definition. Boeing, as we know at this point in time, has put short term profits well above both its employees and its products. Yet your delusion is that not having a union will somehow fix both? Amazing stretch of reasoning there.
> This is delusional. Unions are generally bad for companies and almost always bad for shareholders.
And? It's not the union's job to be good for companies or shareholders, it's their job to be good for workers.
> Unions are rarely interested in the "health" of the company itself but rather in their control (which is at conflict with shareholder control) and their compensation (again, eating from shareholder compensation).
Yes, and? You say this like it's a bad thing.
> Unions also use aggressive measures (strikes, shutdowns, etc...) rather than negotiations.
When you/workers are only used for their labour, withholding labour may be the only bargaining chip you have. Why not use said chip?
Or perhaps companies can treat their workers well so that they don't feel compelled to form unions. There are a number of auto plants in southern Ontario, and most are union shops, except Toyota's: the CAW has been trying to organize for many years, but the workers always vote "no". Seems like Toyota treats them well that the workers don't need organization 'against' the company.
Perhaps other companies can learn a lesson from that.
>Unions also use aggressive measures rather than negotiations.
Unions start with negotiations and move to strikes if those don't work. Literally what happened here.
>There are very few good stories with unions but most of them are tragic especially long-term.
Do you have any proof to cite here, eg stats showing success rates of all unionized businesses? Boeing, much of Kroger, and a ton of other industries/companies have long used union labor without "tragic" results.
>For investors, it's both the short and long term that's f-ked.
I'm not gonna feel bad about the wealthy losing a bit of cash.
>Source: Check the current Boeing union demands.
Yeah, better wages, no forced overtime etc. - super shitty things to ask for. If you can't feel my eyes rolling right now, well...
Lol literally every point in this post completely dismisses the interest of the majority of people in our system, the workers. I'm very sorry if the capital class ends up with a temporary haircut so that workers can have safe, sane, and respectful conditions.
>There are very few good stories with unions but most of them are tragic especially long-term. For investors, it's both the short and long term that's f*ked.
This is the most blatant disregard for or lack of understanding of labor history I have seen in a while
> [...] voted in favor of the strike, some 96 percent — far more than the two-thirds needed to launch the work stoppage.
> The Biden administration was monitoring the situation; acting Labor Secretary Julie Su has been in contact with both sides.
If it's important enough for the whitehouse to get involved, then the union members have incredible leverage. It's telling that 96% voted against the deal. They know they can get a better one.
Boeing spent $43B on stock buybacks between 2013 and 2019 while paying their CEO ~$30M/year.
> To support its share price, the company under McNerney poured billions into stock buybacks instead of investing profits into the kind of research and development needed to stay competitive. McNerney decided not to spend billions of dollars building a new plane to replace the 737. Instead, Boeing tweaked and updated the existing model and called it the 737 Max, outfitting it with larger, more efficient engines for increased economy. Compensating for the resulting instability was a secretive automated system called MCAS that would adjust the plane’s pitch without input from the pilot.
> McNerney also fought to deeply cut costs. On his watch, the company opened its first non-unionized aircraft production line and initiated a program called “Partnering for Success” that pushed suppliers to cut their prices by 15 percent or more. Many feared that squeezing suppliers would harm the quality of their components, but McNerney was determined to recoup the cost of the 787’s development; if the subcontractors complained, they could find their work taken away from them, as happened to landing-gear-maker United Technologies Aerospace Systems.
> McNerney retired in 2015, handpicking his successor, president and COO Dennis Muilenburg. Over the next three years, Boeing’s stock price more than doubled as it sold new planes the world over. (As Bloomberg News reported, Muilenberg and McNerney “had personal reasons to emphasize productivity and cost-cutting” because their compensation was tied to share performance. Together they took $209 million in total pay over seven years.)
It's kinda fun, right? The whole point of tying executive compensation to share price was to have them have some rough stake in the business, but even that didn't prove enough: there's always a longer term, and doing a visible, clear NPV boost is usually accretive to market cap even if it introduces long-term risk, because the long term risks are usually hidden from public eye and very mushy.
Ironically, I think the poster child for how to properly structure compensation away from this is Hank Greenberg's AIG, where not only was his compensation basically all deferred stock options, they were deferred until retirement, so about as long-term a view as you can get. He was very risk-averse, and his biggest flaw wasn't under his operational ownership but under successor and personnel selection (looking at you, Welch).
But at some level, it was just bad people making bad calls. I don't think McNerney thought that this would wreck Boeing, he was just wrong. Even if he was left predictably destitute at the end of such a failure, he probably wouldn't have changed his choices because he thought they were good. You could claim that this is a failure of boards and governance (and, truly, I think boards are by and large really bad and I wish there was a much more pervasive activist investor culture) but at some level I'm not sure how much of this is solvable.
I don't know. There's probably a way to do boards well enough that this isn't a problem.
We all know boeing won't be "wrecked"; they're too critical for state interests to be allowed to fail. If they're smart they'll either nationalize the company to remove the profit inefficiency or force the company to split to remove the profit inefficiency. Either way, the profit motive and lack of any competition is clearly a national security risk.
> We all know boeing won't be "wrecked"; they're too critical for state interests to be allowed to fail
People keep repeating this without context. The auto companies are strategically significant. That didn't prevent them from going bankrupt [1][2]. Wiping shareholders doesn't mean blowing up the factories.
I'm increasingly convinced Boeing needs to go bankrupt. It can then shed unprofitable units--through spin-offs, sales or liquidations--and restructure its obligations. I'm not convinced the union comes out of that better off than it is now. But America sure does.
> The auto companies are strategically significant.
Not really, they're more politically significant than economically critical. I've certainly never owned an american car and never plan to. We'll be fine continuing to rely on foreign companies to produce our vehicles. Foreigners certainly don't want our cars (outside of maybe tesla in the nordics, i guess?). None of this is true for the plane market, or at least not until boeing acquired its current popular reputation of not being very good at making planes (deserved or not)
The fact we bailed out the companies but refused to take ownership should be considered treason. Same for the banks, the car companies, the airline industry we bailed out for more than its entire value, etc etc. completely corrupt and incompetent governance
The auto companies are strategically significant because war footing America will turn those F150 lines into tank lines in a matter of months instead of the years it would take to spin them up from scratch.
No it won't, because only about 30% of F150 parts are made in the US. The rest are made elsewhere - mostly China.
This is not 1940, and the US simply doesn't have the strategic industrial base it used to.
Off-shoring made some people a lot of money and lowered consumer costs (while simultaneously cutting consumer pay.)
But it was economically and strategically unwise. The US is set up to run small-scale wars against technologically inferior opponents. It has no ability to sustain a prolonged multi-year slug-fest against an opponent with a superior manufacturing base.
> This is not 1940, and the US simply doesn't have the strategic industrial base it used to.
this is just wrong.
The US didn't really have that industrial base in 1940 either. We developed it fast over a couple years of war.
To the extent the US had an industrial base, we still do. US manufactures more than we did in 1940 - we just do it with far fewer people in factories via automation.
This is really the key - there's a ocean of difference between "we manufacture literally nothing" and "we don't manufacture/assemble as much as we could".
Considering the US hasn't won a single war against technologically and numerically inferior opponents since the turn of the century, I think we have even more fundamental problems than just a rusty war machine dependent on Chinese blue jeans.
Now granted I might be unfair to the US here; the Middle East is known as the graveyard of empires for a reason.
The US did not lose the war against Saddam. The war was started under false pretenses and they made a mess of the reconstruction after, but that's different from a military defeat. If one side of a war manages to destroy the other's military, execute its leader, and set up shop in his palaces; that's a win on the military front.
2) I’m not sure the military was doing just fine in all of those. Vietnam comes to mind, but also Afghanistan—reading the Afghanistan papers, the brass seems to have given up on any kind of actual goals or accountability in favor of a system that let them continually cycle officers through and let them claim they succeeded at their mission (funny, they all keep achieving their mission, but facts on the ground remain exactly the same or worse!), for years and years. Fighting fitness may have been OK throughout, but military leadership in the military itself was absolutely not committed to any kind of winnable mission, let alone to actually winning it. That may have been driven (I’m sure it was) largely by civilian leadership, but the entire upper echelon of military leadership betrayed their commands and the soldiers counting on them, to keep up a convenient (to their careers, and a bunch of junior and mid-tier officers who got a big boost to their careers…) political fiction at the cost of any hope of something resembling actual success, and all it took was shitting all over their soldiers and the trust of the American people.
I bet Iraq (part 2) was similar. I have some grave concerns about the state of our more-politicized-and-static professional officer corps since roughly Vietnam.
Disagree on point #1. We occupied Afghanistan for 20 years. We operated with nearly absolute impunity in all population centers, through all trade routes, and all agricultural areas. Our casualties were a minuscule amount our total forces. Our culture completely transformed theirs (in a way that old school hardliners lament publicly). We killed a huge number of Taliban (and foreign fighters).
Clausewitz says that "the political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it." Can you tell articulate what the political goal of the war was?
Thinking back to 2001 (I was in middle school), the goal was retribution. I believe the military achieved that in spades. Yes, in the end Afghanistan did not turn into a US vassal state or a US colony. But was that the goal?
>Can you tell articulate what the political goal of the war was?
The goal was to eradicate the Taliban, remove terroristic sentiments, rebuild Afghanistan, bring the country to 21st century democratic standards, and prevent future 9/11s.
Did we achieve it? Hell no.
Verdict: We lost. Over 20 years of bloodshed and misery on both sides for fucking nothing. We failed on every single fucking count. Every. Single. Count.
The discussion was more about if the military fumbled Afghanistan or if it was a political failure.
You haven't shown a military failure.
I also disagree with that list of objectives and their current status. Let's go through 1 by 1:
+Eradicate Taliban. Complete. This is a new gen of fighters and the movement shares very little outside the name. Nearly all the Taliban from 2001 are dead of violent causes.
+Remove terroristic sentiments. Not a goal, but also has Afghanistan committed many terror acts in the last 15 years? Current status is trending green.
+Rebuild Afghanistan. Not an original goal (ie in Oct-2001). Also not a DoD goal, this was a State Dept goal after the military victory was secured. Also I'd argue that Afghanistan today has better infra than it did in Aug-2001, so this is complete.
+Democratic standards. Not an original goal. Also not a DoD goal, this was a State Dept goal after the military victory was secured. Not met.
+Prevent future 9/11s. Current status is trending green.
So we met all but 1 goal. That's not bad as wars go.
>The discussion was more about if the military fumbled Afghanistan or if it was a political failure.
While I started off with the former, overall it is both.
>You haven't shown a military failure.
It has been demonstrated by Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and others that the best way to defeat America is to engage in low tech guerilla warfare. We have lost every single one of them.
Even more embarrasing is that the Houthi are demonstrating that the age old adage of "Don't touch America's ships!" also isn't true anymore. Our Navy hasn't adequately responded to some deranged goat herders lobbing missiles into one of the world's biggest sea lanes.
>Eradicate Taliban. Complete.
Are you drunk? The Taliban is literally back in power ruling over Afghanistan with an iron fist.
>Remove terroristic sentiments. Not a goal,
Lest we forget, we waged "The War On Terror".
>Rebuild Afghanistan. Not an original goal
You can not remove hate until the people thereof can live comfortable lives, which is still not the case.
>Democratic standards. Not an original goal.
See above.
>Prevent future 9/11s. Current status is trending green.
I've lost count on the acts of terror we've seen across the west, America and otherwise.
You've moved the goal posts of this discussion. We've been talking about military success or failure.
Democracy (and "comfortable lives") was not a military objective. The military provided security for the State Dept and NGOs to pursue those goals.
Since 9/11, Afghanistan has not prosecuted any terrorist acts on the West in my recent memory.
The Taliban of 2001 was largely killed off. Yes, there are people in charge of Afghanistan today who call themselves Taliban, have some limited pre-9/11 leadership, but are largely a completely different set of people than existed back then and this occurred because of military action, not old age.
When the participation trophy generation grows up and becomes generals you'll hear things like, we would've won that war if it wasn't for all that attrition!
Roughly 2.2 trillion on the credit card for Afghanistan alone. That's without the interest that will be paid on it. Your grandkids children will be paying for that war.
The only time anyone cares about that debt is when democrats are in control of the government - then republicans care. (sometimes when republicans control congress and the democrats control the president they care, but it is not as much then)
The only president in my lifetime to not start any wars isn't really liked by either the democrats or the establishment republicans. Both parties are big fans of losing wars for some reason.
> An armed conflict between Israel and Hamas-led Palestinian militant groups[ad] has been taking place in the Gaza Strip
and Israel since 7 October 2023.
> The United States has given Israel extensive military aid and vetoed multiple UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions.
> United States provided advice and intelligence to Israeli forces during the raid, through its "hostage cell" stationed in Israel. The attack resulted in the deaths of 274 Palestinians.
How would that work in your mind? Call that one for Harris because Biden is mentally unfit?
By that measure what the hell was bombing Suleimani? Or moving our recognised capital of Israel to Jerusalem? Or arms to Saudi Arabia during their war with Yemen?
Neither Trump nor Biden started a war. They had wars happening around them that we were to various degrees involved.
By my quick count, Obama (awarded the Nobel Peace Prize) started seven wars, Trump started zero wars, and Biden so far started one war. All three Presidents were involved in a war started by a predecessor.
So, yeah. Trump started no wars, and he is the most rejected POTUS by the Powers That Be(tm) for that and other reasons.
Reading a bit more into the war started by Biden against the Houthis, I... didn't quite realize the Navy had straight up admitted we are weak and useless.
>“We’re sort of on the verge of the Houthis being able to mount the kinds of attacks that the U.S. can’t stop every time, and then we will start to see substantial damage. … If you let it fester, the Houthis are going to get to be a much more capable, competent, experienced force.”
The comment I'm replying to said that and it was said frequently about Vietnam. What they didn't do is use the clear language I used and instead blamed the public for not wanting to spend every last penny on a pyrrhic victory as if that isn't attrition.
I agree that the dollar cost is real attrition too. Vietnam and Afghanistan were so wildly costly because we made the (political) choice to limit how we could engage the enemy, while our enemies were not limiting themselves
Vietnam: limiting Cambodia ops, the DMZ, limiting bombing of N Vietnam
Afghanistan: limiting Pakistan ops, focusing on creating a stable democracy rather than killing Taliban then leaving
We made political choices on how to wage war, and then blamed the military for those poor choices.
A war effort involves the entire country: The entire economy beyond just the military industrial complex, all branches of politics, and the military including both officers and rank-and-file soldiers.
Yeah, we could use biological weapons or drop hydrogen bombs as a few examples. We could send marines house to house executing anyone who even looks like a bad guy. Trouble is giving a few million civilians radiation poisoning or the bubonic plaque to "stop communism" or to "spread democracy" is evil and insane.
Years of startup problems but when it finally started humming they were building a B-24 every 63 minutes! In the meantime existing factories were winning the war.
As Americans we tend to glorify the industrial feats of WWII but the US government used a very heavy hand to pull that off. Public-private partnership is the preferred euphemism today but essentially we were a socialist economy.
I agree. We should also stop subsidizing agriculture, there is enough food grown around the world for everyone. All this waste is very inefficient!
In fact, we dump our cheap overproduced food on third world countries and collapse their ag. sector. If we stopped producing and switched to importing we would boost their economies.
Since food can be grown in almost any country on earth, we would have a diverse supply chain. I'm sure nothing would go wrong with this plan./s
> Foreigners certainly don't want our cars (outside of maybe tesla in the nordics,
The Nordics are not all the same, Norway is far ahead (20% of private cars already full EVs) of the rest with Denmark a distant second when it comes to electrification of transport.
But also the Tesla Model Y was the best selling car in the WORLD in the last twelve months, not just Norway. Of course quite a few of those were built outside the US so perhaps they don't count as US cars.
Cool, i don't care about either of these things. Jobs are a poor index of economic health for americans and we should really be guaranteed one as a fundamental human right if we also refuse to implement modern welfare.
>I'm increasingly convinced Boeing needs to go bankrupt.
I agree and hope they do go bankrupt, but I hope so because the country needs a fucking wake up call: American Exceptionalism(tm) is simply no longer true.
I sincerely think we need to see one (Boeing), maybe even a few (Intel? US Steel?) paragons of American Excellence(tm) go down in smoking ruins so we have to accept that we are not 1970s America taking mankind to the Moon and beyond anymore.
Once we realize that, we can actually get started on Making America Great Again in a real, meaningful way instead of a dumb political catchphrase.
The Canadian government drove its primary aerospace company, Avro Canada, not just into bankruptcy/reorganization, but to completely shutdown operations. The country lost 14,000 aerospace professionals, but more importantly, it lost its leadership position in cutting edge aerospace. Its best engineers left for the USA or the UK. Canada, more than a half century later, has never recovered anything like the leadership role it had built during the post-war period. Be careful what you ask for.
Maybe so, but I would say cars are different than aerospace.
It’s clear that Boeing was able to squeeze costs centers at the expense of quality and business investment all while keeping the coin under shell in the form of regular old stock buybacks.
But if/when Boeing goes under who is going to vet all this NDI sitting in their portfolios? They’re just gonna spin it off to another buyer—consisting of who exactly? McDonnel Douglas? Elon Musk? Tencent?
Seems like a nightmare for someone, not sure for whom.
> But if/when Boeing goes under who is going to vet all this NDI sitting in their portfolios? They’re just gonna spin it off to another buyer—consisting of who exactly? McDonnel Douglas? Elon Musk?
Idk, pick one that's American or closely allied [1]. Ideally not one of the three larger than Boeing.
Worst case: audit and re-assign the contracts. We'll be better for it in the long run. And I'm not convinced it wouldn't result in quicker, higher-quality deliverables in the short.
Who even needs a specific buyer? Boeing itself is a publicly traded company, the spin-offs can be too. Put the business unit into its own corporate entity and give all the shares of the new entity to the existing Boeing shareholders to do with as they please, or sell them into the market.
The top secret stealth formula they could possibly be privy to is not publicly traded. I was making the point that you're going to have a board filled with people who in some instances could be hand-selected to say the quiet part loud, and the list of companies who makes some of this stuff has one item in it.
There are more than a million people with a US security clearance. Finding enough to fill the board of a new company shouldn't be prohibitively difficult.
You probably know more about this than I do since you claim "people keep repeating this without context." Looking at your links, it seems to me a confusion of terms. Yes, the legal entities behind GM and Chrysler went away...in order for the new entities to receive billions.
So, technically, you are correct. The business entities of June 2009 failed. However, the consumer DGAF who owns www.gm.com or www.chrysler.com. They can still go to their local dealer and purchase a vehicle "made by" these companies. The "companies" live on.
Some car manufacturers are definitely not critical to national security, they just employ tons of folks in few places. Company making weapons like choppers, planes etc for whole US military is on completely different level of importance.
Would love to see a shift towards something like deferred options for executives. Or, ya know, a fixed multiplier on median employee pay, like managers make 3x median, VPs 5x, CEOs 7x. I’m okay with people who have crazy responsibilities making good money, but it doesn’t have to be obscene.
> But at some level, it was just bad people making bad calls. I don't think McNerney thought that this would wreck Boeing, he was just wrong.
Well, he was stupid not to - there's no way he didn't know thay focusing on the short term stock price won't have negative effects on the quality and future of an engineering organisation whose main business, building and selling airplanes, is extremely capital intensive. He came from McDonnell Douglas who nearly bankrupted themselves doing the same sort of crap (pushing suppliers to the edge, cost cutting at every opportunity).
That being said, McDonnell Douglas' history was visible to everyone - what they were doing hadn't been working for decades (first as Douglas, then as McDonnell Douglas).
Then blame the board imo. They define the objectives for the CEO, the incentives for achieving them, and the governance framework for governing their execution. If shareholders want this “short term thinking” that always gets brought up, then they have every right to it.
Of course this “short term thinking” trope is just a meme that the armchair commentators like to pedal out. If the system was dysfunctional enough to prioritise short term profit seeking to this extent, then all a competitor would have to do to monopolise any market is do enough “long term thinking” to outlast all their failing competitors. Investors would notice this and reallocate their capital accordingly.
But none of this is what happens in reality. If anything I would say the market is over-interested in long term strategies. The popularity of the growth over profit model that we observe amongst most prolific capital allocators takes “long term thinking” to absurd lengths.
> If the system was dysfunctional enough to prioritise short term profit seeking to this extent, then all a competitor would have to do to monopolise any market is do enough “long term thinking” to outlast all their failing competitors.
isn't this exactly what's going on with Boeing?
> Airbus last year topped Boeing for the fifth straight year in the orders race, with 2,094 net orders and 735 delivered planes. Boeing had 1,314 net orders and delivered 528 aircraft.[0]
I 100% agree the majority of investors don't seem to take the long view, and that's been the case for a while.
The Board of Directors at most major corporations is made up largely of current or former executives, many of whom come from the same industry. It's in their personal interest to normalize lucrative and exploitable compensation plans.
You would also be shocked to know what people control the lion's share of investment dollars.
Its not like you have 30 competitors who can produce AH-64 Apache chopper equivalent out of blue with all support stuff required around it, its not perfect market and boeing c suite knows it very well.
Sure in 30 years they may be eventually pushed out but they can coast 2 generations of successful careers till then.
Half of them would look like job hoppers with such short tenures on their resume. Some of them have simultaneous executive positions at other companies.
If you want some evidence of short-term thinking not being a meme, it's probably that.
> If the system was dysfunctional enough to prioritise short term profit seeking to this extent, then all a competitor would have to do to monopolise any market is do enough “long term thinking” to outlast all their failing competitors.
This makes it sound like my broker, the finance community in general, or maybe the state is better able to handle long term thinking than our industry leaders, but why would anyone believe that? Aren’t they all looking quarter to quarter and retiring next year no matter how bad they wreck the company/economy/country?
Stock is sold and bought all the time with no tax. It's in the investor's intrest to sink a company for short-term profits. When the s*it hits the fan, they can sell the falling stock, short-sell even, to some clueless pension funds and invest the money in a competitor instead. When only one company remains, profit +++. This is how stock markets work. Why are you surprised?
Long term thinking is often incompatible with short term thinking. It doesn't matter if your company is long term sustainable if it's short term unsustainable. See dumping.
Tying compensation to short-term performance creates perverse incentives which make it much harder to accept the idea that your plans might be ruining the company.
Bad people brought to fruit by a MBAd culture whos claim to success is mostly inherited inertia..
Longterm Losers with an Attitude and shortterm numbers to silence doubters.
> The whole point of tying executive compensation to share price was to have them have some rough stake in the business
This reasoning was always flawed. The Stock Market is not real life. It consists of the opinions of a bunch of guys who sit in towers in New York, London, Shanghai, etc... In theory there are fundamentals that should drive the price, but in practice the market is not rational. It's not a good metric for the long term health of a company. Even worse, Goodhart's law applies in spades:
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Time and time again we see CEOs playing games with the stock price in order to get a big payday. We see management sacrificing long term stability in order to maximize their year end bonus.
Imagine if every time you remember a now dead company do a stock buyback they instead invested that money into R&D, or simply lowered their prices to be more competitive in the market? Maybe they paid their employees better and didn't have constant turnover problems and had higher quality output. How many of those now failed companies would still be around today?
Yeah, that's my point. A stock buyback is a visible boost to NPV, whereas the drawback (opportunity cost of not investing in core businesses) is much harder to measure. Sometimes, they don't need any additional investment. Other times, it's Boeing.
> Muilenberg and McNerney “had personal reasons to emphasize productivity and cost-cutting” because their compensation was tied to share performance. Together they took $209 million in total pay over seven years.
Absolutely stunning - those guys will walk away from this mess with more money than God and American aviation will take a backwards step that may take decades to fix if at all... fuming here.
Incentives matter. The extremist solution would be to ban executive compensation tied to stock price and some mechanism where every penny more that goes into buybacks/dividends than R&D/CapEx is taxed at 105%.
Oh, and make executive and BoDs personally and criminally liable for safety fiascos like the 737MAX. I bet you'll see culture change in a hurry under those circumstances
"Some mechanism" is called simply taxation. In 1944, the top income tax bracket in the USA was 94 %. Nowadays you'd also need a wealth tax to deal with the perverse incentives caused by past accumulation of stock.
Stock buy-backs are a tax efficient way to send distribute to shareholders. If you make them illegal then the only way left to distribute money to shareholders is via dividends. Want to make that illegal as well???
I have said this and I'll say this again: executives should never have a disproportionate pay comparing to their most senior trench workers (think a very senior, lead engineer). 3-5x should be the maximum.
The saying of "oh if you don't give big bucks then you won't hire good talents" is only true to certain extends. Einstein doesn't figure out GR because he wants the cash from Nobel's prize, actually none of the winners probably achieve because of the money. Scientists won't stop inventing because they don't get the big bucks (most don't get big bucks anyway). Carmack would still pump out great code if he stays indie. As long as properly paid, pretty much every real talent would be happy and do whatever they love to do.
Giving disproportional pay to executives ONLY attract bad players and TBH some 500 are probably better NOT have an executive. It also creates sort of toxic culture everywhere that people are forced to chase big bucks because average pay is screwed.
Also, the only reasonable response to the saying of "oh if you don't give big bucks then you won't hire good talents" is "you mean the same talent that got you into this mess in the first place?"
My reply to this is that the potentially outsized rewards gives Carmack de facto leadership of his next project, because he’s the one paying the bills, and it lets him work on whatever he wants, in perpetuity, without ever having to consider money again. In a system where that’s not the case, then maybe his superior skills are enough to secure a leadership spot, or maybe not, because maybe he hasn’t invested enough in developing his political skills. This is generally a failing of engineers versus business people. Many of the engineer-led companies you see these days are because they were founders.
Pretty much this. If a potential leadership hire is willing to walk away solely because of the pay then they are clearly not the right hire. Of course they should be well-paid. But the job is about the job, not about the money.
If they aren't sufficiently excited by the mere idea of being in charge of the company's products, services, and future direction, doing a good job for customers, shareholders, and employees, then they should look for a different job.
Also, the 25% (over 4 years) they're bandying about as the offer includes (per [1]) a loss of a bonus with a 4% target, and that's an annual bonus. I don't understand how this person calculated, but one of the employees claims it's more like a 10% raise including the foregone bonus. Good deals don't need to be sold with lies.
Its not about one or two guys its financial engineering culture that Wall St rewards. You can make bank without being an engineer anymore. 2008 meltdown has not changed the culture.
> Boeing spent $43B on stock buybacks between 2013 and 2019 while paying their CEO ~$30M/year.
Boeing share price was up almost 400% in that period. If the business goal was to maximise share price and therefore return for investors over that period it was a cracking success.
Since the US government will always pick up the pieces in the event of a failure its a minimal risk stratagy.
Can someone explain to me the theory of stock buybacks? How is this not just financial engineering? How are you meant to differentiate companies who’s stock goes up because they’ve been productive and made great products from those that increase their stock prices using buybacks? Are there rules against taking out loans and using them to perform stock buybacks?
Aren’t they taxed differently, though? To my knowledge, dividends are taxed as ordinary income, whereas sales following a stock buyback may be taxed as capital gains (if they were held long enough before that point).
As a shareholder, dividends are income. Cash going in to your account that is taxed immediately.
A stock buyback of 1000 shares means that your one share now represents 1/999,000th of the company, not 1/1,000,000th. Thus the share is worth more. It isn't income until you sell the share and pay taxes on the gains. This flexibility is useful and can result in tax savings depending on the situation.
The real problem with dividends is they're taxed at the corporate level (corporate income tax) and then taxed when distributed to the shareholders (the shareholders pay income tax on the dividend).
Eliminating the double taxation of dividends would likely solve most of the buyback problems.
Rich people borrow against appreciated assets. They don't sell and incur capital gains tax. That's why company leadership loves buybacks.
Ordinary people have to sell assets to take advantage of appreciation. So unless they can time sales to optimize taxes - really only an option for retirees - they might as well get regular dividends.
> Ordinary people have to sell assets to take advantage of appreciation
> No one's talking about houses here. I thought that was obvious.
For most ordinary Americans, the largest asset they will ever own is their house. Owning that asset is the essence of the old American Dream. So it seems like your original comment was primarily about housing assets.
Anyone can get a home equity loan to access the appreciation the house might have. They don't pay taxes on the loan, and many people use the money on improvements that further increase at value of the asset. That combined with further asset appreciation and the loan pays for itself when the house is later sold.
Ordinary people can and do do this. The rich just do it at a much larger scale.
My original comment was about stock buybacks and how they boost stock prices. I repeat, no one was talking about houses. I thought it was obvious "assets" meant "stock" for the purposes of this comment thread. But since this is HN there's always at least one pedant.
Finally primary homes don't have any capital gains tax on sale (or at least not up to a pretty high limit). So this whole discussion is irrelevant. Ordinary people can always sell their "biggest asset" without paying much in tax.
If you're talking about the US, then no, dividends are given special tax treatment at a reduced rate if they are "qualified dividends". If they aren't, then yes, they are taxed as regular income.
You pay taxes in Dividends, which is one reason shareholders generally don't like them. A lot of shareholders are also in the savings phase of their life - they are working some other job and don't need the income from Dividends yet and so getting a dividend is a bad thing as it is more money they have to invest (particularly if you have to pay for each trade which is common). Shareholders who are retired like dividends because it is a simple paycheck without needing to sell their shares and they would be paying those taxes anyway.
> Stock buybacks used to be illegal in the States up until 1982. You can thank Raegan for that too
This is not true, but seems to come up a lot. I guess it makes for one of those fun "internet facts" that people like to repeat without any investigation. Bonus points for blaming Reagan.
Stock buybacks were not illegal before 1982. If you sit down even think through it, it doesn't even make sense they were illegal. Just like issuing new shares (or doing a stock split), companies have legitimate business needs to buy back stock (reduce the quantity of outstanding shares).
What happened in 1982 was that the government made Rule 10b-18, which outlined the "safe harbor" requirements for stock buybacks, where if followed, the company could not be found liable for stock manipulation.
Really? You think it's bad that the government is explicit in its rules?
I think that's a good thing. I'd rather have it be clear to all parties what is acceptable and what isn't, rather that a murky legal framework where you never know if you're breaking the law.
Being explicit is good unless it yields outcomes that are strictly worse, which seems to be where we are. I expect plenty of lobbying to clarify rules and be more explicit naturally comes with carefully crafted loopholes that permit unethical behaviour. In that case, being less explicit meant the regulators had discretion to go after truly abusive actors. This has upsides and downsides. I would always prefer more explicit rules if the rule-making process were not compromised.
This subject brings up so much rancor that I think you might have missed the possibility that there was no sarcasm intended in the post you responded to.
I mean, from what I can read online, it seemed the practice was generally regarded as market manipulation prior to 1982 and so was de facto illegal. So yeah, thanks Reagan indeed. There are good reasons to blame him for his part in the current state of affairs.
I'm not even American... When I say "blame Reagan", I obviously don't mean him personally, rather his government or his neoliberal ideology even.
And you keep acting like the 1982 law had no effect when it made the largely marginalized practice of stock buybacks mainstream. Maybe you should check your biases.
> Boeing spent $43B on stock buybacks between 2013 and 2019
Stock buybacks should be illegal or at least very difficult to do. They provide short-term gain to shareholders (and the executives who authorize them to prop up the stock price on which their bonuses depend) but can be extremely damaging to the company long-term (by which time the CEO is out anyway, and shareholders may have reaped their profits and moved on), with workers, and the local economy, left paying the price. The worst kind of capitalist poison.
> In 2019, following the discovery of exterior damage on planes manufactured in Charleston [the non-unionized factory], for a time Qatar Airways would only accept delivery of Dreamliners assembled in Everett [the unionized factory]. (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_South_Carolina#Quality-...)
But then they moved all 787 production to North Charleston, so problem solved.
> But then they moved all 787 production to North Charleston, so problem solved.
That better be some top shelf sarcasm.
It’s shameful what’s happened to Boeing. I worked there during the fall. After the bribery scandal, but before MD broke it. It was still okay-ish until they butchered their R&D dept. That’s not a healthy company.
I am very sympathetic to this line of criticism but I also find that "stock buybacks" are misunderstood and, as a result, overly demonized. So I just want to explain a few things for anyone who reads this.
The question with a corporation is what to do with surplus profits. The first iteration of this was to pay dividends. These legally are paid equally among shareholders. If you distribute $1B in profits and have 100M shares issued then each share gets a $10 dividend. Simple. Additionally, dividends had to be profits so corporate taxes were paid on those.
So there are two problems here:
1. Not every shareholder may want a dividend; and
2. The US tax treatment of dividends is bad, specifically double-taxing. as an example, the company may pay 15% corporate tax, pay a dividend with the remaining 85% and then the individual may 50% federal and state taxes on that, leading marginal tax rates of upwards of 60%, possibly higher.
(2) has led to some screwy legislation (eg passthrough corporation discounts) so solve what is otherwise a simple problem. Australia has completely solved this problem with so-called "franking credits". This means that $1B of profit is made, 30% taxes are paid and $700M is distributed but it comes with $300M in tax credits. So if you get a $700 dividend, you also get $300 credit with the ATO. If your marginal tax rate is higher than 30% is higher, you may have to pay a little more. If it's lower, you'll get a refund.
Now you generally can't borrow to pay dividends until you historically pay dividends. There are a lot of rules around this.
Enter share buybacks. This is where the company buys back its own stock on the open market. This reduces supply and hopefully raises the price for remaining shareholders.
Some will argue this is market manipulation but it really isn't. It's just a different way of distributin gmoney to shareholders. Unlike dividends, you can choose to take it or not by selling or not.
A share buyback has none of the dividend tax problems but it's even better. If you've held for 12+ months you're paying the long-term capital gains tax rate, which can be substantially lower than the marginal income tax rate.
But here's the big problem: it's completely fine to borrow money for a share buyback. This loophole needs to be closed.
Prior to the IRA and Trump tax cuts, it would work like this: you would leave profits overseas so you wouldn't have to pay corporate tax on them. You'd then borrow money used those overseas profits as collateral and do a share buyback. This should've been illegal. Or, in the very least, any borrowing against foreign profits should be treated by the IRS as repatriation of profits and thus tax is owed.
The Trump tax cuts changed how foreign profits are treated. The IRA further changed this with the 15% minimum tax, which was a very good change and one that didn't get a lot of attention.
Should a company pay out shareholders or pay its workers more? I absolutely favor the latter. But we shouldn't focus solely on share buybacks because that's a small part of the problem. I'd say what we need is:
1. A higher corporate tax rate;
2. An end to passthrough corporations;
3. End the double-taxing of dividends. Just do what Australia does;
4. All share buybacks have to come from profits only; and
5. An aggressive attack on profit-shifting / transfer pricing to offshore profits.
How about they tried using that money to be more competitive in the market? Lowering prices. Paying workers more. Spending more on R&D. That sort of thing. Why are shareholder considerations the only considerations?
>Enter share buybacks. This is where the company buys back its own stock on the open market. This reduces supply and hopefully raises the price for remaining shareholders.
Which if stocks come with voting rights means shedding influence of shareholders. You can't say that a buyback is equivalently classed to a dividend (by being a transfer of money to exiting shareholders), if you don't account for the second and higher order effects.
Doesn't it also increase the influence of existing shareholders? People have to decide to sell. It's really no different (to them) that they sell on the open market or to the company.
I'm not defending share buybacks, for the record. They're only one piece of the puzzle however. The real issue is what companies should do with profits and that includes share buybacks and dividends. You can't really be against share buybacks without being against dividends. And tit's fine to be against both. Being against one but not the other is kinda silly though.
I wonder if a non-profit aerospace competitor would be viable, if this would force all profits to be invested back into the company. Or maybe a hybrid with some kind of profit cap.
Why is the CEO pay relevant? It is not even within an order of magnitude of the amounts needed to pay for even the contract Boeing proposed to the union, let alone the union’s demands. People complain about CEO pay as if paying them less would get them what they want. Frankly companies need CEOs, and people who are qualified for the job are very few in number. Whereas the line workers represented by the machinist unions are in trades where there are massive quantities of workers available - which is why many took Boeing jobs even if they were not happy with the pay and benefits.
I am also not sure why the stock buybacks are worth mentioning. There are many reasons why a buyback may be the right thing for a company to do. I am aware that sometimes it can be a manipulation of executive compensation by artificially raising the stock price (and may have been so here). And obviously I don’t support that. But I feel like the practice of buying back is attacked by many without adequate understanding of what it is for and how it can be financially good for the company, helping support future investments.
CEO pay is relevant because Boeing haven't had a competent CEO in decades. Yet all of them were compensated handsomely for making pretty obviously bad choices (e.g. the 787 development was done McDonnell Douglas style, pushing most of the costs and risk to suppliers, and was highly problematic) or downright killing people through negligence.
> I am also not sure why the stock buybacks are worth mentioning
Because Boeing is a very capital intensive business that is currently in mountains of expensive debt, with multiple projects delayed with years, and a recovery time of 5 years minimum. The idiots in charge wasted billions on the wrong things, and now the company is a very bad situation.
CEO pay generally has a relationship to company size, and Boeing is pretty big. It would be hard to argue their CEO is overpaid if they paid the CEO that much and the CEO did a good job. Implying the problem is not how much they were paid but rather the quality of the work.
No, because the CEO who is paid $300/year and then likewise bankrupts the multi-billion dollar company is to a first order approximation the same amount of bad and what you actually need is the CEO who does a good job even if you have to pay them millions of dollars.
There is the real problem - we cannot evaluate how a CEO did today for another 10 years. Their job is to figure out where the company needs to be in 10 years and then get them there.
If the supply of labor is so high then Boeing can hire scabs. I don’t follow how on the one hand the workers add so little value and are so replaceable that they deserve no raise and then on the other hand their strike could kill the company.
I also don’t follow how paying union dues is a problem if they’re going to get you a 25 - 40% raise whereas you’re unlikely to get anything on your own. I get not everyone likes unions, but you’re making a pretty compelling case for them IMHO.
I think it's extremely unlikely Boeing would be allowed to replace the union with scabs. The NLRB is not current business-friendly, I'm 99% sure they would find a way to forbid it.
Unions aren't a monopoly they're a democracy. After a democratic vote, the minority has to accept what the majority wants. Yes, sometimes voters make poor choices. New workers know about the union before they join. You don't move to a new state and refuse to pay taxes because you didn't vote for them. Once you're there you get to vote in the next election. America is a democracy and you don't have to revert to feudalism when you step onto the factory floor.
> Unions aren't a monopoly they're a democracy. After a democratic vote, the minority has to accept what the majority wants.
OP is repeating a lot of anti-union propaganda, but this one point is true, which is evident if you look at how unions in other countries work.
In many European companies, it's commonplace for workers in the same company to have a choice of which union to represent them, so two different workers may be represented by two different unions. That's essentially unheard-of in the US, where unions almost exclusively claim majority representation.
Teachers in my local US school district have two unions, but that's the only exception to the rule that I'm aware of. It would be good to see a little more competition, but not enough to weaken labor's bargaining power.
No, the US gov used anti-trust laws to break them up because anti-union efforts are valuable to corps. That's why you'll also see so much anti-union propaganda today.
It's no secret unions are the weakest they've ever been in the US. Are we really better off for that? If you ask the people benefiting from union busting, yes. If you open your eyes, no.
Our betters know better. Don’t believe your lying eyes, listen to Elon. Lol. Clearly making airplanes with doors that fall off is fine, as long as we maximize shareholder value.
Maybe had the company not prioritized greed and instead invested in itself they wouldn’t be in this mess. Don’t blame the workers for this and a company that depends so heavily on the government to keep it afloat shouldn’t be allowed to buyback stocks.
Unions in a good place because Boeing isn’t going anywhere. Mismanagement allowed the greedy management to cash out already why not the workers.
I see this repeated often - blame placed entirely on management and not the workers. Why do you believe that? Do you honestly believe that they have not contributed at least partially to the decline of Boeing? That union protectionism has not affected productivity? That hostile bargaining and strikes hadn’t hurt their finances? Accusing the company of prioritizing greed and blaming the boogeyman of management sounds like a caricature, and not an unbiased perspective.
Often, people try justify high pay for management positions by pointing out the responsibilities that comes with such a position. If that's the case, then it only makes sense to place blame on management when things go sideways. If not, then what exactly is the value that management adds to the company that justifies their high pay?
It's the same thing when people talk about the "risk" of owning a business. At the same time, those same people will advocate dodging accountability for business owners.
If there's no threat of liquidation, fines, bankruptcy... what's the risk? If the fed can't come into your home and take your furniture... what's the risk? Because those workers end up homeless in the case of failure. And the owners just go back to their mansions like nothing happened?
I disagree, it's 100% true. Often conversations about business owners and executives will be derailed to address the "risk" they face, that being the reasoning we should cut them some slack.
In those cases, it quite literally happens in the same breath. Arguing business owners take on risk, and then immediately countering saying we should not hold them accountable.
It's a similar thing you see to the police. When a LEO shoots someone without due cause, people will decry to cut them some slack because their jobs are very risky. I mean, they could die. But there's not very much risk if you shoot someone the first chance you get - before any danger even prevents itself, right? And there's not very much risk if you cannot face jail time for such an action, right?
In order to use this "risk" argument you need to be harsher on the perpetrators. People usually do the opposite when they make such an argument, thereby deconstructing their own argument without realizing it.
>In those cases, it quite literally happens in the same breath.
Perhaps you could show some examples, then. What you describe is completely foreign to my own experience.
>When a LEO shoots someone without due cause
No, that is not when the argument is brought out. Often, however, it's brought out to highlight that there was, in fact, due cause that was not obvious to critics.
>But there's not very much risk if you shoot someone the first chance you get
They don't actually do this, in any remotely ordinary circumstance.
They do shoot people who threaten them - because someone with a knife standing several meters away, who doesn't care about the risk of getting shot, can seriously injure you before you can get off a clear shot with a gun (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tueller_Drill).
>And there's not very much risk if you cannot face jail time for such an action, right?
If you ignore the risk of physical injury or death (also noting that some criminals also carry firearms), then yes, there is not very much risk.
>People usually do the opposite when they make such an argument
You are still not providing anything that resembles evidence.
You're missing the point, the LEO argument is just an example of this phenomenon. I'm not here to actually arguing for or against hypothetical law enforcement crimes. I can't, by the way - I was very careful not to mention any specific circumstances purely so we wouldn't go down this rabbit hole. I know how tempted people get.
> If you ignore the risk of physical injury or death
I didn't. It's really going over your head here.
> evidence
... of what? The phenomenon that people will often talk about risk while also using that definition of risk as justification for why slack should be given? I just did, in two different ways.
But it's a real phenomenon and you can find literally infinite examples. I don't know why you're fighting me on this, to me this is painfully obvious.
People say the same thing about the military. Risky, risking their lives, heros, yadda yadda yadda therefore look past some small crimes. These arguments eat themselves from the inside out.
> I didn't. It's really going over your head here.
You think you didn't, but you did. Again: police don't just shoot people preemptively. They do so when there is a risk of injury or death.
You might not believe their threat assessment is reasonable; but you are not the one trained to understand these situations, and you have presumably not had to negotiate them yourself.
Nobody is saying that the police should be excused for shooting people because they're in a job where they could get shot at. They're saying the police should be excused for shooting people because they had a real reason to believe that the person who was shot would otherwise shoot them first. (Or charge at them with a knife from within 6 metres or so, etc.)
This is not done for the purpose of killing - that is just a frequent consequence of the standard practice to minimize the chance of being the victim. Anything else would be irresponsible.
> I just did, in two different ways.
No, you didn't. You described some forms of argument. You gave no reason to believe that anyone actually presents such arguments.
> I don't know why you're fighting me on this, to me this is painfully obvious.
Because to me, the opposite is painfully obvious. I can recall "literally infinite" examples of people telling me that the discourse worked the way you describe, me looking into it, and me promptly finding that the other person was simply mistaken.
> I was very careful not to mention any specific circumstances purely so we wouldn't go down this rabbit hole.
Which is another way to say that you did not provide evidence.
> Again: police don't just shoot people preemptively. They do so when there is a risk of injury or death.
They most certainly do, otherwise there wouldn't be trials and some cops in jail. Well, there are, so some do. And when those "some" do, then people will defend them via risk. Which DOESN'T WORK if you eliminate risk by preemptive murder.
> Nobody is saying that the police should be excused for shooting people because they're in a job where they could get shot at.
Many, many, many people do say this. They say almost exactly this. There's many examples, I won't list any however because I don't think it matters and I don't want to give you any fuel for a tirade.
> You gave no reason to believe that anyone actually presents such arguments.
How the actual fuck do you expect me to do this? I've talked to people in my life, I've been on Twitter. Hell, I live in Texas and BOTH my parents are Trumpies - I've heard MUCH more insane arguments. For fuck's sake, I've heard arguments on how vaccines cause autism. Not just small little arguments too - many real people I actually know.
You're really, truly, with your entire heart, telling me you've never heard an argument like this? Really? Okay. If that's the case then okay. You win. Jesus Christ talk about difficult.
Management defines the culture the workers operate in and define the policies that they adhere to. Good quality work requires the time and facilities to complete that work and remedy any issues. From what I've read of Boeing they moved to a culture of deadlines over quality. The workers stayed the same but were driven to complete work faster and when a quality issue was raised the policies set by management meant that they were largely ignored. That's management squeeze, not willful worker dereliction.
> I see this repeated often - blame placed entirely on management and not the workers. Why do you believe that?
Because it is management who hire and fire workers, who pays them salary, who says them what to do, who does the quality checks on the work done and so on. If management couldn't get their workers to do a quality work, it is the management's fault. In this case the management should be fired and the company better find more competent managers.
When you place blame, you need to do a causal analysis and ask the question: who could change the outcome and didn't? The workers? Don't make my slippers laugh, the workers could do nothing. While management had all the power, including the power to fire bad workers and to hire better ones. Including the power to force workers into compulsory training courses, including the power to create a system of incentives that would encourage good work, and so on.
> While management had all the power, including the power to fire bad workers and to hire better ones. Including the power to force workers into compulsory training courses, including the power to create a system of incentives that would encourage good work, and so on.
That would be true if there wasn't a union. They place limits on who Boeing can hire and fire and have to agree to any changes in incentives.
Unions just for existing do not get special protections. Contracts and rights are agreed to by both parties. The processes involved in the firing of employees is black and white. Whatever the company agreed to is the rules.
> I see this repeated often - blame placed entirely on management and not the workers. Why do you believe that?
Because between the top management and the workers, one of them are capable of (and do) take major decisions everyday, and the other one can be replaced if someone at the top is having a bad day.
The power and balance in the vast majority of firms isn’t just skewed, it’s extremely skewed. I’m not sure if this is a US-specific thing or what but the difference between say bottle-pissing Amazon drivers and Bezos is ridiculous.
(And no, I’m not a “commie” or anyt specific politically, I just have seen employee owned companies and work-life balance in many places.)
The top comment in this thread highlights the astonishing sums of money the shareholders were taking from the company. If you think the workers are to blame for the state of their finances you are either ignoring the facts or you are in here dishonestly trying to push a narrative.
Management's constant attempts to undermine the union by firing people, outsourcing, moving entire factories and so forth have been more harmful than anything the union has done.
Competence or incompetence is not really relevant. Company as big as Boing gets employees on a bell curve, just like everyone else.
They get average people in a profession and from there, it's on management.
It's management job to put into place system to make employees competent (i.e. trained to efficiently to do the tasks required with a certain quality) and weed out the ones who can't deliver.
There will always be individual failures, but anything over low single digit percentage is a systematic problem = management fault.
> Do you honestly believe that they have not contributed at least partially to the decline of Boeing?
No, because they just do what they're told. If the stuff they do is bad then necessarily the stuff they're told is, too. Therefore, it's management/business' fault. Boeing IS NOT an engineer run company.
> That union protectionism
Literally does not exist in the US, anywhere. We have huge problems with union busting and anti-union propaganda. The union existing and having a drop of bargaining power isn't "protectionism" - your lenses are skews.
> That hostile bargaining and strikes hadn’t hurt their finances?
Uh... this isn't a problem of finances, it's a problem of poor management. Planes falling out of the sky, coverups, lies, stock buy backs. A strike doesn't cause your executives to lie to the media and the FAA, does it?
> boogeyman of management
No management exists. The company does make decisions about its products, strategies, investments, time, etc. Those decisions ultimately decide the trajectory of the company. I don't think that's a boogey man.
> unbiased perspective
Yes, those repeating anti-union propaganda, which has been built up for at least 70 years in the US, are surely the unbiased ones. I don't know what to tell you hear other than - do you hear yourself? If you told me this was a comment from a c-suite exec I'd believe you.
> That doesn’t seem very reasonable for jobs where the supply of labor is high compared to demand
Why would you think that's the case? Boeing's jobs pay barely above minimum wage for shitty work hours and long training in far away factories. They have a lack of thousands of mechanics, machinists, engineers, etc.
Also, the workers were screwed out last time there were negotiations because Boeing threatened to move production to non-union states. They're trying to partially compensate for that tol.
The labor involved is highly skilled, and has seen extensive underpayment. When Boeing tried to ship manufacturing away from union shops, the quality and reliability of the planes plummeted, driving up costs for the company.
As a frequent flier, I'd much rather be in a union plane than a "cheapest labor we could find" plane.
Union labor is only going to be better if the work is compensated enough that people stay around. Unions are not magic.
Boeing has not been doing that.
They underestimate the value of retaining people who have actually seen a few full plane lines start.
They are in a situation now where there are not enough senior personal to properly guide new hires as they rotate through every 1-2 years.
You want good people, you have to pay for them.
If you've got a bunch of morons on payroll (because management spent years asleep at the wheel), paying the morons more and retaining their services for many more years so they become experienced morons won't do you a whole lot of good. Management is clearly the root cause of the problem but the solution must include trimming the incompetent workers from the company.
I am not saying that unions are bad or this union striking is bad. What I'm saying is that if you think this union action will turn Boeing around and get them flying right again, you're mistaken. Boeing needs an invasive surgery to cut out the necrotic tissue (both management and workers) if they are to have any hopes of survival as anything more than a zombie kept animated by government necromancy.
>Yeah I’m sure that was the union’s fault, and not pressure from management to work quickly, cut corners, and akip on quality.
The union's job is to fight back against those poor choices from management that negatively impact the workforce and the product delivery. Otherwise what's the point of the union? What value are they adding to the workers if they end up with the same issues as non union labor?
If the Union went on strike a year or two ago with claims(+proof) that the management was pushing down quality then I would consider the union to be doing it's job of trying to protect the workers from management like the claim was.
After a door falls out, numerous government audits and hearings, the union standing up and saying "Hey! Guys, we have an issue with management" seems to be a little barn door house.
The start of the thread was saying that union work is more quality than non-union. Child of that post claimed that union workers were the ones who missed the bolts.
If we want to claim that unions protect workers and improve quality(as opposed to those who say that unions are the reason that you can't get rid of bad workers) then the unions need to take timely action, not after.
However, the union strike is regarding pay and benefits. Not asking for better quality goals or production targets.
25% raise over four years after how many past years of frozen or low increased in wages and how many billions of share buybacks? If wage increases are below inflation you're taking a salary decrease.
> Glad to see these guys out the job and production moving to the Carolinas
Here's an idea: let them compete. Seattle versus North Charleston. I quite literally don't know if I agree with your or not, but that's the point--none of you, I or a dickwad in Chicago or D.C. should be making that call unilaterally. The market should. Split them up and return us to the competition that built America's golden age of aviation.
You'll have to break up the FAA first. The certification costs are ungodly, rigid, and the certification process created fascistic interweaving of industry with government.
To break the monopoly, counterintuitively, we have to deregulate Boeing.
Seems Boeing effectively became part of the FAA. I've produced and designed experimental aircraft. The FAA made it clear they would not certify it, simply wasn't legal since it wasn't contemplated under any certifiable title in the CFRs other than experimental.
> You'll have to break up the FAA first. The certification costs are ungodly, rigid, and the certification process created fascistic interweaving of industry with government
Why do you need to break up the FAA to simplify certification?
The golden age of flight had not only competition of manufacture, but competition from consumers and purchasers on risk appetite. It could not emerge under an FAA as we know it. To come anywhere near that you'd need to break up the FAA, as it has a virtual monopoly on violence in enforcing the CFRs here. Let people pick which, if any enforcer they want certifying their airplanes.
That is, the FAA suffers from the same lack of competition as Boeing.
You can't count all the dead from flight being held back FAA. It's similar with housing regulations -- the code inspector sees dead in a house but not the 10 homeless people he killed by making housing less accessible.
One example is FAA balking at certifying evtols for years after they started to emerge. They're dangerous but could allow more accessible rescue options for people already in a dangerous survival situation, or need a fast ride to a hospital.
I won't get into too many specifics, but there's a reason they call it ScreamLiner. And it ain't because final assembly in the Carolinas is implemented to exacting, high quality standards, by excellent and exemplary employees.
There are a lot of poor performers throughout Boeing. Starting with their C-Suite execs.
The people who decided to build the 737 max were sitting in Chicago at the time and now are sucking up to Washington politicians from Arlington County, Virginia
Sure it's failed from the floor workers because they forgot the plug door needs bolted. It's failed other ways due to the other (SPEEA) union botching the MCAS.
Sometimes it's easy to lose track of how basically all the Washington unions are so broken in their homicidal negligence while begging for more money to fail miserably.
The MCAS failure was a multilayered one. The engineers who designed it, software engineers who developed it, QA, testing, pilots, managers who approved, managers who instilled that work culture, etc etc are all responsible and should all have been fired and sentenced to prison for their negligence and dereliction of duty.
In the aerospace industry, and other safety critical industries, they use the "swiss cheese" model for risk analysis. For an accident to get through all the layers (slices of cheese) meant to stop accidents, you need the holes in all of those layers to line up in just the wrong way. When that happens you need to investigate and fix each layer of cheese, not focus on the single layer of cheese on the top and ignore the rest. You will never build reliable safety critical systems with the mentality that only a single point of responsibility needs to be identified and corrected.
This thing with duty feeling is hard. They all feel they did their best. Exactly as my precursor who spend 17 years in the role and did way below bare minimum. No single comment in the code. Last project does not work at all, but was approved as finished. Laziness and ignorance are everywhere. As long as managers accept it there is no way to stop that. Maybe I should stop drawing flowcharts in ascii art manner. Nobody will say “thank you” for that anyway. Nobody will give me a raise for that. It might help the next guy in my chair, but should I care about him?
> This thing with duty feeling is hard. They all feel they did their best
If you work in aerospace and your "best" is non-redundant inputs from a sensor known to fail, you're not good enough for aerospace and never were. I know not to do that and I'm just a former SRE who also likes air crash investigation. My homelab has more redundancy than a critical system that could by design crash an airplane.
And people at Boeing knew this. That's why they hid the system's existence from everyone and lied to the FAA, who also utterly failed at doing its job.
I heard this was done on purpose because they'd need a lot more documentation if the system was important, and having redundancy would tip off the FAA to its importance.
That 25% raise is on the amount agreed upon in their CBA in 2008. So they haven't really gotten a fully negotiated raise since 2008. You would probably reject that as well, unless you were desperate.
Boeing as an independent entity may not exist in six months to a year if they can’t get their shit together - either someone will buy them or the government will nationalize/bail them out.
Get all you can while you can. The riskier your business is the more labor costs.
Which ones are "these unions", or is this just a generic shaking fist at cloud moment?
> I was lucky to get a 5% raise this year and my wage is frozen until next year, basic insurance and absolutely no pension
I mean... maybe you should join a union?
> The workers of the union clearly aren't even doing a good job considering how many mechanical failures have affected their jets!
I guess you're trolling, but obviously the leadership who made the strategic decisions over decades that lead to these problems are not members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 751.
Inequality continues to rise. Everyone around you is getting poorer. More unions would help stop it, or at least slow it down. We need more unions, not less.
You blame Boeing’s quality problems on the wage workers and not management
And you drag their union for the reason that you consider yourself lucky and gracious for receiving an under inflation raise with no retirement benefits
That’s crab mentality - totally unnecessary to drag others down to your level when their success costs you nothing and only stands to benefit you too through their infectious solidarity
They're voting to strike right as the new CEO gets in? That's kind of the worst time possible to improve the situation at Boeing. All you're doing is creating an antagonistic environment with your boss. So dumb.
There is an insane amount of “bootlicking” being posted here. I’d say it’s astroturfing but really it’s likely decades of brainwashing. Time to go watch some Amazon union busting videos in my right to work state.
So when Boeing was shopping this summer for a new boss I was thinking the new boss would negotiate with the board worker pay increases related to the upcoming union contract.
It looks like the new boss was not smart enough to ask for a big worker pay increase (or maybe did not ask at all). Looks like not a good place for Boeing.
BTW - there is another contract due in 2026. Hmm, another strike in a couple of years? Will Boeing be in a better place or worse place in 2 years? Interesting times ahead.
Imagine thinking that people should stop thinking of their own best because it might create "an antagonistic environment"...
How about making the conditions good enough for employees so they don't have to strike to get some basic benefits and OK salary for performed work?
If the executive team doesn't want to people to be comfortable at their work, it feels a bit unfair to put "creating an antagonistic environment" on the employees.
Trying not to see it black and white because I do support unions to a point but it is hard not to think negative things about a union being pushy at a place like Boeing. I know one engineer there and she was incredibly bright. I'm hoping for the best outcome so they win and everyone in the USA wins because a company like Boeing nose diving is bad for everyone.
> it is hard not to think negative things about a union being pushy at a place like Boeing
Hard not to think negative things about a union being "pushy" at a place where there are serious cultural failings around safety, the company has engaged on a decades-long campaign of financial engineering where it has slashed investment into the company and instead paid out huge dividents to its shareholders, and the company regularly pursues and demonises whistleblowers (partly in what a cynical person might term collusion with the regulator, but also independently) who attempt to apply pressure to the company to improve and inform the public about the risk to life that the dangerous practices the finance types at Boeing have adopted.
Unlike the idea I’ve initially got from reading some of the comments here, the workers aren’t striking for long overdue measures that will save the company and get engineers back in charge of Boeing.
They are striking to get the biggest share possible of the pie before Boeing completely crumbles down. Reading the news, there isn’t a single demand from the workers that’s about trying to get the company back on its feet.
If you're interested in the union's proposals for those "long overdue measures", obviously you don't ask the WSJ.
> No one understands safety better than the very workers who meticulously build these planes every single day. That's why we must have a voice in the company's safety initiatives, as our livelihoods depend on it. Our Members are experts - they know how to build the best airplanes in the world, and they are the ones who will bring this company back on track.
>
> We spent Saturday drafting and proposing a new safety and quality framework that provides Union involvement and input into the Quality Management System, ensuring we protect the integrity of our production system. We know that the only way to ensure Boeing makes the right decisions is to have a seat at the table when critical decisions about quality, safety, and new product developments are made. Having a voice at the highest levels can and will influence changes. That's what we are trying to do in this contract. We are proposing these articles for the first time in our history and know that our Members' voice is critical in this effort.
Because they have a set of specialized skills with only a few potential buyers, and if they kill this one, they’ll have very limited options that use their skills without massively uprooting their lives.
If you reread what I was replying to, I was saying they might want to demand changes to management because it’s in their best interest to demand those changes, focusing only on short term benefit to themselves is harmful to their long term best interest. And organized labor does have the power to severely damage the companies they’re part of it’s not all one group or the other.
That's up to the bosses to figure out. If your business can't find employees to do the work at the compensation rate you're offering, then your business has failed. It may even be that your line of business is unviable in the current economy. That's not the employees' fault, that's just business.
This reads like someone just spouting off a preconceived notion. How much are they making now? What are they looking to make? What do you think is reasonable? The AP article says the union salaries haven't been visited in 16 years.
It should be illegal* to post articles about strikes without including details on current deal, current offer, and union demands. All these pieces try to influence your opinion without providing any details! Maybe the union demands are reasonable, or maybe they're not. Give me specifics please!
> It should be illegal to post articles about strikes without including details on current deal, current offer, and union demands.
Getting 96% to vote to go on strike pretty much says that company offer is complete garbage. You probably can't get 96 out of 100 people to agree that the sky is blue.
And while I wish that things were a bit more fact heavy, sometimes the sticking point is something really arcane and non-obvious to outsiders (on-call requirements, for example).
> Getting 96% to vote to go on strike pretty much says that company offer is complete garbage. You probably can't get 96 out of 100 people to agree that the sky is blue.
People can vote the same way without agreeing with each other. Some of them could think it's a bad offer, the others could think the company has bankruptcy immunity because the government will bail them out so they might as well hold out for more even when the company makes a reasonable offer.
> And while I wish that things were a bit more fact heavy, sometimes the sticking point is something really arcane and non-obvious to outsiders (on-call requirements, for example).
This isn't an excuse for not providing the explanation. What should happen in this case is that you get a longer article because there is more context to unpack.
I’m going to assume the “illegal” is hyperbole, but yes I agree.
Another pet peeve of mine is omitting the time frame for wage increases. A 25% raise today is not the same thing as a 25% raise over the course of 4 years.
This union last initiated a strike in 2008 just as the financial crisis hit. They were in a weak position and didn’t get a good deal.
In 2009 Boeing decided to build the 787 in a non-union factory in SC instead of in Washington.
A few years later (can’t recall exactly - it was around 10 years ago), Boeing cut the pensions for new workers. The union was not in a strike position at the time.
In the last 5 years the company has pushed forward with the 737 Max program with all of its problems that you’ve likely heard of.
There was a leadership crisis and a new CEO is starting. They’ve made a big show about recommitting to Washington.
The contract that was voted on this week included a headline raise of 25% over 4 years, but buried in the details was the elimination of a 4% annual bonus.
Sounds like there is a generation’s worth of grievance to sort out, and this being a fraught moment for the company, the union has decided to press their advantage. More power to them. This could have been avoided if the company leadership had a long-term approach to management and employee relations.
That's the whole point of journalism. Right now, they gave neither the facts that the GP wanted, nor the context and understanding that you may need to be comfortable enough to judge it's reasonableness within the context of the strike/industry/company.
It's like a BS meeting by a BS manager that he holds for "stakeholders" where he just throws a bunch of facts on the table, and then proceeds to do nothing to guide the decision making process. And then during the whole meeting we all run around like headless chickens trying to find out more info and context, all half-arguing with one another because we all have different pieces of the puzzle.
</rant> Sorry had one of these just yesterday, and no matter how delicately I phrased or insinuated-it the person with the most info/context just did not offer up guidance and direction (ironically it's the same person that organized the meeting). Then at the end they gave praise to all those that contributed and then said they'll schedule another meeting to discuss the outcomes because we "couldn't reach consensus" or "decide on the next course of action".
That's an interesting point to make. If you can't make a informed opinion, should you have an opinion at all? What defines informed? How much information and experience does one need?
I don't think that entirely detracts from the general premise of wanting to be given more information however.
Does it matter? These puff pieces exist solely to influence public opinion. That's true whether I have internal knowledge or not!
We live in an era where a lot of media types actively push pro-unionization ideas. It'd be helpful to present facts and details alongside union efforts! I personally assume that if details are withheld it's because they'd be damaging to their argument. YMMV.
