Not the first time quality control has been an issue at the N.C. plant.
From a New York Times article back in 2019: "Ever since, Qatar has bought only Dreamliners built in Everett." [0]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...
"We have a manager that will physically watch us while we're working on the jet and watch us as we go to the bathroom," he says. "I'm a 40-year-old military veteran and I have a 20-something-year-old manager asking me why I use time to use the bathroom."
But the point is, anytime you provide 4 "breaks" a day for bathroom time, you'll get some managers staring at you for breaking the pattern. And don't forget that most tasks in aircraft assembly require 2 people. If you're installing fasteners, you've got to normally have someone on the other side of the assembly to either buck the rivet or put a nut on a bolt. So one person running for the toilet causes work to stop for others.
The post you're responding to just stated they had 4 breaks a day. I doubt Boeing isn't providing breaks either, since that would be illegal.
It's entirely possible to have a non-union shop and still have highly skilled and fairly compensated employees.
There are always going to be some employees that abuse things - people taking bathroom breaks every hour, 10 minutes at a time, etc. Those are the ones that get let go, when you're not a Union Shop. Unfortunately, for all the good Unions do, they also tend to protect exactly these sorts of employees, making it difficult or impossible to trim poorly performing employees.
Refusing to provide breaks is illegal, true, but it's trivially easy to legally force employees to take many fewer than they're entitled. Amazon employees in FCs don't piss in bottles because they're very into logistic efficiency of picking...
True, there will always be entities that abuse understandings, employer and employee. The thing is, corporations are superentities with monopsonic power. Employees are units, discouraged from communicating, with limited time in a day to make complaints or study potential improvements to working condition (or law, for that matter).
Unions are a method for setting up a superentity that has the bargaining, informational, and legal power to have a more equal footing with the corporate superentity.
Particularly when Unions have substantial ownership of the company, they have no specific wish to lose dues-paying members or make the company fail.
Hostess famously failed due to the Bakers Union stalling wage talks, even though the Teamsters (representing the other portion of the employees) agreed. Now... nobody works for Hostess and everyone lost their jobs.
Not all Unions actually align their goals with what's best for the employees. Sometimes, it's all about collecting union dues...
Except that Hostess had a bunch of debt loaded up from financial "engineering", and Hostess had already asked for and been granted concessions several times.
At some point, you're better off forcing the company into bankruptcy and rolling the dice--especially if the owners are bleeding it of cash via financial arrangements. It's going to be dead anyway; the only question is whether the owners also get to bleed the retirement fund, for example.
If Hostess can't employ those people after bankruptcy and reorganization, then those jobs were certainly dead, anyway.
At the very least, that seems like a case of a mix of vulture capitalism and failed union negotiations.
They went from well over 30,000+ employees, down to 2,000 today.
Pretty sad honestly. The company was in a tight financial situation, and asked to postpone paying into the pension fund for a few years. The Bakers Union was the only holdout... and now nobody has a pension or wages.
If a company I worked for was ever late on a paycheck, or refused to continue paying for a pension/matching 401k, I think it's perfectly reasonable that the company should collapse.
Perhaps. Personally, I'd take it as a sign of whats-to-come, and leave. If other employees decided to stay, and agreed to some terms to save the company, let them.
In Hostess' case, I believe it was the Teamsters that had negotiated an equity stake in the company during a previous bout of poor financial times. There's always options.
I have a hard time believing the 30,000+ employees wanted their union to destroy the company, particularly since many of them had worked there all their life, their town had little or no other large company to provide jobs, and their pensions/retirement were tied to the entire mess. It's entirely possible Hostess was in bad times partly due to Union negotiated wage and pension funding levels.
In general, I guess I'm more skeptical of Unions than some. I've never been in a Union personally, and would chafe at the idea of being compelled to pay union dues (some jobs require this), and not being able to negotiate my own salary and benefits that fit my situation best.
It’s really hard to do though due to the wrong incentives being in place. You’d need something like worker co-op’s to get the incentives aligned reliably in all cases, such that you don’t need unions.
Unfortunately, unioned jobs where it's known to be difficult or impossible to fire poor performing employees, seems to attract exactly that type of employee, in my experience.
When someone figures out how to do your job better (or tries) at a private company, then you may need to pretend it's a great thing, everybody goes around pretending, but it's a mortal threat and there are tons of ways to passively sabotage a project.
But when someone figures out how to do your job better at a government agency, either the automation makes it easier for you, or you are (nearly always) guaranteed a transfer to another position. People generally accept that work is a bad thing in itself so if you want to eliminate it, they like you. Laziness has its merits.
I've had some first hand experience in both types of environments.
>> get along just fine
Those are 2 different standards. The domain of highly skilled and fairly compensated is a subset of companies getting along just fine. Many workers are unable to fire their boss as it were, due to lack of alternatives. It’s hard to quit when there’s no alternative job and you’re tied to an area.
Like i suggested earlier, you can’t fix this while the information and power asymmetry exists. You can certainly hide it sufficiently in most cases to get along just fine though but that is under-rewarding the labour.
>> difficult or impossible to fire poor performing
Sure, but what’s the cost of that situation?
Sometimes the cost could be so dire it kills the business. That’s not to be sniffed at for sure. Sometimes though it just protects the worker who’s trying but their kid or SO got incapacitated or something equally horrible is happening to them and the last thing they need is fired.
It’s ok if the player with the lions share of the cash pays more than their fair share from time to time.
It’s not ok to protect the player with the lion’s share at all costs even to the detriment of the poorer players.
OK, but private businesses in the US are not public jobs programs, and shouldn't have any obligation to keep paying unproductive employees.
That puts a financial strain on the organization, and can be toxic to a healthy work environment.
(For the record, I'm not railing against people in that position - I'm railing against people perfectly capable of working productively, but choose not to because there is no consequence. It would be analogous to government jobs where the worst that happens is you're transferred to a different department and become their problem instead.)
I get that and i’m in no mind to let them off but i’m not willing to hurt good actors just to be sure no bad actor ever scores a free lunch.
My experience might be more sour than others... I've never personally seen a Union step up to help someone justly... it's always been to keep bad employees employed, and to sue management for various things, and demand higher wages even though the business can't afford them.
You end up spending a bunch of time worrying about what the union will think, instead of what the employee needs.
So in a sense employees at non-union shops are free loaders that reap the benefits of union shops without paying into the organizations that create them
With that said, you have to still make an effort to filter out people with no empathy or low emotional IQ from management roles. Having authority over another human being is serious business.
yeah but their resume, they went to "insert super important college here"!
The less popular part of this whole thing is that the "quality" of the workers at this particular plant is less than "optimal" let's just leave it at that, and that issue is general knowledge since the beginning.
It's an ongoing issue for quite a long time...
[0] https://youtu.be/rvkEpstd9os?t=1434 (I've timestamped to the relevant part about the Charleston plant)
The only small problem is that they turned this plant into a sweatshop, not only the workers have no aviation culture but people in power seem to think they are bolting on just another Ford Pinto like the old days.
> “They didn’t want us bringing union employees out to a nonunion area,” said David Kitson, a former quality manager, who oversaw a team responsible for ensuring that planes are safe to fly.
> “We struggled with that,” said Mr. Kitson, who retired in 2015. “There wasn’t the qualified labor pool locally.” Another former manager, Michael Storey, confirmed his account.
Oops.
But the company also has regrets about how the project was run and vowed not to do that again. I doubt that applies to the [SC] part of the equation, though.
Such a shame because the 777 program in the 90s was an excellent program to model the 787 after, but Boeing threw it all away to agitate the union, penny pinch everything, and outsource all that expertise to the lowest bidder.
Ultimately it ended up costing more to build a worse product with a long tail of severe post-launch quality and design issues.
This is why I said in another response that if Everett loses the 787 but gains 777 orders it may be bad news for the people on the 787 line but neutral news for the state. They could lay off 20,000 people, hire 12,000 of them back, and hire 8,000 new people or folks furloughed from some other program.
ETA:
> 787 was an exercise in out of touch MBAs and execs
I mentioned cynicism elsewhere. You may be right, but I always thought of it more as a Captain Ahab maneuver, where the unions are Moby Dick.
(As a child I did not know that the speech at the end of Wrath of Khan was from Moby Dick. That scene is much darker once you understand that a scholar has chosen these as his final words, knowing damned well how it ends. He will make the gesture anyway, even if the 'whale' survives.)
But people from Missouri (especially southern) may pronounce their state as misery. Having known someone who moved away from there, I'm assured this is perfectly accurate. Biases may have been involved, but 'state of misery' jokes basically write themselves.
(I'm from the midwest, we take our cross-border rivalries far more seriously than should be legal, but nobody outside the midwest can tell you the difference between Iowa/Illinois/Indiana/Missouri and have no qualms about saying it to your face. The struggle is real)
Don't get me wrong, the Everett plant certainly has had issues in the past (there are plenty of signs hanging up about Foreign Object Debris), but the company seems to have targeted cost cutting as priority one.
I also remember that there were consistent ongoing quality issues. Planes from SC would require significant rework when they arrived in Everett.
If I were Boeing, I'd also be looking into the possibility of sabotage, but it's more likely cost cutting.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/losing-787-would-be-ma...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/03/boeing-union...
> Boeing’s mere presence in South Carolina was already viewed as a union-busting move when the company first opened an aircraft production plant there in 2011 rather than Washington state, where Boeing had unionized operations. South Carolina has the lowest union membership rate in the United States at just 2.7% of workers. The National Labor Relations Board filed a federal complaint against Boeing for the move, accusing the company of violating federal labor law, before dropping it after the company came to an agreement with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM).
The 787 was designed to not require as much infrastructure as the Everett plant has to offer. I’m out of the loop, but Wikipedia still lists most of the rest of their catalog as being produced in Everett, and the new 777 is coming online.
Sounds more like having to choose between 787 capacity and other production lines.
I’m not sure where they get losing the 787 meaning nothing to backfill it. For those specific employees, changing programs may be difficult and not all of them will be picked up, but for the region, I don’t see how this means 30k fewer jobs.
Also Everett does other things besides assembly. I think most of their IT and a few other programs are there.