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Striking is one way to get closer to that, good on them.
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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 exis…
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 exis…
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.
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! *obvious hyperbole
> Maybe the union demands are reasonable, or maybe they're not. Give me specifics please! Would that really help, though? Do you have the industry know-how, expertise, and internal knowledge to assess whether the offer is reasonable 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.
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As a frequent flier, I'd much rather be in a union plane than a "cheapest labor we could find" plane.
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 exis…
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.
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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 exis…
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 uni…