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Boeing workers vote to strike

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#61

Post by AnthonyMouse »

stevage wrote: post #30
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

High CEO pay is a symptom of poor board control, not a direct cause of poor performce.

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#62

Post by rob74 »

hinkley wrote: post #3
toomuchtodo wrote: post #2

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…

They started new factories in new states to try to break the unions in Seattle.

...with resounding success:

> 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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#63

Post by danielheath »

JackYoustra wrote: post #27
toomuchtodo wrote: post #2

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…

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…

> even that didn't prove enough

It did the opposite.

Humans respond - on some level - to incentives.

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#64

Post by user_7832 »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #32
NotACop182 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.)

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#65

Post by InDubioProRubio »

JackYoustra wrote: post #27
toomuchtodo wrote: post #2

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…

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…

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#66

Post by AnthonyMouse »

bsder wrote: post #17
forrestthewoods wrote: post #5

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

> 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-…

> 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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#67

Post by AnthonyMouse »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #57
night862 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? McD…

> 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…

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#68

Post by AmericanChopper »

JackYoustra wrote: post #27
toomuchtodo wrote: post #2

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…

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…

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#69

Post by obscuretone »

bsder wrote: post #17
forrestthewoods wrote: post #5

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

> 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-…

The sky is in fact black at the moment.

Bit of a green hue towards downtown, regional bank creating the Aurora Desjardins

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#70

Post by obscuretone »

sofixa wrote: post #43
beaglesss wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If everyone is a little bit responsible then no one is fully responsible.

It’s like dieselgate. Or the Pornhub chaos.

The VP’s tell the directors to get it done. The directors get it done.

There’s a liability force field and those that protect and serve are elevated.

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