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Boeing workers vote to strike

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#101

Post by mulmen »

bombcar wrote: post #96
darby_nine wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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. IBM made machine guns on typewriter lines in WW2.

Exactly correct. Good time to skim https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Run.

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#102

Post by jajko »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #68
JackYoustra wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#103

Post by atoav »

csomar wrote: post #84
Y-bar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bet…

[dead]

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#104

Post by jampekka »

darby_nine wrote: post #75
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

Major industries are economically critical for trade balance. Even if foreigners don't buy US cars, domestic buying means there's less import.

There's a limit to how long USA can print petrodollars to make up for the trade deficit. And the limit doesn't seem that far off.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#105

Post by mulmen »

darby_nine wrote: post #75
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

The auto bailouts saved hundreds of thousands of jobs and turned a profit for the US government.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#106

Post by bibelo »

iancmceachern wrote: post #86

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.

or they could come here to Toulouse to work for Airbus ^^

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#107

Post by tempfile »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #61
stevage wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Implying the problem is not how much they were paid but rather the quality of the work.

Aren't those identical? If you do a bad job, we could have got the same bad job from someone else, who we could have paid less...

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#108

Post by newsclues »

bombcar wrote: post #96
darby_nine wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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. IBM made machine guns on typewriter lines in WW2.

If America goes to war it will need many f-150s for the war itself.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#109

Post by sofixa »

lnsru wrote: post #51
sofixa wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. Nobod…

> 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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#110

Post by sofixa »

metaphor wrote: post #42
sofixa wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ca…

> [McNerney] came from McDonnell Douglas... Cite? Wiki[1] appears to suggest otherwise. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney#Career_path

Oops, my bad, he was just a GE sociopath.

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).

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