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Boeing workers vote to strike

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#151

Post by sealeck »

fragmede wrote: post #146
echelon wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you seen how much lambasting Boom Aerospace gets every time they come up? Starting a new aerospace company isn't for the faint of heart!

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#152

Post by [deleted] »

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]

[deleted]

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#153

Post by sealeck »

honeybadger1 wrote: post #149

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#154

Post by darby_nine »

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]

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#155

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#156

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#157

Post by thowawatp302 »

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…

Because that’s management’s job, when you see the course of business you become responsible for it.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#158

Post by windexh8er »

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]

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#159

Post by gartdavis »

Dalewyn wrote: post #114
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…

>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 manki…

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.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#160

Post by M95D »

hungie wrote: post #21

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.

Ever heard of a stock-price led company that "went back to being an engineering and manufacturing led company"?
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