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Boeing workers vote to strike

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#321

Post by bombcar »

mulmen wrote: post #101
bombcar wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At its peak, the US had 40% of GDP going into the war. Forty percent!

Today the US military budget is 3.4% of GDP. Can you imagine it being ten times as much?

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#322

Post by frmersdog »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #243
diggan wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What private corporation could make mistakes where people lose their lives on the same scale while still operating as normal afterwards?

Monsanto, Nestlé, J&J, the whole tobacco industry, the companies that made asbestos, talidomide, etc.

So, yes. All have deep ties with government through their regulatory apparatus (some would characterize this as "capture"). Also of note: people might be confused by tobacco's inclusion here if they don't realize that North America was essentially settled as a tobacco agribusiness (Spanish gold-hunting and death-trap religious colonies notwithstanding). Tobacco's role in shaping America's socioeconomic nature is massively underrated.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#324

Post by cptcobalt »

Maken wrote: post #212
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.

I seriously wonder how long it would take for a team of engineers to produce a competitive commercial airplane, from planning to the first prototype, if they started right now. Also, is it viable to produce something like the A320 in low quantities when airlines need fleets in the hundreds?

> Also, is it viable to produce something like the A320 in low quantities when airlines need fleets in the hundreds?

Bombardier thought so, and did so! They developed and introduced the C-series aircraft to compete with smaller 737s and A320/A319. After introduction, Boeing fucked them over so hard that they sold the aircraft program after introduction to Airbus for a token sum. Airbus now builds and sells the C-series as the A220.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSeries_dumping_petition_by_Bo...

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#326

Post by bluGill »

willcipriano wrote: post #255
bluGill wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What attrition? While deaths were not zero they were very low.

Roughly 2.2 trillion on the credit card for Afghanistan alone. That's without the interest that will be paid on it. Your grandkids children will be paying for that war.

The only time anyone cares about that debt is when democrats are in control of the government - then republicans care. (sometimes when republicans control congress and the democrats control the president they care, but it is not as much then)

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#327

Post by wahnfrieden »

segasaturn wrote: post #323

[flagged]

You blame Boeing’s quality problems on the wage workers and not management

And you drag their union for the reason that you consider yourself lucky and gracious for receiving an under inflation raise with no retirement benefits

That’s crab mentality - totally unnecessary to drag others down to your level when their success costs you nothing and only stands to benefit you too through their infectious solidarity

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#328

Post by dh2022 »

gigachadbro wrote: post #218
passwordoops wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incentives matter. The extremist solution would be to ban executive compensation tied to stock price and some mechanism where every penny more that goes into buybacks/dividends than R&D/CapEx is taxed at 105%. Oh, and make executive and BoDs personally and criminally liable for safety fiascos like the 737MAX. I bet you'll see culture change in a hurry under those circumstances

Just make stock buy-backs illegal. It would streamline a lot of "focus" issues when it comes to financial "engineering" mindsets.

Stock buy-backs are a tax efficient way to send distribute to shareholders. If you make them illegal then the only way left to distribute money to shareholders is via dividends. Want to make that illegal as well???

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#330

Post by AndrewKemendo »

In my mind, this is an unalloyed good

The practice alone of organizing labor power against owners, irrespective of the demands, given the existing state of the world, is what is needed to show Class solidarity.

Simply showing class solidarity in order to kick off other strikes is valuable in and of itself.

Y’all really have to understand a general strike is coming.

A general strike means the labor class (you most likely), which is the group of people who do not primarily gain their income from passive investments, and are reliant on contracts that they don’t create or control which provide them very little control over their economic future, stop working in order to put extreme pressure on the group of people who do control those contracts and who do control capital.

Such a system is foundationally unethical, and should be Deconstructed as rapidly as possible with the expropriation of all that capital to the rightful owners: the people actually producing the value, and done in a way that’s not under duress, such that you do not have to take whatever dog shit contract is put in front of you

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