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Boeing workers vote to strike

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#421

Post by UberFly »

weaksauce wrote: post #411
deepsun wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a feature of capitalism and effective market. If a company falls a little bit below competition -- market forces it do dive even deeper, die quicker. I'm not saying it's good or bad. I've seen communism, and it's much worse to help failing companies -- they tend to fail even more instead of improving. The problem now is that international market is not really fair, trade treaties help too little.

boeing isn’t a company the us government will let fail. it’s too important to have as a domestic ability.

This is true and I wonder if it's going to put them even more into a zombie state of existence. Their bad business practices will keep getting bailed out and they'll never really improve until a better company comes along.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#422

Post by seabird »

kevindamm wrote: post #241
badpun wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading that one engineer spent 6 years designing „ventilation for seats 40-80” on one of the larger Airbuses. It seems like the amount of design and engineering work required for a prototype of a complete aircraft (assuming you buy the engines) is just immense.

How much of that time was actual engineering-tradeoff decision-making and how much of that was working in a large corporation with abundant communication overhead?

For a safety critical system, the work documenting, explaining, testing, validating, etc. a decision outstrips the work it took to make the decision. It is that way for a very good reason. The problem with it requiring so much work and time isn't that there's BigCorp bureaucracy that needs disrupting, it's that there isn't a problem with the amount of work and time required.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#423

Post by retzkek »

kpw94 wrote: post #381
Rinzler89 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't Boeing engineers also get insurance and 401k from their employer? Plus, they'd have to learn french also. France is not very accommodating to non French speaking foreigners. Trying to get around in life with just English there outside of Paris is not easy.

> France is not very accommodating to non French speaking foreigners. Trying to get around in life with just English there outside of Paris is not easy. I don't really get this kind of comments... Usually people also say the same thing when visiting Japan. "This restaurant only has menu in Japanese and staff only speaking Japanese!!". That's true a bit everywhere in the world, isn't it? In the US, apart from places w…

I didn't sense any judgement there, just a statement of fact. Learning a new language as an adult is doable, but not trivial, so it's certainly a factor in making a decision to relocate to another country for a job.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#424

Post by ahmeneeroe-v2 »

vundercind wrote: post #236
bluGill wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US clearly choose to lose all wars lost though. The military was doing just fine, but the people back home got sick of the efforts.

1) That’s still losing. 2) I’m not sure the military was doing just fine in all of those. Vietnam comes to mind, but also Afghanistan—reading the Afghanistan papers, the brass seems to have given up on any kind of actual goals or accountability in favor of a system that let them continually cycle officers through and let them claim they succeeded at their mission (funny, they all keep achieving their mission, but fac…

I'm with you 100% on point #2.

Disagree on point #1. We occupied Afghanistan for 20 years. We operated with nearly absolute impunity in all population centers, through all trade routes, and all agricultural areas. Our casualties were a minuscule amount our total forces. Our culture completely transformed theirs (in a way that old school hardliners lament publicly). We killed a huge number of Taliban (and foreign fighters).

Clausewitz says that "the political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it." Can you tell articulate what the political goal of the war was?

Thinking back to 2001 (I was in middle school), the goal was retribution. I believe the military achieved that in spades. Yes, in the end Afghanistan did not turn into a US vassal state or a US colony. But was that the goal?

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#425

Post by themaninthedark »

nottorp wrote: post #77
Rinzler89 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yeah I’m sure that was the union’s fault, and not pressure from management to work quickly, cut corners, and akip on quality. The union's job is to fight back against those poor choices from management that negatively impact the workforce and the product delivery. Otherwise what's the point of the union? What value are they adding to the workers if they end up with the same issues as non union labor?

Yep, the union does seem to be striking?

Seems a little late, no?

If the Union went on strike a year or two ago with claims(+proof) that the management was pushing down quality then I would consider the union to be doing it's job of trying to protect the workers from management like the claim was.

After a door falls out, numerous government audits and hearings, the union standing up and saying "Hey! Guys, we have an issue with management" seems to be a little barn door house.

The start of the thread was saying that union work is more quality than non-union. Child of that post claimed that union workers were the ones who missed the bolts.

If we want to claim that unions protect workers and improve quality(as opposed to those who say that unions are the reason that you can't get rid of bad workers) then the unions need to take timely action, not after.

However, the union strike is regarding pay and benefits. Not asking for better quality goals or production targets.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#426

Post by behringer »

eddd-ddde wrote: post #415
Balgair wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll echo this and have done something of this path. It's a very similar field surprisingly. Quite rewarding too. The timelines for products are also about the same (years-decade). The one tip is to not bother applying to Medtronic. They don't actually hire anything outside of interns. All the job postings are for internal roles (but required by federal law to be ... blah blah blah). Suffice to say, don't bother.

I'm curious. So this company basically only hires newbies and trains them from zero to any role they might need? That's kinda cool.

Except for the worker that will see stagnant wages.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#427

Post by ahmeneeroe-v2 »

willcipriano wrote: post #247
bluGill wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US clearly choose to lose all wars lost though. The military was doing just fine, but the people back home got sick of the efforts.

When the participation trophy generation grows up and becomes generals you'll hear things like, we would've won that war if it wasn't for all that attrition!

literally no one said that or even a rough approximation of that. Seriously I have no love for the generals but even they're not that dumb.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#428

Post by lukan »

dmix wrote: post #387
evilos wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't a law be passed that states prosecutors legally cannot consult or assist in cases or for defendants they were involved with during their tenure as a prosecutor for X years after they leave their position?

Politicians don't have much incentive to do this since plenty of them get cushy jobs at bigco benefactors of the spending bills they voted on. Trying to target prosecutors would cast a eye on themselves. It's like trying to separate church and state in England back in 1600-1700s.

"Politicians don't have much incentive to do this since plenty of them get cushy jobs at bigco benefactors of the spending bills they voted on."

It is the same problem - bribery/corruption but hard to proof and not much interest to investigate.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#429

Post by dimal »

diggan wrote: post #213
aners_xyz wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not really sure this framing makes any sense if I’m being honest.

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

Are you joking? Once a corporation gets large enough, the worst they can get is a fine, which is usually a fraction of their income. This is how the system works.

For example, depending on how you calculate it, Merck killed between 3,000 and 500,000 people with Vioxx, and they knew the risks prior to releasing it. They got a fine. And now, the company is now doing just fine. No one was individually prosecuted.

If you have a corporate charter and billions of dollars, you have a license to kill.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#430

Post by wannacboatmovie »

gosub100 wrote: post #364
jandrese wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one hand I can't blame any engineer that wants to flee, but on the other Boeing really can't afford any more brain drain. We are already seeing the results of years of forcing experienced but well paid engineers out and outsourcing their jobs. Planes literally falling out of the sky, but some nice fat executive bonuses.

Pivoting to a remote-first culture would be a great start. Tons of talented engineers angry about RTO to draw from.

Why would a manufacturing company - who is clearly having manufacturing problems - pivot to a remote-first culture? What problem would that solve? It's hard to build airplanes in your driveway, but I can't say that I've tried.

That door-blowing-off thing wasn't a design issue. "It's hard to forget to install the bolts when you're working from home" is a bit of a logical fallacy.

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