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Boeing workers vote to strike

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#451

Post by protastus »

dh2022 wrote: post #432
MPSFounder wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal, but out of my graduating class in chemical engineering from a University in Seattle, the top 20 students went into tech and finance. The worst performing students (by academic metrics) went to Boeing. Over time, I expect decisions to be made by engineers which are not stand outs. Coupled with the MBA trainwreck prioritizing profits and cost cutting, I expect Boeing has a very rough patch ahead.

Top 20 students in chemical engineering went into tech and finance.... two professions that at the first sight have nothing in common with chemical engineering... Tech and finance must really be looking for a lot of employees....

No doubt, Big Tech prints money and absorbs all available talent. Boeing's troubles are surely compounded by having all the best new talent hired away from them, because Big Tech pays much better.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#452

Post by rtkwe »

cwmma wrote: post #449
zardo wrote: post #447

The negotiating team has to be pretty out of touch with the members to reach a deal that's rejected with 96% of the vote.

Not really, the negotiation team gets the best deal that can get that doesn't involving going on strike and they present that to the union which is then better informed for their vote.

Correct rejecting the companies "best and final" contract is basically par for the course in union negotiations. The company is banking on being able to outlast the strike to get a better deal than the union would otherwise agree to or betting on the government coming in an kneecapping the union and forcing the workers to accept a deal like happened with the ATC and train operator unions when they struck (striked? struck doesn't sound right in the context of a union strike for some reason...).

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#453

Post by kfajdsl »

mricordeau wrote: post #206
benhurmarcel wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a great plan if what they're looking for is a higher salary though. Engineering in western Europe doesn't pay nearly as well as in the US.

Yes but Toulouse is way cheaper than any Tier 1 city in the US and you have to include insurance/health, school cost in the US (I'm from Toulouse and living in the US for more than 10 years). If you make 250k/year in Tier 1 city in the US it's probably as good as making 80k/year in Toulouse.

- Engineering jobs in the US tend to come with health insurance benefits

- There are several state programs in the US that make attending an in-state public university very affordable. For example, in GA I attended university for $0 in tuition (only paying for room and board + a couple hundred bucks a semester on bs “fees”). The requirement for that grant is getting a 3.0 or higher high school GPA.

- Not sure how cheap Toulouse is, but at least in the US you’re probably better off making 200k+ in HCOL than 100k in LCOL. At that level of income, you don’t have to spend much of your income on essentials even in an extremely HCOL area like SF ($3000 a month gets you a nice apartment).

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#454

Post by mbrameld »

behringer wrote: post #426
eddd-ddde wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Couldn't they change employers after leveling up their skills?

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#455

Post by darod »

dh2022 wrote: post #440
boc wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they just pay a lot more. If Boeing was paying $500K+ TC for engineers in their early/mid career, you'd see a lot more expertise enter the field. Instead you basically have to go into tech or PE/IB to see that type of compensation fresh out of school. Especially when students are taking on hundreds of thousands in debt, the payback period becomes really important when considering career paths.

I completely understand graduates would choose higher TC from tech/finance vs TC from Boeing. What I do not understand is why tech/finance companies would want to hire chemical engineering graduates..... I know a few people who changed careers from biology to finance - but that was only after going back to school and getting some business degree....

because they solve a lot of math problems very well.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#456

Post by TheAmazingRace »

FireBeyond wrote: post #375
jonhohle wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX,… how many times does someone “win the lottery” before it’s not actually chance? Not saying anyone can repeat it, or a random IC could leave and succeed, but that space seems ripe for disruption. (Maybe not passenger planes, but cargo with less liability.)

Obligatory repeat of this detail, since you're talking about PayPal as a Musk success story: Musk had very little to do with the success of PayPal. I'm not even talking in terms of the "Gwynne Shotwell is the real genius of SpaceX" naysayers. I'm talking: Musk had an attempt at an online bank that was ... not going well. Confinity had done what Musk couldn't - had built a prototype/MVP of PayPal. They'd already got i…

He also has his long and obnoxious obsession with x.com.

This spanned back to PayPal and he had to try this crap again with the Twitter rebrand, that frankly hasn't worked all that well, because most within my circle still call it by the old name Twitter.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#457

Post by hosh »

kedean wrote: post #446
benced wrote: post #445

A lot of people here seem justifiably angry at Boeing management's total destruction of an engineering corporate culture. It's unclear to me if fixing that is what the machinists are demanding or if they just want normal union things like being paid more and working less. No hate if they are optimizing for that, unions don't exist to serve corporate culture. Just want to be clear-eyed about what the union is seeking…

It's not totally clear to me, but it is telling that the union members specifically say boeing needs to "stop breaking the law" and that the rejected deal included an allegedly large pay increase. 96% turning that down doesn't feel like the increase just wasn't enough to me

It goes with the perception of corporate greed. Boeing stocks have shot up, profits are not being shared, and those profits came at a cost of safety, and it isn't as if market share had not still declined against Airbus.

I wouldn't be surprised if a machinist used to be able to go home, proud of the work they have done, and now, it is not so.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#458

Post by lordfrito »

triceratops wrote: post #267
MereInterest wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren’t they taxed differently, though? To my knowledge, dividends are taxed as ordinary income, whereas sales following a stock buyback may be taxed as capital gains (if they were held long enough before that point).

Rich people borrow against appreciated assets. They don't sell and incur capital gains tax. That's why company leadership loves buybacks. Ordinary people have to sell assets to take advantage of appreciation. So unless they can time sales to optimize taxes - really only an option for retirees - they might as well get regular dividends.

> Ordinary people have to sell assets to take advantage of appreciation

Not entirely true.. Ordinary people can take advantage of appreciation of their home value via a standard home equity loan.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#459

Post by kevindamm »

seabird wrote: post #422
kevindamm wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm aware of that, but the proportion of overhead varies per company. Six months seems like a long time for a ventilation system, and the point being made in this thread is that the runway available for some spun-off group of former Boeing engineers would need to accommodate the very long schedules of the design stage.

I'm just curious how much inflation there is in those schedules because I'm sure it's not zero.

But you make a good point that these long runways are because the overarching tradeoff is one that prefers taking as long as it takes.

Re: Boeing workers vote to strike

#460

Post by mulmen »

willcipriano wrote: post #334
bluGill wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

The only president in my lifetime to not start any wars isn't really liked by either the democrats or the establishment republicans. Both parties are big fans of losing wars for some reason.

Were you born in 2020?
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