Why is the South Carolina factory worse than Washington?
None of this should have made it out of the factory floor. Every crew that works on a plane has to certify (literally sign off a form) that when they worked on the plane they left it in good shape (no obvious defects, like metal shavings, tools left inside, etc). If the next shift comes in and finds dangerous debris or damage the prior crew should have noted, then the prior crew is required by the FAA to have a formal report written against them, as they have created a dangerous plane.
Management has applied heavy pressure to my friend repeatedly to not report these incidents, despite his legal obligation. Ultimately, he took a $25k hit paying back the Boeing relocation package and left after 10 months to work on repairing trains (which has been a significant improvement).
Yeah, the idea is to have management put pressure on the people who left stuff in bad shape. Shooting the messenger isn't the right answer.
When I was a kid, half the parents I knew worked at Boeing and were proud of the quality engineering or manufacturing they did, but over the past two decades Boeing has had this crew retire and has worked to shift to a blame the messenger culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downfall:_The_Case_Against_Boe...
Publishing his experience anonymously is likely impossible, but if not, I’d be really keen to read it.
Some reporting suggests several major customers (airlines) were so fed up with this 'foreign object debris' (metal shavings etc) problem that they said they would only accept aircraft from Washington. From your story, I can't help but wonder if Boeing management got around this by flying near-complete aircraft from SC to WA to get around this.
To give you a sense of how bad this debris issue is: the US Air Force refused delivery of new air tankers after finding debris (in fuel tanks if I remember correctly).
FWIW "right to work" is the normal terminology.
It's better to just allow people to name their own movement, otherwise, you end up endlessly fighting about names (i.e. are people 'pro-life' or 'anti-choice' and 'pro-murder'/'anti-life' and 'pro-choice').
Right to work laws do not in any way provide a right to work.
Especially since RTW legislation is not about closed shops (which are illegal at the federal level), so these were jobs you could always get.
The latter is essentially a term of art, the former is not. Using the former is imprecise and confusing.
> Realistically, it's best described as "mutual right to terminate employment without cause" or just "right to terminate".
That is a completely different concept called at-will employment. RTW is about union shops (not to be confused with closed shops, which have been illegal in the US since Taft-Hartley)
What?
Goes to show... something, I guess.
That one factory is the home factory close to where the designs are made and the other is so far away seems like a pretty important thing.
This seems like the kind of argument people who really love unions would make.
When that starts, we may expect they will start by exploding mainly on test stands, instead of vehicles.
My intuition is that the latter would exceed the former, and that test stands aren’t a realistic environment for predicting their likelihood.
It is hard to imagine how you would determine, after the fact, whether a rocket blew up because of material failure or something else, but they seem to do it, anyway during development when they have a zillion sensors attached logging everything in real time: "hmm, a millisecond before the explosion, this reading went out of tolerance, and then this one, then this one, and then the data ends."
When the management pressure is for better quality, the union may interfere. Where management pressure is for lower quality, the union should interfere.
We see the harmful effect of unions where the police are in one.
- older, more mature organization
- based near the engineering teams; frequent collaborations
- unionized, highly skilled workforce
The people who took over Boeing and moved the HQ out of SEA intentionally picked SC to union-bust their own workforce.
MBAs just refuse to believe that workplace culture and experience matter — so they treat high skilled workers like dumb, replaceable cogs and then their companies fail a decade later when the senior/principal staff are incompetent or non-existent.
That same mentality is why their new planes have major issues:
They don’t have competent senior/principal engineers because they viewed mid-career engineers as “too expensive” — and so didn’t train any.