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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

You're catastrophizing a bit. This isn't an America problem it's a Boeing problem.

American air travel is safer than it's ever been. Going years without a single fatality is now the norm, not an exception. The airlines are well run and do care deeply about safety. The regulators aren't perfect but generally do a good job. The NTSB is world-class.

Boeing will continue to lose marketshare to Airbus and feel some pain which is appropriate. Eventually they'll get their act together or they will continue to suffer real consequences.

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Working conditions in the USA have come to a point where many don't care because the company doesn't care about them. People are fired at will after working for 20+ years with zero shits given. There is zero loyalty and in return workers just don't care either.

There are only so many checks and balances you can build in until this situation will catch up with you.

Doesn't amazon have such a huge turn over that they are running out of possible candidate to replace those workers?

Being pushed to deliver more and more packages in shorter time or inspect train cars in less time then required why would one care if a packages gets tossed or a rail car is not properly inspected?

In most jobs the only consequence is to be fired which is already possible for no reason what so ever in many states.

Thanks, Jack Welch. May you burn in hell for making the 21st century worker-employer relationship so adversarial.

Sorry, but habe you ever worked in an aero assembly plant? You're making it sound like it's just like any other warehouse sweatshops job where you need to pee in a bottle while you work to meet your quotas when it's the furthest thing possible from that.

You definitely have enough time to work at leisurely pace and assemble every part right. There's not much rushing going on there. If workers get away with doing dodgy work you have a QA issue.

The report from Al Jazeera in 2014[1] about Boeing's assembly line for the 787 was pretty damning, workers were complaining exactly about quality control issues, Cynthia Cole was at Boeing for 32 years as an engineer and she mentions in the report she wouldn't fly on the 787.

So conditions at the plant in North Charleston haven't looked very good for almost 10 years...

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/program/investigations/2014/7/20/t...

In 1966, Boeing had 142k employees and thousands more employees working for them indirectly through suppliers. By 1970 they had less than 39k employees.

Let's not pretend layoffs are new.

Are those headcounts from the commercial aircraft division?

If not you've got things like a reduction in manufacture of ICBMs to consider.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman

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