> Thatcher eliminated all this feather bedding and the UK was better for it.

You might want to catch up on the last few decades of UK history. To say it's unraveling would be generous. The once mighty British navy can hardly even build working ships anymore.

This fantasy of the line workers getting rich at cushy jobs does not seem to be related to reality?

I expect cleaning aircraft factories requires more training and care than cleaning typical industrial facilities. They have to be trained in avoiding foreign object damage, for example. And aircraft assembly has a lot of vertical dimension, so they probably sometimes work on scaffolds with fall arrest harnesses. You can’t just hire the cheapest for that.

Dude, Thatcher was more the kind of person to be on the side of the locust executives that tank a company to cushion their short-term bonuses than on the side of actual workers...

Most of the predicament of Boeing is due to the same kind of anti-worker philosophy (nasty cost-cutting, lowering quality, anti-union, moving headquarters away) that Thatcher championed. The UK may have gotten rid of degenerated featherbedded companies, but they only destroyed it, and never rebuilt any excellence.

You can extract blood from a stone. Once.

Is there actual evidence of this? It doesn't square with the "obsessed with cost cutting" image elsewhere.

Embraer is still an independent company. The merger was a victim of COVID market uncertainty.