I suspect the people charged will be low level mechanics and assembly people and maybe a first level manager for appearances sake. You really think anyone at the executive level is getting arrested for this?
On the other hand, Boeing is “national security” so there will be political pressure to not fuck with it too much.
But to some extent it only proves the point. Boeing has been fucking up so badly for so long that the Feds won't give them anything that isn't a fixed price contract.
Creating environments where these processes are kicked into the bucket in whatever way is NOT what workers do, it is coming from the very top. Do I need to continue on ... ? Maybe about what happens to workers if they try to do the right thing? Ever heard about engineers at Boeing who spoke up ... ?
It is time the head honchos not just at Boeing but more generally get to see that accountability, responsibility, and all these other fancy words also have some actual meaning. We have to stop playing this stupid game of "deferred responsibility", because in the end it is not a company but humans making decisions and there are always consequences from that. Some just take a while to cause some effects and not all of them take the direct route, either. But that doesn't make the decision makers less/not responsible.
There is a current smell of Boeing not being particularly cooperative with investigation. That is the usual path that gets somewhat more important people charged for committing crimes. Various brands of lying, conspiracy, and evidence tampering where people get charge for what goes on during the investigation instead of the actual incidents.