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Comment by benced | Hacker News Reader

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 and (potentially separately), what it will take to make Boeing an American great again.

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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.

And if the culture destroys Boeing and its reputation in the end, the machinists are going to be struggling to find new jobs. "Sorry, we don't want someone who built bad airplanes to work on this other safety critical thing."

The larger economy just doesn’t have enough similar positions to absorb all of the Boeing employees without them having to significantly reskill. Not to mention after you build airplanes going to build most anything else might feel like a downgrade.

Unless you are talking about a very specific period in the last ten years, Boeing's stock has not "shot up". It is barely up over the last decade in a period when the total US market has nearly tripled.

Boeing stock is worth 4x what it was 15 years ago.

It had gone up almost 10x from 2010 to 2020, then they got hammered by the obvious.

>Boeing stock is worth 4x what it was 15 years ago.

The S&P 500 is worth 5.4x over the same time period. There might have been some enthusiasm back in 2018, but in the past 5 years they've definitely underperformed.

It's the latter. They want normal union things (nothing wrong with that). Engineering is a whole different world, white collar vs. blue collar.

unions are bad for our economy. they are monopolies in themselves

I’m curious to know if you think unions are bad for the economy now, after everything they/labor have accomplished for worker rights in the last century, or if it’s those very things you consider bad for the economy?

Is child labor good for the economy? Maybe short term.

Are 16 hour workdays and subsistence pay good for the economy? That doesn’t make good consumers out of the employees.

Unions exist because people were subjected to brutal conditions and it seems very unlikely to me such conditions were conducive to a healthy economy.

Whose economy are they bad for? They are bad for the rich people's economy, and good for poor/middle class folk.

Ah yes, the economy.

Sod people. Won't somebody think of the LLCs!!!

The sheer impudence of workers demanding money for their work and whining about rent.

There are shareholders over here who don't even have a megayacht to sit around on all day.

> 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.

Let's not be naive here. People are going to strike on what they are incentivized to strike on. Not the goodness of their hearts.

They should want to influence the company to ensure they can keep their jobs, at the higher pay they want, indefinitely. There's a clear incentive: without the corporate culture fixed, they'll go from on strike to laid off when Boeing goes bankrupt before they can get the full raise.

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