Union members cheer during a news conference following a vote count on the union contract at the IAM District 751 Main Union Hall in Seattle, Washington, US, on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. Boeing Co. factory workers are poised to walk off the job, crippling manufacturing across the planemaker’s Seattle commercial jet hub after members of its largest union rejected a contract offer and voted to strike. Photographer: M. Scott Brauer/Bloomberg
One of my major complaints about growing up in Seattle is that it was essentially a one-company town. My dad worked at Boeing when he could, but was frequently laid off — they could do that, just fire thousands of people on any downturn — and later rehired. The population was just a sponge that would serve the Boeing workforce as necessary, and when there was a major layoff the entire region would suffer. As a kid, my parents were good about insulating us from the major consequences, but did notice when suddenly we’d have to move to a more run-down house, and we’d have a lot of tuna casserole for dinner, and our dental appointments were cancelled.
Seattle has diversified since then, but Boeing is still the elephant swimming in Puget Sound, and when Boeing goes on strike, it hurts the entire region. The workers have good cause, though.
Alex Mutch, a striking aircraft inspector, said he had been saving up for the strike since he was hired five years ago.
“We have been left hanging on a leash for almost 16 years and missed out on a lot of opportunities for cost-of-living adjustments, especially with the rate inflation has gone up,” Mutch said. “My grocery bill has doubled since I moved down here. Not to mention the cost of rent.”
It’s not just Boeing that has caused this strike — it’s the whole damn system of predatory capitalism. Food prices have shot up where I live, while the grocery stores make record profits, and you can’t blame that on Boeing. There’s a whole industry thriving everywhere on buying up houses and renting them out to workers, at massive advantage to landlords. Seattle has a massive homelessness problem, with these horrible fences put up all over my old neighborhoods to prevent people from camping there, and no, they’re not building enough housing, because that would dilute the landlord’s profits. I’m supposed to be selling my mother’s old home, and I’ve gotten offers sight unseen from real estate companies that want to scoop it up fast and cheap.
Boeing offered a huge salary increase, and it wasn’t enough.
Under the agreement, the average pay for machinists would have risen from $75,608 to $106,350 per year without overtime, according to the company. But workers said the offer failed to take into account the high cost of living in the Seattle region and the years that employees had gone without significant raises.
There’s another major factor affecting workers. People don’t want to leave Washington state. It’s a beautiful, pleasant place to leave, but management would love to relocate the plants to a cheaper, less idyllic location, where they could save money with a new assortment of less highly trained workers. This has happened multiple times, where they announce that they want to relocate people who have built lives in that gorgeous state.
Union members said they have been frustrated for years with Boeing’s tactics, including threats to move airliner production out of the region.
My dad always wanted to work at Boeing, where the pay was good and the benefits were great, but I guarantee you that if he’d been told he was being relocated to Oklahoma he would have quit on the spot. Sorry, Oklahoma, I’m sure you’re a lovely state, but compared to the west coast…no, just no.
This issue comes up in multiple stories, but it’s always understated, for some reason. The WaPo has an article titled Why Boeing workers voted to strike after rejecting proposed deal, which doesn’t actually say much about why, except this one sentence, which also mention the relocation concerns.
Boeing machinists, who build the company’s flagship planes, have not had a new contract in 16 years and have been bargaining for months over higher pay, better benefits and a promise from the company that it will keep assembling its planes in Washington state.
I think this is probably a bigger issue than anyone is reporting. Boeing has a deep scar in its heart from the McDonnell-Douglas merger that ended up replacing expert, engineering-based management with a gang of clowns with MBAs who moved everything to Chicago, leading to the current crop of woes, such as airplane doors blowing out and a space capsule that wasn’t safe to return in. The damage to the company’s reputation was directly caused by the displacement of skilled leadership, so it’s no surprise that workers want assurances that they’re not going to be similarly replaced.
This is another consequence of predatory capitalism. You know who else is feeling the effects? NASA. A couple of billionaires decide to exploit the expertise generated by NASA, and suddenly there’s a brain drain that’s dismantling an institution. A panel met to review the status of the agency, and they did not have good things to say.
A panel of independent experts reported this week that NASA lacks funding to maintain most of its decades-old facilities, could lose its engineering prowess to the commercial space industry, and has a shortsighted roadmap for technology development.
SpaceX has not been an entirely positive force on the space industry.
The panel members also spotlighted concerns they heard from NASA employees that an increasing reliance on commercial partners could decay the skills of the agency’s workforce. The committee acknowledged the successes of NASA’s commercial cargo and crew program, which are based on fixed-price service contracts, but cautioned that excessive use of such contracts puts NASA employees in oversight roles rather than hands-on engineering jobs.
This puts NASA at risk of losing its most talented engineers, who might move to companies for more rewarding and higher-paying work. “Very few of the nation’s most innovative scientists and engineers would likely seek or remain in such pure oversight positions,” the panel wrote.
“I think it’s the committee’s consensus view that the United States would be best served for its future by continuing to have engineering prowess in NASA and not have the agency just become a funding pass-through or a contract monitor,” said Kathy Sullivan, a retired space shuttle astronaut and former administrator of NOAA.
This chart shows the condition of NASA facilities, divided by center and discipline. A red circle means poor, yellow means fair to marginal, and green means compliant. The size of the circle corresponds to the number of facilities at each center.
Capitalists always undervalue the importance of people and expertise — they treat them as trivially fungible. I’m just reminded that one of the biggest obstacles to rebuilding Notre Dame, or building a new, equivalent construction, is that the knowledge and skill of expert stonemasons has faded away over the centuries. We’ve got stone, we’ve got timber, we have machines that enable heavy construction work, but we don’t have the deep knowledge of generations of masons anymore, and we’d have to reconstruct the appropriate technologies all over again, at great expense.
Boeing and NASA are repositories of practical knowledge that you can’t quickly replace, especially not when our current system would think you can just swap in Elon Musk to take over 75-100 years of hard-earned expertise.
I remember those days.
Everyone in northwestern Washington had a relative working for Boeing at one time, or knew someone who was working for Boeing at one time.
When Boeing was in a recession, the saying, sometimes seen on billboards was, “Would the last person to leave Seattle turn out the lights.”
A common practice. My first job was with a major glass products manufacturer. One of the plants has nearby company housing that it would rent to employees. It decided to get out of the rental business and sold its units to employees at a bargain price. About six months later it closed its plant and relocated its operations to another state.
I also worked for a government department. In an effort to reduce staff and win votes the government relocated to a regional centre about 100 miles north. It lost nearly 2/3rds of its staff and went from government owned premises to rented premises on land owned by the minister’s family and that was the least of his corrupt behaviour. All told he stood to benefit to the tune of $900 million from insider trading and control of licenses. The real hit came to the functions of the department which had a statutory responsibility to monitor various aspects of industry safety. It took nearly two years to replace specialist staff who resigned rather than relocate. In the interim it couldn’t meet those responsibilities. The final outcome of it was 3 successive ministers being convicted and jailed for corruption. The rot was so deep that the last minister convicted came into the job when the opposition party took over government.
Saw that long ago in the Bay area.
.1. Successful drug biotech company replaced the founders with experienced business people, at the insistence of institutional stockholders on the BOD.
.2. The new CEO didn’t understand what those people in T shirts and tennis shoes were doing but knew they were expensive. This was the “technical staff” aka…scientists.
.3. They got rid of the technical staff in order of most valuable first.
.4. Nothing happened.
Literally.
Drug discovery and development just stopped.
.5. In a year or two, the company was starting to fail and go under.
The BOD met in emergency session and fired the CEO for cause, the cause being clueless about running a drug company.
.6. It wasn’t enough and they were sold to a large pharmaceutical company.
.7. The new management and CEO spent years rebuilding R&D. It worked so that they still exist but they never regained completely what they had lost.
Working people with skills being treated by predatory capitalists as disposable is not new. My dad, who was trained as an architectural drafter, retired in 1985 after almost 40 years in his profession. He, and other drafters his age, were being replaced by higher-paid people with two-year junior college degrees. They had experience with the new computer programs but zero experience actually translating that into reality. That had been a problem at that company for years: When a nuclear power plant was being built by the company, my dad noticed that the plans for one section had been printed backwards. He complained, the complaint made its way upstairs, and the answer came back: ignore the problem. Dad said the guy who made the decision had an MBA but had never read a blueprint, and everyone knew it. So the nuclear power plant gets built, aaaaand, a whole section is built backwards, has to be torn down and rebuilt, at great expense to the company. Who’s held responsible? Not the know-nothing who approved the bad plans. Oh, no: it was my dad, who had 30+ years of experience drafting plans, who had called attention to the bad plans, and who had been told to ignore the problem. He was demoted, threatened, and retired at that decreased salary a few years later. That’s what happens when long-time expertise is lost. That plant, FYI, is Diablo Canyon, on the southern California coast, which has been having many problems for years. Including the fact that geologists have warned since the time it was built that it’s close to an active earthquake fault. Just like they ignored dad’s warning about the plans for the plant, the company ignored the geologists’ warnings…Because it’s more profitable to do so. The company, Pacific Gas and Electric has been getting repeated rate increases, because they haven’t bothered to maintain equipment. That’s cost lots of damage, especially from fires, and the company is offloading those costs onto regular people. Ignoring experience has lots of downstream effects.
We used to say when Boeing sneezes, Seattle catches a cold.
Isn’t “predatory capitalism” tautological?
@6: Yes.
This ode to NASA is written as though the Rogers Commission never happened and NASA wasn’t notorious for being a bureaucratic environment that cut corners to come in under budget and cost 14 astronauts their lives in the space shuttle program alone, making the NASA designed space shuttle perhaps the most deadly vehicle in history.
Putting budget conscious government bureaucrats beholden to the political winds of fortune in charge of engineering is not a good idea and has been recognized as a very bad idea for at least 40 years.
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“Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, commonly referred to as SpaceX, is an American spacecraft manufacturer, launch service provider and satellite communications company headquartered at the SpaceX Starbase near Brownsville, Texas. The company was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with the goal of reducing space transportation costs by designing for reusability and ultimately developing a sustainable colony on Mars.”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX)
@8 whereas leaving engineering to private equity MBAs and fascist pseudo-technologists like Elon will surely work out perfectly
BTW, if anyone is thinking 14 deaths isn’t that much – I googled and a total of 848 people flew on the NASA space shuttle. That means you had a 1 in 60 chance of not surviving.
For comparison, I also googled the chance of being killed in a commercial airliner. It’s estimated at 1 in 10 million.
But please – tell us more about NASA’s briliant engineering expertise, and how we should be concerned engineers prefer to work for enterprises that aren’t hopelessly compromised by pork barrel politics.
If corporations are people, finance people killing great companies should be prosecuted.
<sarcasm> No, Oklahoma is not “a lovely state” for those without plenty of excess liquid capital (that is, below the C suite). In the 80s, it was horrifically anti-union and anti-non-Protestant… and those were its good points. Plus, they didn’t take PZ’s father’s job, just PZ’s father’s basketball team! </sarcasm>
All seriousness aside, the comparison between “NASA engineering culture” and “commercial airline safety” is very similar to “lab safety of 17th-century alchemists” and “lab safety of 1970s high school chemistry students” — or, more to the point, “pilot/passenger casualty rates in 1912 aircraft” versus “pilot/passenger casualty rates in 2012 aircraft (even when someone is shooting at them).”† This is not to say that NASA had/has no problems; it is only to say that comparing “building stuff to explore places nobody has ever explored before, in environments we’ve never experienced before and about which we are using our best guesses of what’s actually there” to “commercial exploitation by nonexperts supported by a century or more of silent and hidden safety experience, even when coopted by greed” is not even credible enough to call “ludicrous.”
tl;dr Don’t compare safety statistics in real time during an experimental phase to safety statistics developed decades later in a commercial-exploitation phase.
† Specific example: The per-sortie casualty rate of purely-civilian aircraft and environments of the nascent US Air Mail service only a few years later was approximately ten times the per-sortie casualty rate of US combat-with-people-shooting-at-them aircraft in Vietnam in 1969… not to mention that the latter was much more survivable (that silly “parachute” thingy, for one).
Lol comparing passenger planes to the space shuttle is a hilarious take.
@8. Silentbob :
History is lonmg and strnage and full of horrors as wellas incredible achievements. Theportion we e experienced inour lifetimes is short and even the partof history that has had heavier than air flying machines is extremely short -really only about 1900 till now so a blink of an eye relative to even historically known vehicles and vessels.
When Magellan saild off to circumnavigate the globe and find spices for Europeans he started with five sailing ships and 270 odd men (& they were almost certainly all men), one ship, three years later with 18 survivors made it back “successfuly” led by Juan Sebastián Elcano as Magellan himself had perished on the voyage.. Admittedly 55 more survived froma ship that turned back earlier and 12 more were captured by the Portugese military. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellan_expedition)
Sir Francis Drake similarly led the second global circumnavigation again with five ships and over a hundred men. One ship – the Pelican which been renamed the Golden Hind made it home this time with its pirate explorer captain surviving along with 59 crew. They ha d been out of contact for years and been presumed lost a sother explorers of that era and later eras frequently were.
Many battleships of course were lost with all hands or very close to. Even inthe aviation age earlieat fighters and bombers and barnstormers and explorers frequently vanished or fell from the skies killing all aboard.
It only killed one person – because it only flew one person but my vote for most deadly vehicle would be the Soyuz 1 flight :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_1
Rather than the Space Shuttle.
Although I guess it all depedns on how you look at things.
Then there’s the Titan submersible, ancient slave ships and more..
Yeah, I guess its absurd to compare Magellan’s galleons with the Space Shuttle too or is it? Guess it depedns how youlook at things, what perspective you take, comparing in what regards, etc.. Still..
I also still miss the Space Shuttles which were amazing to see launched and under-rated in their achievements and capabilities in my view. Sure they had their issues including safety ones, still.
PPS. NASA, bureaucrtic over=–regulated, conservative NASA decided that the Sapce Shuttle was safe tofly again after bioth disasters.
They also decided that Boeing’s Starliner wasn’t safe to take its two crew back to Earth just this year.
Does that maybe, say something about which of those vehicles is more deadly? If I had a chance to fly on either I know which I’d choose.
FWIW. When I tried searching for deadliest vehicles I got a list of cars of course. The one’s Nader wrote about :Unsafe at any Speed*) frex would have to be up there.
.* See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed:_The_Designed-In_Dangers_of_the_American_Automobile
Then there’s a train apparently dubbed called The Beast that’s taking refugees from mexico intothe USA that’s going to be the topic of newsprogram Dateline on SBS TV tonight if that counts a sa vehicle
I know that’s not what you were meaning and these things are all very different and hard to compare. I guess we have to put that down to being too braod and vague and subjective a claim to really asess and calculaet and determine.
II could I ‘spose note what those old 16th century ships brought with them to the “New World” interms of germs and stell as wellas guns but again.. anyhow. .
Fuck’s sake. I did mean to hit preview not post there. Sigh. Sorry all.
Hope ppl get the gist. History is very long and “deadliest” is very hard to define and subjective and relative in the shell of a nut.
If folks can see it? That Datreline newsdoco on the migrants “Beast” will be broadcast on telly at 9.30 pm c3 here locally for those (few? Many? Some?) living in South Oz currently.:
https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/news-series/dateline/dateline-2024/dateline-s2024-ep26/2302959683909