Thread: More problems for Boeing

Originally Posted by Milland

Ask the workers at VW, Mercedes, or BMW if they'd prefer not to be in a union. I suspect they're pretty happy with theirs. And are German cars not exceptional?

some are and some aren't. Ask a Mini owner about his cam chain......

Originally Posted by moonlight machine

Ask a Mini owner about his cam chain......

Ask a Corvair owner about his engine falling out

Originally Posted by EmanuelGoldstein

Ask a Corvair owner about his engine falling out

That was a safety feature. If the engine fell out, the rear swing arms couldn't jack the car over on its roof.

(Yes, I know the Corvair, especially the later ones, were much better cars then they got credit for)

Originally Posted by moonlight machine

some are and some aren't. Ask a Mini owner about his cam chain......

Heh. I have my own opinions about the "engineering" on some German cars, like the famous BMW M46 rear suspension pickups ripping out, or coolant system failures. And With a Merc, it's probably best to lease it and save on the cost of repairs after the warranty runs out.

Porsche does seem to have a good reliability rep, at least compared to the other makes.

Originally Posted by steve-l

Unions do nothing for the exceptional. They only support the weak. Personal assessment drives an individual's opinion.

this here,is so not true,as the lad with the hole in his foot
isnt.
Gw

Originally Posted by Greg White

this here,is so not true,as the lad with the hole in his foot
isnt.
Gw

How can you possibly say that. The exceptional employee should be rewarded better than others. Unions prevent that. On the other hand the lesser employee is both protected and supported by unions. This makes my very simple statement perfectly true. Therefore an individual's opinion of unions pretty much is a product of his self assessment.

Originally Posted by Milland

Ask the workers at VW, Mercedes, or BMW if they'd prefer not to be in a union. I suspect they're pretty happy with theirs. And are German cars not exceptional?

AFAIK you cannot compare unions in the US with those in Germany or over here (NL)

Peter

Originally Posted by Peter from Holland

AFAIK you cannot compare unions in the US with those in Germany or over here (NL)

Peter

Why? I see little difference. My statement is crystal clear. It is about the individual's self assessment, not the product of his employer.

I worked at a large aerospace connector OEM that due to a consolidation was desperate for bodies at the same time Boeing had a massive lay-off. The shop I worked at had great pay and benefits for a non union shop in So Cal. Boeing people flooded in seeking work. Long story short, on top of getting paid 50-75% more than what we paid, none of them had the versatility for lack of a better word than what a lot of our guys had. I was shocked when they described how things worked in a union shop. The CNC guys were not allowed to do any program editing and didn't make any of their own tooling. The guys who ran cam automatics weren't allowed to do even minor maintenance to the machines. I think if we pretended to be Boeing for a week our productivity would drop by 25%+.
We needed about a dozen guys and only two were hired out of the Boeing lot. Both guys were in their late 50's and it took a while to retrain them and rid them of their learned helplessness. Fortunately they hadn't even spent half their working years at Boeing.

That was over 30 years ago, but if that is still the Boeing way I would suspect they save a ton of money by outsourcing.

Originally Posted by steve-l

How can you possibly say that. The exceptional employee should be rewarded better than others. Unions prevent that. On the other hand the lesser employee is both protected and supported by unions. This makes my very simple statement perfectly true. Therefore an individual's opinion of unions pretty much is a product of his self assessment.

The place I mentioned above had a union drive and the company even allowed the union to conduct meetings in the auditorium. Most all the top people were against the union, every single one of the slackers and hacks were for the union. The union was voted down by a huge margin.

We had one finishing operator who wasn't worth a crap tried to get a union in our plant.No one was interested.

The owner had two plants that he bought that were union.
The one in La. after a year the Union went on strike demanding a 10% increase in benefits and wages. Owner told them when the plant started showing a profit he would talk. They went on strike and he promptly closed the plant.

He bought a plant in Stockton and the employees went on strike not for wages but wanted him to only promote from within. He closed that one too. Some of our guys were out there moving equipment and ran into some strikers in a local bar. They were moving a Hiedelburg press out and the strikers told them that the old man was just bluffing! It cost a shit load of money to move and set up one of those presses, hardly a bluffing matter. We are using it as a west coast warehouse now. They should have studied the owners history with unions before they went on strike. As a sole owner no one is going to tell him how to run his business.

Originally Posted by steve-l

How can you possibly say that. The exceptional employee should be rewarded better than others. Unions prevent that. On the other hand the lesser employee is both protected and supported by unions. This makes my very simple statement perfectly true. Therefore an individual's opinion of unions pretty much is a product of his self assessment.

Where that all falls down is - who decides who is exceptional ? Shop foremans son in law will obviously be exceptional, in the foremans eyes. I've worked at shops were everybody was on a different rate of pay and it ends up as a race to the bottom.

Regards Tyrone.

When I was in the Site test section, the union did an anonymous survey of pay and grade for all the engineers in the company every year. We discovered that we averaged £2,000 per year less than the design engineers for the same level of seniority (my pay at the time was £6,000 per year). When we took this to our management we were told that it was because we worked a lot of overtime (at time+ 1/4) and worked abroad for large parts of the year. Apparently an 84 hour standard working week living out of a suitcase in a tropical shit hole was worth less per hour than a 39 hour standard working week living at home and walking to work.

We got a pay rise out of it....

Unions can be good as well as bad.

Originally Posted by steve-l

How can you possibly say that. The exceptional employee should be rewarded better than others. Unions prevent that. On the other hand the lesser employee is both protected and supported by unions. This makes my very simple statement perfectly true. Therefore an individual's opinion of unions pretty much is a product of his self assessment.

couldnt have put it better. fuck unions.

Originally Posted by steve-l

Unions do nothing for the exceptional. They only support the weak. Personal assessment drives an individual's opinion.

In general - unions drive wages up for everybody. When hourly folks are getting paid really well, how do you imagine companies incentivize them to go into management or support roles?

Originally Posted by Dualkit

Boeing people flooded in seeking work. Long story short, on top of getting paid 50-75% more than what we paid, none of them had the versatility for lack of a better word than what a lot of our guys had.

Again, please be careful with the anecdotes. I spent a lot of time at Boeing; first as an hourly worker, then in a salary position (both union BTW). I knew a lot of really talented people who worked full careers there, and had never been laid off. However, some of the worst performers seemed to get laid off every 4 or 5 years. Which group do you imagine were the lot seeking to go to work at your shop for a massive wage cut?

Let me just say too, I am SO damn tired of all of the union hate. Anyone who applies binary thinking on this subject is showing a ton of ignorance.

It seems like every couple of weeks there is a thread complaining about the lack of new talent in this industry. Then a week later there will be another thread bashing on unions.

Have you ever noticed that there are NEVER shortages of young people lining up around the block to get into the really good union trades? Firefighters, linemen, heavy equipment operators - those trades get their pick of talent from the new crop. Meanwhile wages in manufacturing suck, but a bunch of us are happy to be at the bottom of the wage pool, as long as we think we are doing better than the guy working next to us. This "me first" thinking is not only disgusting, but it's against our own best interests.

There are a couple of big union shops around here that (as Dualkit said) pay 50% more than everybody else. If those places weren't around driving competition for the most talented people, wages at the top would drop. You don't get top programmers making 150k/yr if all of the top machinists are making 50k/yr.

Originally Posted by boosted

It seems like every couple of weeks there is a thread complaining about the lack of new talent in this industry. Then a week later there will be another thread bashing on unions.

Oh please go and fly a fucking kite will'ya!

Around here Pratt & Whitney is famously known for sniping good talent away from their very own suppliers when the need arises.
They don't teach a friggin' thing to anyone inside, they don't support the local schools, they don't even hire out of the local schools.

Other, non union shops do that. They provide financial aid to the schools AND they hire the better guys after graduation.
What is their benefit at the end? P&W swoops in, hire the guys they need and let the local shops pound sand and start over again.

Originally Posted by SeymourDumore

Around here Pratt & Whitney is famously known for sniping good talent away from their very own suppliers when the need arises. They don't teach a friggin' thing to anyone inside, they don't support the local schools, they don't even hire out of the local schools.

Other, non union shops do that. They provide financial aid to the schools AND they hire the better guys after graduation.
What is their benefit at the end? P&W swoops in, hire the guys they need and let the local shops pound sand and start over again.

So why is the union to blame for P&W's shitty ethics?

Hell, I would even argue that some of those places develop such strong unions to protect their workforce from the shitty corporate ethics.

Originally Posted by boosted

So why is the union to blame for P&W's shitty ethics?

.

The other way 'round boy, it's P&W to be blamed for the shitty, useless union they've allowed to morph into.
I have had two guys that went from a bicycle messenger and a commercial fisherman to become union machinists.
I take absolutely no credit for their development, all I did is provide a job and base knowledge while they've attended school.
After that they both went straight to a 40+ hour job after graduation.
They a couple of years later both got picked up by P&W.
Good for them as far as pay rate, but!!!

There is not one useful thing they've learned in the last 4 years since getting there!
They are not allowed to do anything outside of their scope for any reason at any time!

Bottom line is that they are both happy to be where they are, but they both know that if/when shit hits the fan they will both be far less employable than those in the "wild".
Not my words, theirs.

I'm going to drop back for a bit here, seeing as this is now a "Union" thread.

May I gently point out that there would be NO unions if it weren't for rapacious management? Where squeezing every dollar out of the workers by employing children and anyone else they can get for pennies, while enforcing draconian work rules, pay take-backs, company stores (anyone remember them?), and safety rules?

What safety rules!!??

It's always a funny thing. It's like sheep voting in a more brutal butcher to be their final destination - something I don't understand.

But then, you can guess who I voted for...>>>

And now back to Boeing. Isn't there general agreement here (and in the world) that the loss of the engineering culture and the rise of the bean-counters from McDonnell-Douglas was what brought on the MAX, and the FOD issues in the "re-homed" South Carolina 787 (the plane some customers refuse to buy)?

Both these issues and more are from MANAGEMENT looking for the cheapest way, the way that got MANAGEMENT the biggest bennies at the end of the year (or quarterly) due to fiscal performance, rather than how good a plane they made and sold?

And how did that work out? The 787 and MAX issues were already beating on Boeing stock value BEFORE Covid, and made them vastly more susceptible to harm from the drop in the airline market.

This is what's so weird about America. In Western Europe the unions and the corporate management for the most part work hand-in-hand, as they realize that work conditions that benefit both (trained, capable workers and solid, effective management) lead to a more profitable, sustainable company for all parties.

So what if the very top doesn't make 1000X what the line worker gets.

Maybe that's a good thing?

[Just waiting for the shouts of "Commie!". Like I said, sheep who love their butcher]