[ilikehurdles]

Boeing opened its South Carolina plant to avoid a unionized workforce, and that plant has been responsible for producing these horrific excuses they call airplanes. They had the benefit of a doubt before, but now it's clear that Boeing's leadership, like that of other public companies, values cheap labor over safety.

[loceng]

Things would change if there was accountability transferred all the way along the chain of command, and then the salaries C-level executives would certainly be much more warranted; the not just fines but hard jail time argument.

[bgorman]

I'm pretty sure the 737 Max planes has been entirely assembled in Washington State, where the Boeing employees are unionized.

[cafard]

Perhaps, but the story is about 787s.

[bgorman]

Southwest doesn't even fly the 787. The article never mentioned that plane.

[tomatotomato37]

I'm not sure how unions have any relations to this. They exist as a mediator between management and workers for pay and rights; customer satisfaction or safety is completely outside their domain

[ilikehurdles]

Unions give employees the knowledge and leverage to push back against unrealistic demands, deadlines, and cost-cutting measures without retaliation. These kinds of rushed solutions causing more problems down the line are caused by a culture that rewards employees who put up with managers breathing down their neck.

[CamperBob2]

Irrelevant in this case, though. While concerns have indeed been raised about SC production quality, this particular story involves an engineering failure, not a production issue. Boeing engineers are unionized through SPEEA. They can bring the company to its knees at contract negotiation time, and they have done so in the past.

[robocat]

I disagree, it is also a production issue because:

"One whistleblower reported to the FAA that they had seen damage to the electrical wiring connected to the plane’s angle of attack sensor from a foreign object, which feeds data to the MCAS system so it can determine whether it needs to engage to prevent the plane from stalling. This wouldn’t be the first time Boeing’s manufacturing process reportedly had problems guarding plane components against foreign object debris produced by the fabrication process."

[CamperBob2]

Stuff happens. The fact that damage to a single AOA sensor -- whether in the factory or in the field -- could cause this sort of event is strictly an engineering issue.

[robocat]

It is most definitely not "strictly" an engineering issue.

By that logic you can say it is a quality control, FAA or management issue (and not an engineering issue) - because the engineering problem was not caught by other systems.

Also "engineering" created the AoA disagree alert. Whoever decided to make that an optional feature should be "strictly" at fault? Maybe it is the fault of the airlines that decided not to have that feature installed?

Engineering is just one part of a complex system so why do you think engineering should be blamed 100% for failures that occurred due to the whole system?

[vkou]

Another poster cited a small anecdote about a Boeing whistleblower:

> In another case, a whistleblower in charge of defective inventory found that some of the items marked defective were going missing and ending up installed on aircraft to meet production goals rather than wait for a proper replacement, the red paint marking them defective having been clumsily rubbed off.

In a unionized workforce, people are far more confident about pushing back on this sort of criminal bullshit, when their manager asks it of them. (Because getting rid of someone in a union shop requires a paper trail. And people making illegal demands hate, hate, hate paper trails.)

In a non-unionized workforce, the only recourse we, as the public have is to jail the line workers who scrubbed the paint, while their managers will quietly deny any wrongdoing (Of course we didn't suggest this sort of thing, of course we had no idea this was happening, of course we didn't pressure anyone into doing something so blatantly unethical, under express or implied threat of termination...)

We just told people that we need them to ship 100 parts, and waggled our eyelashes suggestively at a box labeled '100 defective parts'.

[kevin_thibedeau]

This is not a manufacturing issue. It is all on poor engineering and poor management making poor decisions.

[ogn3rd]

Gosh, it's almost like corporate greed is ruining our country.

[benttoothpaste]

In South Carolina Boeing produces 787 Dreamliners. The 737 Max is produced in Washington.