[ceejayoz]

> Managers were also urged to not hire unionized employees from the Boeing factory in Everett, where the Dreamliner is also made, according to two former employees.

> “They didn’t want us bringing union employees out to a nonunion area,” said David Kitson, a former quality manager, who oversaw a team responsible for ensuring that planes are safe to fly.

> “We struggled with that,” said Mr. Kitson, who retired in 2015. “There wasn’t the qualified labor pool locally.” Another former manager, Michael Storey, confirmed his account.

Oops.

[hinkley]

The entire 787 project plan smelled like union busting to me. I was very surprised they didn’t strike over it.

But the company also has regrets about how the project was run and vowed not to do that again. I doubt that applies to the [SC] part of the equation, though.

[ptmcc]

787 was an exercise in out of touch MBAs and execs trying to run an engineering and development program with all the worst business & management practices, and the results show.

Such a shame because the 777 program in the 90s was an excellent program to model the 787 after, but Boeing threw it all away to agitate the union, penny pinch everything, and outsource all that expertise to the lowest bidder.

Ultimately it ended up costing more to build a worse product with a long tail of severe post-launch quality and design issues.

[hinkley]

Airplane programs at Boeing are siloed. They build up a little company to run the program and then retire bits of it once production is looming. There's no guarantee that any sanity found on one program will translate to another. Or insanity.

This is why I said in another response that if Everett loses the 787 but gains 777 orders it may be bad news for the people on the 787 line but neutral news for the state. They could lay off 20,000 people, hire 12,000 of them back, and hire 8,000 new people or folks furloughed from some other program.

ETA:

> 787 was an exercise in out of touch MBAs and execs

I mentioned cynicism elsewhere. You may be right, but I always thought of it more as a Captain Ahab maneuver, where the unions are Moby Dick.

(As a child I did not know that the speech at the end of Wrath of Khan was from Moby Dick. That scene is much darker once you understand that a scholar has chosen these as his final words, knowing damned well how it ends. He will make the gesture anyway, even if the 'whale' survives.)

[xnyan]

*SC. “At least we’re not South Carolina”, the mantra of North Carolina

[hinkley]

People from Illinois pronounce it, ill eh NOY or ill uh NOY (even though proper french would be ill EE nwah) and get pissed when people from Wiscaaaahnseeehn pronounce it ILL uh noise. It is clear they are aware of this.

But people from Missouri (especially southern) may pronounce their state as misery. Having known someone who moved away from there, I'm assured this is perfectly accurate. Biases may have been involved, but 'state of misery' jokes basically write themselves.

[hinkley]

Apologies both to the fine people of North Carolina and the good people of Charleston. You do not all look the same and I did not mean to imply that Charleston has anything to do with North Carolina.

(I'm from the midwest, we take our cross-border rivalries far more seriously than should be legal, but nobody outside the midwest can tell you the difference between Iowa/Illinois/Indiana/Missouri and have no qualms about saying it to your face. The struggle is real)

[jkaptur]

I think it stands for "North Charleston" in this context.