[nickff]

The trope is that the South Carolina facility is largely un-unionized (because it's in a freedom-to-work state), which has caused poor quality. I have not seen any clear evidence of this, as all Boeing facilities seem to have QC issues. On a related note, I'm not sure how Boeing's QC compares to Airbus, though both seem to have similar aircraft availability rates, which would indicate similar levels of QC.

[panick21_]

SpaceX manufacturing facility in California is also un-unionized. The amount of difference between the two places is very large, to just conclude that it has to do with unions seems like a stretch to me.

That one factory is the home factory close to where the designs are made and the other is so far away seems like a pretty important thing.

This seems like the kind of argument people who really love unions would make.

[ncmncm]

Where you have unions, people are not as afraid of management pressure.

When the management pressure is for better quality, the union may interfere. Where management pressure is for lower quality, the union should interfere.

We see the harmful effect of unions where the police are in one.

[woodruffw]

Among other things: the safety tolerances for SpaceX are substantially different than those for commercial airliners. When a SpaceX launch craft fails, it explodes somewhere over the ocean or in LEO. When a commercial passenger airliner fails, several hundred human beings die.

[ncmncm]

SpaceX management is currently oriented to both high quality and high production rate. When their commitment to quality slips, such as traded off for production rate, quality will slip. When quality in a rocket engine slips, they explode.

When that starts, we may expect they will start by exploding mainly on test stands, instead of vehicles.

[woodruffw]

How many launch failures have been attributed to materials failures in the engines themselves, and not improper process and/or maintenance before actual launches?

My intuition is that the latter would exceed the former, and that test stands aren’t a realistic environment for predicting their likelihood.

[ncmncm]

Probably the main difference from operating bolted to a test stand is vibration both from its own operation and from all the other engines operating at the same time, and instabilities in fuel flow caused by the same. The bottom end of a launching rocket is a really hostile environment. Just the noise would kill you. Top is marginally better, depending on what happens at the bottom.

It is hard to imagine how you would determine, after the fact, whether a rocket blew up because of material failure or something else, but they seem to do it, anyway during development when they have a zillion sensors attached logging everything in real time: "hmm, a millisecond before the explosion, this reading went out of tolerance, and then this one, then this one, and then the data ends."

[timgebrally]

There are Falcon 9 launches carrying humans on crewed Dragon launches. SpaceX carries people to orbit and to the ISS.

[masklinn]

> The trope is that the South Carolina facility is largely un-unionized (because it's in a freedom-to-work state)

FWIW "right to work" is the normal terminology.

[justinjlynn]

"Freedom to work" and "Right to work" are both Orwellian euphemistic terms, to be honest. Realistically, it's best described as "mutual right to terminate employment without cause" or just "right to terminate".

[blendergeek]

You are thinking of "at-will" employment [0]. That is a separate issue from "right-to-work" which has to do with labor unions [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law

[ncmncm]

"Right to work" has everything to do with labor unions.

[masklinn]

> "Freedom to work" and "Right to work" are both Orwellian euphemistic terms, to be honest.

The latter is essentially a term of art, the former is not. Using the former is imprecise and confusing.

> Realistically, it's best described as "mutual right to terminate employment without cause" or just "right to terminate".

That is a completely different concept called at-will employment. RTW is about union shops (not to be confused with closed shops, which have been illegal in the US since Taft-Hartley)

[nickff]

They're euphemisms, but I am not sure they're Orwellian. How would you say they're Orwellian?

It's better to just allow people to name their own movement, otherwise, you end up endlessly fighting about names (i.e. are people 'pro-life' or 'anti-choice' and 'pro-murder'/'anti-life' and 'pro-choice').

[masklinn]

> They're euphemisms, but I am not sure they're Orwellian. How would you say they're Orwellian?

Right to work laws do not in any way provide a right to work.

[djbebs]

They do though

[masklinn]

No, not in any sense of the word. There's no guarantee that you'll get any job let alone a specific one in an RTW state. Therefore it's not a right to anything. It's just union busting.

Especially since RTW legislation is not about closed shops (which are illegal at the federal level), so these were jobs you could always get.

[kwertyoowiyop]

It does mean the opposite of what the phrase might normally imply.

[Dylan16807]

I don't blame you for confusing the terms but I am so upset that the average person upvoted you without checking. You have the wrong term, and I'm going to comment here just to give people an extra chance to know that.

[rootusrootus]

Or perhaps "right to freeload"?

[masklinn]

…

What?

[rootusrootus]

That's the whole point of 'right to work.' Allow new employees to freeload on the union-negotiated rates for the shop without requiring them to actually join the union. Who would pay if they got the benefits anyway? So the union gets defunded.

[deltarholamda]

Interestingly, back when Jesse Jackson was in the news a lot, he did a lot of advocating for Right-to-Work legislation. The idea was that unions were racially discriminating against blacks, and RtW laws prevented this.

Goes to show... something, I guess.