Just a Reader
Member
Oh, well, I'm so impressed. Apparently you were the backbone of both the US and the UK's aircraft and shipbuilding industry all on your own. I'm also sure it was the extended ciggy breaks and and overly strict separation of work-duties that broke the back of Boeing's commercial aircraft busines. By no means can it be attributed to poor product and project planning, that saw huge cost and time overruns at the Dreamliner project and that was the cause for the stitched-together 737 Max. It was the ciggy breaks, not huge share buy-backs and inflated compensation packages for the executive suite, like the one that saw a failed executive like Muilenburg walk away with a $58 million package. That would have bought an awful lot of ciggy breaks.Care to share your firsthand knowledge on this subject?
I’ll give you mine.
I’ve worked in an industry and for my company for 14 years. Boeing, Spirit Aerosystems, Airbus, Northrup Grumman, NASA, and other major aerospace manufacturers are our direct customers.
I’ve taught classes to employees at the Boeing facilities in Everett, WA and Charleston, VA.
I’ve worked on the factory floor with employees at Spirit Aerosystems in Kinston, SC and Tulsa, OK.
Designed, personally installed, and tested systems for the A350 at the Airbus factory outside Chester, UK.
Unions absolutely without a doubt are a contributing factor toward increased cost and lowered productivity.
At one facility, there was a mandatory 10 minute smoke break every hour. Yes. Every hour, 50 minutes after the hour, I was forced to stop teaching and wait ten minutes as a horn blew, all factory workers walked to the nearest door, and went outside. Puff puff, then horn again and back to work on the hour. Right there, a union policy encouraging lung cancer for its members.
While working a manufacturing issue, I once sat at a station on the floor waiting 30+ minutes for a union-authorized forklift operator to move something out of our way. There were several workers there trained to operate a forklift and it would have taken us 2 minutes to do ourselves. But only certain union members could drive forklifts, so we had to wait. It wasn’t an issue of worker health or safety that wasted that time. It was the union ensuring that nobody could take that forklift operator’s job, regardless of the expense or lost production time.
How about shipbuilding? I used to work at Northrop Grumman in Newport News, VA where we built nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. Plenty on union BS there too. Want to unbolt one flange from another? Gotta wait for the union pipefitter to operate the socket wrench, even though the mechanical engineer who literally designed the flange is highly qualified in the operation of socket wrenches.
Lots of stories like that. And I lived it. And saw a lot of it.
But I’m sure the New York Times reporter who doesn’t know how the A350 wings are QA inspected, or how we join 747 wings to the fuselage by premeasuring the assemblies and pre-manufacturing the shims via virtual fitup has more accurate, firsthand real-world knowledge on how unions affect things. His next story was probably about condom distribution in third-world countries, of which I’m sure he dispensed information as an informed expert.
Or maybe a guy who just reads over in Germany has a better idea and I should trust the information he read in a paper?
Funny how Boeing was at its peak when its production was run in Washington.
Anyway, the assumption that unions operate the same way in Europe as they do in the UK and in the US is nonsense.