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CharlesColeman | 6 years ago
Unions empower employees, and the quality control issues were getting raised by employees and getting ignored by management. Empowered employees could have more effectively pushed back.
Also, the union employees were more qualified to do this type of work. However management gave instructions not to hire any, so the Boeing hired less qualified non-union people to assemble the planes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...
> A New York Times review of hundreds of pages of internal emails, corporate documents and federal records, as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, reveals a culture that often valued production speed over quality. Facing long manufacturing delays, Boeing pushed its work force to quickly turn out Dreamliners, at times ignoring issues raised by employees....
> Mr. Barnett, who filed a whistle-blower complaint with regulators, said he had repeatedly urged his bosses to remove the [dangerous metal] shavings [near wiring]. But they refused and moved him to another part of the plant....
> 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....
> In the interest of meeting deadlines, managers sometimes played down or ignored problems, according to current and former workers. Mr. Barnett...learned in 2016 that a senior manager had pulled a dented hydraulic tube from a scrap bin, he said. He said the tube, part of the central system controlling the plane’s movement, was installed on a Dreamliner. Mr. Barnett said the senior manager had told him, “Don’t worry about it.” He filed a complaint with human resources, company documents show....
> But several former employees said high-level managers pushed internal quality inspectors to stop recording defects. Cynthia Kitchens, a former quality manager, said her superiors penalized her in performance reviews and berated her on the factory floor after she flagged wire bundles rife with metal shavings and defective metal parts that had been installed on planes.“It was intimidation,” she said. “Every time I started finding stuff, I was harassed.”...
> Mr. Barnett was reprimanded in 2014 for documenting errors. In a performance review seen by The Times, a senior manager downgraded him for “using email to express process violations,” instead of engaging “F2F,” or face to face. He took that to mean he shouldn’t put problems in writing. The manager said Mr. Barnett needed to get better at “working in the gray areas and help find a way while maintaining compliance.”
rumanator|6 years ago
That assertion relies on a lot of hand waving and unrealistic claims. If the problem was that "objects" were being left everywhere in the planes that were being delivered, those objects weren't being left out by management while they were pushing paper in their office. Thus even if it's an operations problem caused by the lack of worker oversight then this means the problem is being created by the worker's lack of care and attention to detail.
Thim means its either a process problem, which unions have absolutely nothing to do with, or it's an incompetence problem which actually is addressed by the exact opposite of what a union does: increase worker scrutiny and quality control. I mean, when was the last time you heard a Union representative state "yes we are to blame for this... Better ramp up oversight and penalties for us screwing up our job."