I don’t like how every news story about the layoffs uncritically parrots the company excuse about the strike, as if decades of regulatory capture, short-term business strategy, and poor engineering and supply chain decisions by successive waves of over-paid executives didn’t sink the company.
I hold fast to the idea that if you want to find the dumbest person in the room you only need to look up the chain. The higher you go the dumber, more outwardly over-confident, and more disastrously insecure and fragile they get.
The Seattle Times is really not a good online paper, it’s honestly pretty bad. Maybe it was good back in the heyday of print when they had good streams advertiser funding, but nowadays their front page is mostly taken up by local sports related journalism. It’s frankly, kind of disturbing.
They did/do have a really good aerospace reporter who covered the most recent round of Boeing scandals, and broke a lot of the stories, but he’s not the author of this article.
I think I might even prefer the Baltimore Sun’s broke ass website just based on their exponentially lower ratio of local sports stories on the front page.
So they’re firing striking employees? I’m sure there’s no way that could possibly backfire for them.
That’s not what the article says though.
Boeing killed John Barnett
No mention of them giving $70 million to the outgoing CEO.
Oooh I hope in a few years when they go begging we can all agree that if they are too big to fail, they are too big to be a private business.
It needs to be broken up.
Or nationalized.
That’s about 17,000 people I believe.
Damn, how do they have so many people?
edit: Apparently it’s 170k total, so 17k fired.
170,000 globally, 17,000 laid off. Boeing’s competitor, Airbus, has around 150,000 employees globally, for a comparison (although Airbus doesn’t have US government contracts, as far as I know, which could explain the larger number at Boeing).
A lot of these people probably have little to do with working directly on aircraft manufacturing is my guess. IT, compliance, accounting, and marketing, to name a few. It just takes a lot to manufacture, sell, and maintain aircraft at this scale I think.
Are US govt contracts special that way? Airbus is also a major military supplier, they own Eurofighter and Eurocopter. They also have the FCAS to act as a money pit, and they are apparently the second largest space company in the world as well, they own ArianeSpace among other stuff.
A lot of Boeing positions require security clearance due to the military contracts, I’m not sure how that works in Europe but I wouldn’t be surprised if they have something similar.
I think it’s less standardized, so it’s more of a thorough background check, but I guess it’s similar.
I once applied to work at NATO and they just wanted a thorough background check.
And this does not include all the subcontractors, for example the engine is manufactured by other companies like Safran which has around 90,000 employees.
That’s certainly going to stop them from circling the drain.
I’m actually more surprised they’re still making the 767. Though I know they were heavily used for freight at one point.
Nobody wants to make wide-body airplanes these days.
Well maybe if you ate a little less, we wouldn’t need widebody airplanes!
I do not really see why this is bad. If they can exist with 10% less, why not.
