The next-generation airliner is billions of dollars over budget and about three years late; the first paying passengers won’t be boarding until this fall, if then. Some of the delay stems from the plane’s advances in design, engineering and material, which made it harder to build. A two-month machinists strike in 2008 didn’t help.
But much of the blame belongs to the company’s quantum leap in farming out the design and manufacture of crucial components to suppliers around the nation and in foreign countries such as Italy, Sweden, China, and South Korea. Boeing’s dream was to save money. The reality is that it would have been cheaper to keep a lot of this work in-house.
Note to LA Times: Send one of your crack reporters to figure out why Boeing is moving to Charleston, Right-to-Work, SC. It isn’t outsourcing, its unions.
… and of course what’s going to happen is that things are at least initially going to go poorly in SC because a lot of the knowledge/skill is going to insist on staying in Washington state.
#2–That’s what the union president said. The people in SC are only capable of being WalMart greeters. Contrary to popular belief and Hollywood culture, many of us in the South actually wear shoes and can count without assistance. 1. I bet the union president’s comments will be shown with regularity during the (unsuccessful) union campaign 2. I bet he’s wrong. Not to mention with 10 to 20% unemployment in the Northeast/Midwest and lots of college graduates who are underemployed, I bet the Charleston plant is going to do exceedingly well, just as BMW has done exceedingly well in SC without any UAW members coming down to “help”. BMW is so successful, they have just doubled the size of their plant and their production. I also suspect Boeing doesn’t want anybody from Seattle in Charleston. That’s why they’re moving.
And here I was under the mistaken impression that shoelessness was only an issue in the far northwestern reaches of the state. Look, I read the article, and knowledge loss was a major issue in their problems. I’m sure that one southerner can still whip ten Yankees, but time will tell.
When a unionized manufacturing plant becomes unprofitable, a logical business decision is for the owners of the corporation making a product to go to a more profitable manufacturing plant, unionized or non-unionized, to make that product.
When the union-control of an entire industry forces the owners of the corporations owning the manufacturing plants of that industry to pay exorbitant wages, benefits and retirements to its workers, then those excessive payments are ultimately passed on to the consumer and often result in the consumer making purchase choices that damage the economic viability of that entire industry.
The extra money that the consumer pays for a unionized product that has had its prices excessively ‘jacked up’ by an industry-wide unionization is worse than a ‘tax upon the consumer.’
It is an ‘extortion of money’ from the consumer, not the industry, by unionized labor.
And of course, extortion is a form of organized criminal behavior.
I don’t think greed is limited to people in blue collars.
Reply to BlueOntario (#6.).
I don’t think that “greed” is limited only to people in blue collars either.
But extortion is extortion and in the case of many unions, they extort from employers monies that go well beyond (often far beyond) what is ethically justified in collective bargaining.
#4–I think the LA Times article is VERY biased against the South and non-union labor. The same things were said about BMW when they moved here and they were completely wrong. I think most of LA/DC/NY elites view us as the flyover, and they are wrong. And if that idiot Ewell had attacked Culp’s Hill on July 1…
Is southern, non-union labor up to the task???? Apparently, Mercedes(AL), Kia(AL), Hyundai(AL), BMW(SC), Nissan(MS), Toyota(MS), Nissan(TX) seem to think so.
For all the anti-union sentiment here it seems to be being missed that the problem at Boeing is not potential (and therefore dismissable) but already realized.
# 9, Kia is in GA, but your point is well-made.
And I suspect that the major part of the reason for out-sourcing is political. Boeing wants to sell the airliner all over the world and it is a lot easier to sell it to, for example, Korean Airlines if there are Korean companies involved in building it. It’s exactly like the US military. Why are subcontractors for a major system spread all over the country? Because the Generals know that, as long as a Senator has a subcontractor in his state, he’ll continue to vote for funding.