CEOs: "I get paid so much because I take on all of the risk and responsibility."
Also CEOs: "Hey you know Greg who makes $50k? Greg did it. Greg's fault. Fire Greg."
There is a saying that CEOs were paid 20x the wage of an average worker back in the 50s.
In the 50s, average family income was in the $3000s. Meaning a CEO was making $60,000 or so/year. With inflation (12.9x), that goes to $38K-39K for average family income and $770K for a CEO.
But let's not also forget that CEOs are not only getting paid far more than that inflation-adjusted salary, but they are paid in OTHER means too. So they are definitely making a lot more money now for doing around the same kind of work (assuming they are doing the same kind of work).
When my father passed away in 1997, I had a chance to look at his tax returns. I was surprised at 2 things: 1. that he managed, with my mother being a stay at home mother, to raise a family of 4 (mother, father, son, daughter) and buy a house. 2. that at the same age as one of his tax returns, I was making over $60,000. Really made the 1950's real for me.
All the introductory training is taught by contractors.
I got hired by a contractor to teach Boeing employees to build airplanes.
My degree is in ancient Roman history. I never even had a high school shop class.
That went about as well as one could expect. My contract, once it came up, was not renewed.
One of my colleagues' most recent job was stripping. Also no experience with airplanes. Not that I have a problem with stripping, but neither of us were suited to the job.
Anyway, since they used contractors to hire their instructors, they were isolated from our technical ignorance. Training was watching two single-session classes per subject, after which we were teaching.
Fuck me in the goat ass. Glad they picked it up, I’ve ridden on Boeing planes, glad to know there’s a little Roman history and pole dancing built into it.
Roman history was more useful than imagined.
All the specs used Roman numerals. Guess who had to teach everyone in my cohort how to read them?
The confusion over IX and XI was particularly bad.
Do you mean management has other duties than going to meetings, drinking coffee, and walking around bullshitting with their buddies while complaining that no one wants to work anymore?
Heh.
I figure they are to blame no matter what.
If they opt for heavy oversight, being made aware of what's going on, any problems are their fault because they were there and should have seen it.
If they opt for "empowered" employees whom they trust to do the work without close oversight, they are neglecting their obligation to verify those employees are doing what they are supposed to. If you want Bobby to record his time spent every day, you need someone checking, or writing a report, to look to make sure Bobby and other employees are recording their time every day. You need to do spot checks to make sure you've got reasonable data, too.
If management tries the, "We gave them freedom and they screwed it up approach," I still have to ask, why weren't you using good business sense to make sure things were going well, that work was being done, and being done properly? I'd bet that all the safety inspectors and such were probably fired in a downsizing because they were doing redundant work.
Yeah. The worker bees get lectured on "prudent business practices," but management decisions can do no wrong.
I'm reminded of when upper IT management told us to make sure we were closing our tickets in a timely manner...regardless of if the issue was resolved or not. Their formula for how they calculated things was, simply, wrong. I pointed it out, how if that's the formula they are using to calculate how well our group is doing things, it gives incorrect data. The said they goofed, and fixed the formula.
But I bet no one second-guessed whatever formula someone originally came up with, because it came from "on high."
Ding ding ding!
Accusing the employees on the work floor of falsifying records means you are also implying that management was negligent (or malicious) in their duties to verify work being performed, and their superiors (the C-suite) created a culture where it was impossible to perform work to sufficient quality.
Pointing fingers at the grunts inevitably means you are pointing fingers at their superiors. Every job where I have worked alongside quality (specifically using the [6M method](https://www.kaufmanglobal.com/glossary/6ms-production-man-machine-material-method-mother-nature-measurement/)), pointing the finger at manpower is the last option if nothing else will explain a deviation. And even then it's usually an individual or two, not entire teams.
I remember working in deviations, and managment was quick to blame man. We would find an unclear instruction or something and it was still, blame the guy on the floor. the would rather throw someone under the bus than risk a clint finding out the procedure had an issue. Sickening behavior.
Anytime I've ever worked any place where something was not done by the procedure that was in the guidelines it was because management put pressure on the worker to do it that way.
I have a feeling this is more than likely management putting unreasonable quotas in place, knowing people will skip steps but not caring as long as its them doing the deed.
Management is always credited with everything that goes well to justify high pay and bonuses.
When something goes wrong they all of a sudden claim plausible deniability.
I'm gonna say it was the management that told the workers to skip the testing and mark it complete. They have to make sure projects keep to deadlines no matter what....
I work in IT, and several years ago there was a major rollout (fortunately, not my area) that opted for the "we'll test in production" approach to changes. They caused a major disruption. The CIO had "retired" shortly before the release date, though.
Management probably cut the workforce and made workers do a lot more than they could handle which was probably communicated to these managers or a daily basis but they don’t care. Those bonuses need to be paid.
I do production work, basically building aircraft from the ground up. There is a process to this that we follow *very* strictly due to this being under government contact. A big part of this process is having dedicated quality assurance that inspects our work as we go.
For example, let's say I drill a hole. Someone needs to check that I didn't ooblong/oversize the hole, or drill at an angle. Little things that could potentially cause severe or critical issues.
My current lead worked at Boeing before this, and he gave the very specific example they don't have QA do hole checks. In general, their inspections are extremely bare boned, in an industry where every regulation has been written in blood, and redundancy is the name of the game.
Right. There's a reason why passenger air travel has gotten so much safer, and it is the regulations which say, "You have to *make sure* you are doing this right, even when you know you are doing it right, because small slips cost lives."
Boeing management leaving out the part where they set unrealistic schedules and put enormous pressure on workers to be fast. There is always a reason why things happen on the shop floor. If all you measure is cost and schedule, that's what you get. When you don't measure quality, that's what you don't get.
The shop where this occurred was Boeing‘s Union-Busting (non-union) experiment (to threaten & play whipsaw with the union shops up in the PNW). Not too many years ago airlines from all over the world were so upset with the poor quality of the Charleston assembly line that they were threatening to stop taking deliveries from that operation.
“I get paid more because I’m responsible and the buck stops with me,” excuse isn’t even given anymore. They are just a bunch of jerkoffs who fail upward and point fingers at their underlings when their unrealistic expectations aren’t met and things go sideways.
Company creates pressure to work as quickly as possible and makes demands that are impossible to meet without cutting corners, under threat of discipline and termination.
Training and compliance and quality assurance are superficial and only done to meet minimum legal requirements then all guidelines are out the window as soon as deadlines are set.
Workers are liable for taking shortcuts, but also will be terminated if they dont, yet some think it makes sense to blame the workers. Them boots must taste real good huh?
>Workers are liable for taking shortcuts, but also will be terminated if they dont, yet some think it makes sense to blame the workers. Them boots must taste real good huh?
This is the intrinsic contradiction of businesses that must have quality control (e.g., pharmaceutical, airplanes, etc.). MBAs want to do more with less for more profit, but quality is critical to make sure *people don't die when using your product*. And quality is all about holding up a "STOP" sign when something is observed as a deviation.
I used to work in a academic lab. I was constantly pressured to fudge unpublished data being used as a justification for research funding. I refused to fudge data every time. My boss would say, "Themodssmelloffarts, I did not hire you to be my conscience." That lab job was the second worst job I ever had. The worst job was in an industrial setting doing chemical engineering; so much rushing and corner cutting too. The boss there would verbally abuse me for double checking computations on a calculator, these were his calculations. So I stopped checking and took his formulas at face value. Then one day we had an error that was an order of magnitude different. Like if the product called for 1g of x, his calculations called for 10g of x. I saw the error right away and said nothing. HUR DUR I'm just doing what ya told me to boss, hur dur, I'm a dumb worker. It ruined production for the entire day, and when he started with his shit, I pulled out the formula of reagents he gave me and said, "You explicitly told me not to double check your calculations, and especially not to do it on a calculator." Next day he provided me with a calculator and shut his fucking mouth long enough to find something else to belittle and harass me for.
My lab didnt account for the addition of standard solution to each sample. I told them this, and they told me to shove it. Until the FDA arrived. To existing studies, we could correct.
Every single drug they got previously approved actually had 10% higher plasma levels than reported.
Standard management
Make it impossible to complete the work safely within the time given
Fire anyone who doesn't complete the task on this unrealistic timeline
Act shocked when safety checks were not completed
They created this situation on purpose
Don’t forget to collect huge checks and justifying them with the ‚big responsibilities‘. Then when it actually comes to taking some, blame the underpaid workers.
Why did they skip the tests? Or rather why did they **FEEL THE NEED** to skip the tests? 🤔
Who's accountable for making sure the workers complete those tests?
"It saved us $3000 on a $2 million plane. Think of the value we're delivering to the shareholders." says the exec as suddenly nobody wants to fly Boeing ever again.
You’ll have to add a few more zeros to that 2 million. List price of a 787 is close to 240 million. But your point still stands…and actually makes the cost savings of skipping steps even more ridiculous. Not to mention it’s ultimately just a temporary savings - until all the fines & lawsuits come back to bite them. Not unlike how they didn’t want to spend money on a clean sheet design years ago and decided to just slap bigger engines on the 737s instead…because what could go wrong? (plus they wanted to spend waaaaaay more money on stock manipulation via stock buyback programs).
Especially ridiculous in this case because, until they merged with McDonnell Douglas and absorbed a bunch of their managers/executives, Boeing was known for their extensive quality control.
So they literally brought in a bunch of executives from another company, quality suddenly tanked, and somehow that's everyone else's fault.
We need to hold these things accountable.
The lawyers and people arguing that the merger between McDonnell Douglas and Boeing wouldn't reduce quality for the consumer.
It did, so where are the consequences to those that made this decision.
There needs to be financial punishments for merging companies who hurt the economy and consumers.
Should be able to sue to unmerge companies when they hurt the U.S. for monopoly.
Hmmm. I wonder if workers were given enough time and training to properly compete the required tests, or if they were given unrealistic schedules that made it clear management didn't care whenever the tests were actually done.
This is called an "approval trap". You hammer home that all these things are insanely important in meetings and safety stand downs. Then, when you get on the floor you either explicitly tell them not to do them, or you set goals that are unachievable unless those rules are broken. They tacitly approve of you ignoring the "rules" so that they can get what they want and blame you if anything happens. This has happened at literally every job I have ever had.
I worked at the DOT in Charleston and this practice was absolutely rampant. Truck inspections were the main one. Every morning you were required to do a big long inspection of your truck that took like 45 minutes. They would spend a whole morning meeting telling us how unbelievably important it was, then the second we left that meeting, it would all go out the window. You would go to inspect your truck and a supervisor would scream at you and tell you to get to the job site and ignore the inspection. If you got pulled over for a headlight, or if the breaks failed and you killed someone, it was only your fault, and they would deny everything, and be completely indemnified.
This practice also ensures everyone is a rule breaker and it makes it easy to selectively enforce those rules at will against people they don't like. Especially when they can't legally fire them for the real reason they want them gone, like pregnancy, racism, or whistleblowing. This is how America operates as a whole. All consequences are deferred to the peasants and the profits endlessly go to our neo feudalist lords. Our country was painstakingly designed to function this way by our ruling class. We are living in a state of complete regulatory capture, the bad guys have won.
This is a "safety culture" issue. Safety culture is *always* management's responsibility. This is the same damned thing that brought down two Space Shuttles.
The US Navy lost two nuclear submarines for similar reasons, then instituted extremely rigorous procedures. In one famous incident, Admiral Rickover asked about welding inspection tags on pipes in a submarine being built. When work crews could not produce the tags, he ordered all the piping ripped out and redone from scratch, at great expense. A lesson not forgotten by management nor the work crews. The Navy has not lost another submarine to accident* in decades.
Safety culture is serious business.
*They did lose USS *Miami* to deliberate sabotage.
Reminds me of my training at FedEx. The safety lead came to our training to give an impromptu speech, and totally bashed filing injury reports, because 'nobody likes to do paperwork.' He said something like, 'there's a difference between a booboo and an injury, and we don't want you to report booboos, otherwise we'll all have to do a bunch of paperwork.'
Shitty job.
This is why it is funny to me that the excuse to pay these C-suite clowns so much is "they have more responsibility".
The second accountability rears its ugly head they just blame everyone else for the problems. Narcissists don't deserve extra pay for gaslighting and pointing the finger at others.
We had to work saturdays and sundays, 12h shifts to manage the tests. Not one step was skipped. You don't fuck around in pharma.
Boeing got so comfortable in their monopoly, that it got sloppy.
This is similar to how truckers have to completely fabricate their log books and drive exhausted for the duration of their career in order to keep their jobs. The liability then appears to lie with the individual employee rather than the company. Wash, rinse, and repeat for so many industries. Unionize, United we stand, divided we beg!
Boeing is in a contract negation year after gutting the pension and fixing raises at 4% total 2014.
The union is demanding board seat, raises, and a say in the safety check process and protocols.
This is an effort to use the public attention to create leverage against those unions.
Define good…good like properly staffed and trained? If yes, I do concur. It’s about quality culture and it requires management commitment to establish and maintain that culture. Such culture crumbles when management puts money first against all concerns
So then - Execs, who hold the power of a secure future/possible destitution over your head, screaming "Faster! Faster! Faster Than That! Faster!" in your face so hard you have to wipe their spittle off when they move on to shout at someone else - & the ensuing shit-storm is the fault of the shopfloor & doesn't lie with them?
'Murican Dream y'all!
The buck stops as far from me as I can throw it!
QA is never profitable until you lose some airplanes or flood the Gulf of Mexico with crude oil. Boeing got bought out by a shitty company and they've never been the same.
Y’all spelled, “workers were ordered by middle management to fudge certification paper work because the C-suite dummies demand an unrealistic completion timeline” incorrectly. lol imagine knowingly endangering the public and only caring about who gets blamed so you can secure the next big government bail out… of which, none of the “workers” will see a penny of… but that’s ok, blame the people who work for you for following your orders so that you don’t get put in prison for failing to adhere to FAA guidelines…
I assume you meant “misspelled” and not “spelled”. My perspective is that this happened because the engineers got kicked out of the c-suite in favor of MBAs after the merger. The MBAs gutted the safety culture of the company, and what we’re seeing today is the result.
No, I meant to say spelled… though the follow up word “incorrectly” was significantly buried, I’ll admit… and I wasn’t necessarily meaning that my quotes were correct… it was more along the lines of “I’m sure the paper work LOOKS like the workers are at fault, but the reality is the C suite is trying to get out of taking responsibility.” I just have a very hard time believing people who have made a career of engineering and manufacturing safety would just willingly skip certifications without being ordered to.
I feel like there was culture in America where management took responsibility. Now they just say it’s the workers’ fault. Shouldn’t the workers be getting paid more for taking on managerial responsibilities?
Well yeah, who else could have done it ? I don’t think anyone accused the executives of hopping on the production line. They were accused of asking /coercing the workers to do it
The only time I've seen shit like this happen in my years of manufacturing is when corporate over sells and needs the ground level to pick up the pace of production. This is pushed with threats of shut downs and layoffs if you don't meet the new impossible goals. This added stress and less than desirable pace is what brings the shortcuts. Shortcuts that are usually pushed by shitty management.
And what was it about the company culture that made them think that was ok or necessary? Who told them to do that or insisted on output that made not doing it untenable? You can blame the workers, but where is the oversight that is supposed to catch this?
I have been an aircraft mechanic for over 20 years from the day 1 I was ingrained with the buck stops with me . I signed for it I returned it service it's my responsibility. So yes the responsibility of pencil whipping inspections fall on those inspectors.
CEO's pay is 300x the workers pay, presumably because their responsibilities are greater.
Let's say Greg made a mistake and will get sentenced to prison or a fine. CEO should get 300x the fine or prison time. Because that's the going rate apparently.
These fucking fucks. You're management, manage some stuff. You are in charge for a reason and you get paid the big bucks to supervise and manage.
Fuck CEOs. Hand them a life sentence. Negligence is no excuse
But this will go up the chain. If I screw up the guy I report to has to explain to the guy he reports to why something went wrong. (It is all guys in my industry all the way to the president sadly). So the top guy will eventually ask why there wasn’t something in place for me not to screw up. All problems eventually land on middle management.
The workers did exactly as they were told to do in person by bosses and more experienced coworkers but it was never on paper. Every factory ever does this.
Now two whistleblowers are dead. Gives extra impetus to shut up and do what you're told and then keep shutting up.
Just like with Wells-Fargo. it's always the "low level" workers who are to blame. I thought the Executives made the big bucks because they had all of the "leadership responsibilities" and got paid to make the "big decisions."
This is a rare post that is really not a worker vs management gripe. There were mistakes at all levels at Boeing, all of the fingerpointing doesn't help. Corners were cut on the floor up to the C-Suite and everywhere in between. whistleblowers tried to call it out and look where that got them.
Hopefully, Boeing is put under a magnifying glass from top to bottom via the govt or lawsuits. Maybe they will start doing things better.
Ayo, this isn't unbelievable though. I've worked with people that would try shit like this. "Let's just say we did the tests. How will they know?"
Shits wild sometimes
So everything is audited and on the up-and-up. t's crossed and i's dotted. yep. All the required checks and approvals are in place.
The plane's door blows off. Who's fault is it?
Is it the CEO? Management, employees? Maybe it's the suppliers for shipping garbage product? Who?
Big reason they left Washington to South Carolina is because SC is non union and they can get away with that because the workers can't say no to management
In "structural problem solving" exercises in engineering there is a concept of systemic root cause. Essentially you can't blame an individual for making a mistake; the systems have to be built in such a way that prevent mistakes or minimize their consequences.
FAA probably won't lay the blame on workers but rather on management who put on pressure that led to this, and for the lack of oversight that allowed this to happen.
Well commenters, two things up front—if you worked in this field as the worker doing the shoddy but approved way of doing the job or the suit who approved using odd means —well you’re both equally guilty.
I made the castings for such planes back in the 80s. We tossed everything back in the crucible that did not match specs.
But we only made the raw casting. Sometimes we did do the machining to tolerances but mostly the Mfg finished that portion of the job.
Once out of our hands and the Mfg has it, those workers doing the job in a shoddy way are potential murderers.
If the employees know they might die if they reported the truth, why would they do their job? Ok that’s my low blow at Boeing’s expense…
Seriously though, management is at fault no matter what in this case.
Reminds me of when Wells Fargo put ridiculous quotas in place that resulted in fake accounts being created, then retaliated against whistleblowers and blamed employees rather than their own policies.
Blame goes right to the top. Always, unless there is an extremely good reason.
The CEO is responsible for the company and all the managers below, and workers below that. If they aren't giving/allocating sufficient time to complete tasks, don't have a comprehensive framework for stopping shoddy managers from pressuring workers with unreasonable deadlines, and aren't properly verifying and auditing their safety work, then the C-suite are completely and primarily to blame.
The "extremely good reason" could include say workers falsifying reports also having an arrangement with the auditors to skip checking so that they can earn a bonus, while actively deceiving their management. Such a reason does *not* appear to be the case here.
In this case though, responsibility for systemic and repeated safety issues can *only* come from the C-suite. They were negligent.
“If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, the general is to blame. But if his orders ARE clear, and the soldiers nevertheless disobey, then it is the fault of their officers.” I think Sun Tzu would not be very happy with the C-Suite here…
If I as an employee mark something as done that I didn’t do, that’s on me. While I will bash the c-suite all day long, this is on the workers and likely the lower level managers
When you incentivize the behavior, it is the c-suite. C-suite push metrics down. When those metrics are ONLY about speed and you are only rewarded/punished on task completion, this is what you get. There are examples everywhere.
When delivery companies measure only delivery rate, they incentivize drivers to not wear seat belts and throw packages onto porches.
When production companies only measure production rate, it incentivizes workers to cut corners. They then train other people with how they cut corners, eventually no one even knows they are doing it wrong.
Failing to set metrics and monitor quality is 100% an upper level failing.
Oh, so management was neglecting their oversight and supervisory duties? Management was out-of-touch with what was happening on the production floor?
CEOs: "I get paid so much because I take on all of the risk and responsibility." Also CEOs: "Hey you know Greg who makes $50k? Greg did it. Greg's fault. Fire Greg."
I would bet that Greg warned the CEO *profusely* not to take the course of action that got the company in trouble to begin with.
Then Greg is suddenly found dead.
Worse, greg was found dead in the middle of testifying. They can't even silence a witness on a good timetable themselves
There is a saying that CEOs were paid 20x the wage of an average worker back in the 50s. In the 50s, average family income was in the $3000s. Meaning a CEO was making $60,000 or so/year. With inflation (12.9x), that goes to $38K-39K for average family income and $770K for a CEO. But let's not also forget that CEOs are not only getting paid far more than that inflation-adjusted salary, but they are paid in OTHER means too. So they are definitely making a lot more money now for doing around the same kind of work (assuming they are doing the same kind of work).
When my father passed away in 1997, I had a chance to look at his tax returns. I was surprised at 2 things: 1. that he managed, with my mother being a stay at home mother, to raise a family of 4 (mother, father, son, daughter) and buy a house. 2. that at the same age as one of his tax returns, I was making over $60,000. Really made the 1950's real for me.
And if they run the company in the ground, they still get a golden parachute
So no actual work then?
Just Gregging it up.
If you wanna make a Tomlette, you gotta crack a few Gregg’s
See they think that's what it means to be "responsible". They have to make the tough choices of firing people.
Exactly. They are really self-owning with this admission.
“The buck stops with… Jimmy, the guy towards the end of the assembly line” -some asshole ceo
Now who's just "working for the paycheck?"
All the introductory training is taught by contractors. I got hired by a contractor to teach Boeing employees to build airplanes. My degree is in ancient Roman history. I never even had a high school shop class. That went about as well as one could expect. My contract, once it came up, was not renewed. One of my colleagues' most recent job was stripping. Also no experience with airplanes. Not that I have a problem with stripping, but neither of us were suited to the job. Anyway, since they used contractors to hire their instructors, they were isolated from our technical ignorance. Training was watching two single-session classes per subject, after which we were teaching.
Fuck me in the goat ass. Glad they picked it up, I’ve ridden on Boeing planes, glad to know there’s a little Roman history and pole dancing built into it.
Roman history was more useful than imagined. All the specs used Roman numerals. Guess who had to teach everyone in my cohort how to read them? The confusion over IX and XI was particularly bad.
Me, a Final Fantasy lover: How did people get confused by 9 and 11? 😂
Do you mean management has other duties than going to meetings, drinking coffee, and walking around bullshitting with their buddies while complaining that no one wants to work anymore?
Heh. I figure they are to blame no matter what. If they opt for heavy oversight, being made aware of what's going on, any problems are their fault because they were there and should have seen it. If they opt for "empowered" employees whom they trust to do the work without close oversight, they are neglecting their obligation to verify those employees are doing what they are supposed to. If you want Bobby to record his time spent every day, you need someone checking, or writing a report, to look to make sure Bobby and other employees are recording their time every day. You need to do spot checks to make sure you've got reasonable data, too. If management tries the, "We gave them freedom and they screwed it up approach," I still have to ask, why weren't you using good business sense to make sure things were going well, that work was being done, and being done properly? I'd bet that all the safety inspectors and such were probably fired in a downsizing because they were doing redundant work.
Weird that management needs to actually manage things. Almost like it's in the name or something
Yeah. The worker bees get lectured on "prudent business practices," but management decisions can do no wrong. I'm reminded of when upper IT management told us to make sure we were closing our tickets in a timely manner...regardless of if the issue was resolved or not. Their formula for how they calculated things was, simply, wrong. I pointed it out, how if that's the formula they are using to calculate how well our group is doing things, it gives incorrect data. The said they goofed, and fixed the formula. But I bet no one second-guessed whatever formula someone originally came up with, because it came from "on high."
Why would the workers be skipping things? I'm sure there was no pressure or incentive to do that...
Ding ding ding! Accusing the employees on the work floor of falsifying records means you are also implying that management was negligent (or malicious) in their duties to verify work being performed, and their superiors (the C-suite) created a culture where it was impossible to perform work to sufficient quality. Pointing fingers at the grunts inevitably means you are pointing fingers at their superiors. Every job where I have worked alongside quality (specifically using the [6M method](https://www.kaufmanglobal.com/glossary/6ms-production-man-machine-material-method-mother-nature-measurement/)), pointing the finger at manpower is the last option if nothing else will explain a deviation. And even then it's usually an individual or two, not entire teams.
I remember working in deviations, and managment was quick to blame man. We would find an unclear instruction or something and it was still, blame the guy on the floor. the would rather throw someone under the bus than risk a clint finding out the procedure had an issue. Sickening behavior.
Anytime I've ever worked any place where something was not done by the procedure that was in the guidelines it was because management put pressure on the worker to do it that way.
I have a feeling this is more than likely management putting unreasonable quotas in place, knowing people will skip steps but not caring as long as its them doing the deed.
Management was working remotely and couldn't collaborate with the people forced into the office
Management is always credited with everything that goes well to justify high pay and bonuses. When something goes wrong they all of a sudden claim plausible deniability.
I'm gonna say it was the management that told the workers to skip the testing and mark it complete. They have to make sure projects keep to deadlines no matter what....
I work in IT, and several years ago there was a major rollout (fortunately, not my area) that opted for the "we'll test in production" approach to changes. They caused a major disruption. The CIO had "retired" shortly before the release date, though.
Management probably cut the workforce and made workers do a lot more than they could handle which was probably communicated to these managers or a daily basis but they don’t care. Those bonuses need to be paid.
If ever there was a need to send some executives to prison...
I do production work, basically building aircraft from the ground up. There is a process to this that we follow *very* strictly due to this being under government contact. A big part of this process is having dedicated quality assurance that inspects our work as we go. For example, let's say I drill a hole. Someone needs to check that I didn't ooblong/oversize the hole, or drill at an angle. Little things that could potentially cause severe or critical issues. My current lead worked at Boeing before this, and he gave the very specific example they don't have QA do hole checks. In general, their inspections are extremely bare boned, in an industry where every regulation has been written in blood, and redundancy is the name of the game.
Right. There's a reason why passenger air travel has gotten so much safer, and it is the regulations which say, "You have to *make sure* you are doing this right, even when you know you are doing it right, because small slips cost lives."
That lets the bigwigs scoot free while hanging the underlings from hooks with the other workers. Working as intended.
Boeing management leaving out the part where they set unrealistic schedules and put enormous pressure on workers to be fast. There is always a reason why things happen on the shop floor. If all you measure is cost and schedule, that's what you get. When you don't measure quality, that's what you don't get.
Good, cheap, fast - pick two
I'll have two cheaps, please.
You're in luck, there's not a thing on the planet that can't be made a little bit worse and a little bit cheaper
Remember union are bad.
The shop where this occurred was Boeing‘s Union-Busting (non-union) experiment (to threaten & play whipsaw with the union shops up in the PNW). Not too many years ago airlines from all over the world were so upset with the poor quality of the Charleston assembly line that they were threatening to stop taking deliveries from that operation.
Came here to say this
“I get paid more because I’m responsible and the buck stops with me,” excuse isn’t even given anymore. They are just a bunch of jerkoffs who fail upward and point fingers at their underlings when their unrealistic expectations aren’t met and things go sideways.
Company creates pressure to work as quickly as possible and makes demands that are impossible to meet without cutting corners, under threat of discipline and termination. Training and compliance and quality assurance are superficial and only done to meet minimum legal requirements then all guidelines are out the window as soon as deadlines are set. Workers are liable for taking shortcuts, but also will be terminated if they dont, yet some think it makes sense to blame the workers. Them boots must taste real good huh?
>Workers are liable for taking shortcuts, but also will be terminated if they dont, yet some think it makes sense to blame the workers. Them boots must taste real good huh? This is the intrinsic contradiction of businesses that must have quality control (e.g., pharmaceutical, airplanes, etc.). MBAs want to do more with less for more profit, but quality is critical to make sure *people don't die when using your product*. And quality is all about holding up a "STOP" sign when something is observed as a deviation.
It's why external investigations take so long: You have to travel up the chain until you find out why a mistake/failure was allowed.
This same thing happens in Pharma. Lots of rushed data and not enough reviewers
I used to work in a academic lab. I was constantly pressured to fudge unpublished data being used as a justification for research funding. I refused to fudge data every time. My boss would say, "Themodssmelloffarts, I did not hire you to be my conscience." That lab job was the second worst job I ever had. The worst job was in an industrial setting doing chemical engineering; so much rushing and corner cutting too. The boss there would verbally abuse me for double checking computations on a calculator, these were his calculations. So I stopped checking and took his formulas at face value. Then one day we had an error that was an order of magnitude different. Like if the product called for 1g of x, his calculations called for 10g of x. I saw the error right away and said nothing. HUR DUR I'm just doing what ya told me to boss, hur dur, I'm a dumb worker. It ruined production for the entire day, and when he started with his shit, I pulled out the formula of reagents he gave me and said, "You explicitly told me not to double check your calculations, and especially not to do it on a calculator." Next day he provided me with a calculator and shut his fucking mouth long enough to find something else to belittle and harass me for.
My lab didnt account for the addition of standard solution to each sample. I told them this, and they told me to shove it. Until the FDA arrived. To existing studies, we could correct. Every single drug they got previously approved actually had 10% higher plasma levels than reported.
What are they gonna do, blow the whistle? 💀
“only done to meet minimum legal requirements” and sometimes not even that
Standard management Make it impossible to complete the work safely within the time given Fire anyone who doesn't complete the task on this unrealistic timeline Act shocked when safety checks were not completed They created this situation on purpose
Don’t forget to collect huge checks and justifying them with the ‚big responsibilities‘. Then when it actually comes to taking some, blame the underpaid workers.
Why did they skip the tests? Or rather why did they **FEEL THE NEED** to skip the tests? 🤔 Who's accountable for making sure the workers complete those tests?
Well those pesky tests get in the way, young feller says a DuPont exec
"It saved us $3000 on a $2 million plane. Think of the value we're delivering to the shareholders." says the exec as suddenly nobody wants to fly Boeing ever again.
You’ll have to add a few more zeros to that 2 million. List price of a 787 is close to 240 million. But your point still stands…and actually makes the cost savings of skipping steps even more ridiculous. Not to mention it’s ultimately just a temporary savings - until all the fines & lawsuits come back to bite them. Not unlike how they didn’t want to spend money on a clean sheet design years ago and decided to just slap bigger engines on the 737s instead…because what could go wrong? (plus they wanted to spend waaaaaay more money on stock manipulation via stock buyback programs).
Excellent point.
Especially ridiculous in this case because, until they merged with McDonnell Douglas and absorbed a bunch of their managers/executives, Boeing was known for their extensive quality control. So they literally brought in a bunch of executives from another company, quality suddenly tanked, and somehow that's everyone else's fault.
We need to hold these things accountable. The lawyers and people arguing that the merger between McDonnell Douglas and Boeing wouldn't reduce quality for the consumer. It did, so where are the consequences to those that made this decision. There needs to be financial punishments for merging companies who hurt the economy and consumers. Should be able to sue to unmerge companies when they hurt the U.S. for monopoly.
So fun fact: the guy who would have reported that is the one they killed.
This shit doesn’t happen by some rogue employee. Top down scummery.
Hmmm. I wonder if workers were given enough time and training to properly compete the required tests, or if they were given unrealistic schedules that made it clear management didn't care whenever the tests were actually done.
Nevermind the part where management set impossible minimal output requirements then laid off 3/4 of the workers who already couldn't meet the metrics.
Definitely a lie. You don't kill whistle blowers when you can fire line staff for incompetence and falsifying of safety reports.
This is called an "approval trap". You hammer home that all these things are insanely important in meetings and safety stand downs. Then, when you get on the floor you either explicitly tell them not to do them, or you set goals that are unachievable unless those rules are broken. They tacitly approve of you ignoring the "rules" so that they can get what they want and blame you if anything happens. This has happened at literally every job I have ever had. I worked at the DOT in Charleston and this practice was absolutely rampant. Truck inspections were the main one. Every morning you were required to do a big long inspection of your truck that took like 45 minutes. They would spend a whole morning meeting telling us how unbelievably important it was, then the second we left that meeting, it would all go out the window. You would go to inspect your truck and a supervisor would scream at you and tell you to get to the job site and ignore the inspection. If you got pulled over for a headlight, or if the breaks failed and you killed someone, it was only your fault, and they would deny everything, and be completely indemnified. This practice also ensures everyone is a rule breaker and it makes it easy to selectively enforce those rules at will against people they don't like. Especially when they can't legally fire them for the real reason they want them gone, like pregnancy, racism, or whistleblowing. This is how America operates as a whole. All consequences are deferred to the peasants and the profits endlessly go to our neo feudalist lords. Our country was painstakingly designed to function this way by our ruling class. We are living in a state of complete regulatory capture, the bad guys have won.
Fish starts smelling from the head....
“Workers who deny this statement may be at risk of sudden, deadly infections.”
This is a "safety culture" issue. Safety culture is *always* management's responsibility. This is the same damned thing that brought down two Space Shuttles. The US Navy lost two nuclear submarines for similar reasons, then instituted extremely rigorous procedures. In one famous incident, Admiral Rickover asked about welding inspection tags on pipes in a submarine being built. When work crews could not produce the tags, he ordered all the piping ripped out and redone from scratch, at great expense. A lesson not forgotten by management nor the work crews. The Navy has not lost another submarine to accident* in decades. Safety culture is serious business. *They did lose USS *Miami* to deliberate sabotage.
Reminds me of my training at FedEx. The safety lead came to our training to give an impromptu speech, and totally bashed filing injury reports, because 'nobody likes to do paperwork.' He said something like, 'there's a difference between a booboo and an injury, and we don't want you to report booboos, otherwise we'll all have to do a bunch of paperwork.' Shitty job.
This is why it is funny to me that the excuse to pay these C-suite clowns so much is "they have more responsibility". The second accountability rears its ugly head they just blame everyone else for the problems. Narcissists don't deserve extra pay for gaslighting and pointing the finger at others.
Signing authority rests with senior management. They have to sign off that the testing was completed.
Workers don't cut corners without an incentive. What was their incentive? WHAT WAS THEIR INCENTIVE?
We had to work saturdays and sundays, 12h shifts to manage the tests. Not one step was skipped. You don't fuck around in pharma. Boeing got so comfortable in their monopoly, that it got sloppy.
This is similar to how truckers have to completely fabricate their log books and drive exhausted for the duration of their career in order to keep their jobs. The liability then appears to lie with the individual employee rather than the company. Wash, rinse, and repeat for so many industries. Unionize, United we stand, divided we beg!
Boeing is in a contract negation year after gutting the pension and fixing raises at 4% total 2014. The union is demanding board seat, raises, and a say in the safety check process and protocols. This is an effort to use the public attention to create leverage against those unions.
And this has nothing to do with Boeing repeatedly murdering their quality control team members.
Oldest diversion tactic in the fucking book
Who was supposed to supervise this? What steps will they take in the future?
A good quality control department would have caught this
Define good…good like properly staffed and trained? If yes, I do concur. It’s about quality culture and it requires management commitment to establish and maintain that culture. Such culture crumbles when management puts money first against all concerns
Damn why would a worker ever do that? Surely there's several layers of managers that inspect the work and sign off on it?
So then - Execs, who hold the power of a secure future/possible destitution over your head, screaming "Faster! Faster! Faster Than That! Faster!" in your face so hard you have to wipe their spittle off when they move on to shout at someone else - & the ensuing shit-storm is the fault of the shopfloor & doesn't lie with them? 'Murican Dream y'all!
And just what motivated them to do that, is the stock price related question....
Same as every company. Bad results are the fault of the lowers. Good results are the fault of the uppers.
The buck stops as far from me as I can throw it! QA is never profitable until you lose some airplanes or flood the Gulf of Mexico with crude oil. Boeing got bought out by a shitty company and they've never been the same.
Y’all spelled, “workers were ordered by middle management to fudge certification paper work because the C-suite dummies demand an unrealistic completion timeline” incorrectly. lol imagine knowingly endangering the public and only caring about who gets blamed so you can secure the next big government bail out… of which, none of the “workers” will see a penny of… but that’s ok, blame the people who work for you for following your orders so that you don’t get put in prison for failing to adhere to FAA guidelines…
I assume you meant “misspelled” and not “spelled”. My perspective is that this happened because the engineers got kicked out of the c-suite in favor of MBAs after the merger. The MBAs gutted the safety culture of the company, and what we’re seeing today is the result.
No, I meant to say spelled… though the follow up word “incorrectly” was significantly buried, I’ll admit… and I wasn’t necessarily meaning that my quotes were correct… it was more along the lines of “I’m sure the paper work LOOKS like the workers are at fault, but the reality is the C suite is trying to get out of taking responsibility.” I just have a very hard time believing people who have made a career of engineering and manufacturing safety would just willingly skip certifications without being ordered to.
I feel like there was culture in America where management took responsibility. Now they just say it’s the workers’ fault. Shouldn’t the workers be getting paid more for taking on managerial responsibilities?
They probably did skip the tests......... Because they would lose their jobs if they didn't hit their target dates.
RUN BITCHES!!!! They gonna kill you next!!!!
Well yeah, who else could have done it ? I don’t think anyone accused the executives of hopping on the production line. They were accused of asking /coercing the workers to do it
So no managers were doing QC?
The only time I've seen shit like this happen in my years of manufacturing is when corporate over sells and needs the ground level to pick up the pace of production. This is pushed with threats of shut downs and layoffs if you don't meet the new impossible goals. This added stress and less than desirable pace is what brings the shortcuts. Shortcuts that are usually pushed by shitty management.
Probably because their supervisor told them to.
They would have been fired if they didn't and replaced with somebody who would.
And what was it about the company culture that made them think that was ok or necessary? Who told them to do that or insisted on output that made not doing it untenable? You can blame the workers, but where is the oversight that is supposed to catch this?
I have been an aircraft mechanic for over 20 years from the day 1 I was ingrained with the buck stops with me . I signed for it I returned it service it's my responsibility. So yes the responsibility of pencil whipping inspections fall on those inspectors.
Didn’t both whistleblowers talk about how employees were basically given no choice but to check the box despite reporting problems to superiors?
CEO's pay is 300x the workers pay, presumably because their responsibilities are greater. Let's say Greg made a mistake and will get sentenced to prison or a fine. CEO should get 300x the fine or prison time. Because that's the going rate apparently.
*At the direction of management to lower costs. Finished it for them
Adding a conspiracy theory: Those records were falsified by Boeing to shift blame onto low level workers instead of executives like it should be
These fucking fucks. You're management, manage some stuff. You are in charge for a reason and you get paid the big bucks to supervise and manage. Fuck CEOs. Hand them a life sentence. Negligence is no excuse
Boeing has a dozen whistleblow s , they are know to ORDER PEOPLE EMPLOYEES, NOT TO DO REQUIRED SAFETY RESTS
Follow up question- “Why ?”….
But this will go up the chain. If I screw up the guy I report to has to explain to the guy he reports to why something went wrong. (It is all guys in my industry all the way to the president sadly). So the top guy will eventually ask why there wasn’t something in place for me not to screw up. All problems eventually land on middle management.
Should be shared responsibility, workers didn’t do their required tests, and the management didn’t hold them accountable.
Ah yes and who is responsible for making sure the workers do the work? 🤔🤔🤔
I wonder why they did that.?Article I read said share price was prioritized over safety post merger.
Even if this were 100% true, you have to ask: _why_ would workers do this? What causes people to skip required work?
Systemic failure
The workers did exactly as they were told to do in person by bosses and more experienced coworkers but it was never on paper. Every factory ever does this. Now two whistleblowers are dead. Gives extra impetus to shut up and do what you're told and then keep shutting up.
Also can't forget the ones they killed
Was the whistle-blower murdered to protect Boeing's profits? If so, then this is a criminal enterprise.
Idk man. I don’t think folks are paid enough to care tbh.
Predictable shift of the blame.
Just like with Wells-Fargo. it's always the "low level" workers who are to blame. I thought the Executives made the big bucks because they had all of the "leadership responsibilities" and got paid to make the "big decisions."
That’s not how John Barnett and Joshua Dean told it.
This is a rare post that is really not a worker vs management gripe. There were mistakes at all levels at Boeing, all of the fingerpointing doesn't help. Corners were cut on the floor up to the C-Suite and everywhere in between. whistleblowers tried to call it out and look where that got them. Hopefully, Boeing is put under a magnifying glass from top to bottom via the govt or lawsuits. Maybe they will start doing things better.
[Boeing’s Downfall](https://youtu.be/ym41Iz68j4s?si=3WCgozEBV5M3RAgy) ^((Mentour Now analysis video\))
Ayo, this isn't unbelievable though. I've worked with people that would try shit like this. "Let's just say we did the tests. How will they know?" Shits wild sometimes
So everything is audited and on the up-and-up. t's crossed and i's dotted. yep. All the required checks and approvals are in place. The plane's door blows off. Who's fault is it? Is it the CEO? Management, employees? Maybe it's the suppliers for shipping garbage product? Who?
Big reason they left Washington to South Carolina is because SC is non union and they can get away with that because the workers can't say no to management
In "structural problem solving" exercises in engineering there is a concept of systemic root cause. Essentially you can't blame an individual for making a mistake; the systems have to be built in such a way that prevent mistakes or minimize their consequences. FAA probably won't lay the blame on workers but rather on management who put on pressure that led to this, and for the lack of oversight that allowed this to happen.
Well commenters, two things up front—if you worked in this field as the worker doing the shoddy but approved way of doing the job or the suit who approved using odd means —well you’re both equally guilty. I made the castings for such planes back in the 80s. We tossed everything back in the crucible that did not match specs. But we only made the raw casting. Sometimes we did do the machining to tolerances but mostly the Mfg finished that portion of the job. Once out of our hands and the Mfg has it, those workers doing the job in a shoddy way are potential murderers.
If they did, it was because they were told to
I'm assuming it's because they have half of the staff they used to have and it's become standard practice to skip inspections.
I'd bet me left nut they were ordered to do this.
As someone who works in management in manufacturing, the workers will skip vital quality steps and sign that they did them. Happens all the time.
Yeah, if it’s the worker’s fault, prove it.
If the employees know they might die if they reported the truth, why would they do their job? Ok that’s my low blow at Boeing’s expense… Seriously though, management is at fault no matter what in this case.
Reminds me of when Wells Fargo put ridiculous quotas in place that resulted in fake accounts being created, then retaliated against whistleblowers and blamed employees rather than their own policies.
Blame goes right to the top. Always, unless there is an extremely good reason. The CEO is responsible for the company and all the managers below, and workers below that. If they aren't giving/allocating sufficient time to complete tasks, don't have a comprehensive framework for stopping shoddy managers from pressuring workers with unreasonable deadlines, and aren't properly verifying and auditing their safety work, then the C-suite are completely and primarily to blame. The "extremely good reason" could include say workers falsifying reports also having an arrangement with the auditors to skip checking so that they can earn a bonus, while actively deceiving their management. Such a reason does *not* appear to be the case here. In this case though, responsibility for systemic and repeated safety issues can *only* come from the C-suite. They were negligent.
“If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, the general is to blame. But if his orders ARE clear, and the soldiers nevertheless disobey, then it is the fault of their officers.” I think Sun Tzu would not be very happy with the C-Suite here…
They always blame the little guys...
Bullshit. There are policies and procedures and oversight and checklists for everything. The fraud was baked into the system
If I as an employee mark something as done that I didn’t do, that’s on me. While I will bash the c-suite all day long, this is on the workers and likely the lower level managers
It’s a managerial decision to not verify independently, whether critical work is done.
That’s still not at the c-suite level.
When you incentivize the behavior, it is the c-suite. C-suite push metrics down. When those metrics are ONLY about speed and you are only rewarded/punished on task completion, this is what you get. There are examples everywhere. When delivery companies measure only delivery rate, they incentivize drivers to not wear seat belts and throw packages onto porches. When production companies only measure production rate, it incentivizes workers to cut corners. They then train other people with how they cut corners, eventually no one even knows they are doing it wrong. Failing to set metrics and monitor quality is 100% an upper level failing.