Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs.
Damn that’s the most relatable thing I’ve heard in a while.
You can quantify it on a spreadsheet by comparing your other metrics vs. turnover rate, esp. by department. The bean counters do this all the time in the big corps. Smaller ones might just make things up but the big ones have teams of people building out strategies all centered around certain profitability / marketshare / stock price goals. Such as those at Boeing.
They’re making intentional decisions to hollow the place out to maximize short-term profit and to break the unions at their workplaces. They have an estimate of what this will cost them and then they hit the “yes” button.
What they fucked up at is that they got too close to the “horrific safety and PR disaster” line mostly by doing blatantly negligent things, nothing requiring deep knowledge. Make are the bolts are tightened. Make sure QA does inspections. Make sure that when QA finds something wrong, it gets fixed. This was all replaced by “do it fast and don’t complain” incentives. This does tie into the union busting though, as it was part of opening up new non-union shops in various red states.