“We reset our workforce levels to align with our financial reality and to a more focused set of priorities,"
I’ll start by saying that over time, I have begun, more to support unions. Over the course of my career I have seen time and again Corporations take more and more from employees while giving more and more to shareholders. yes, that is the supposed point of capitalism (though that can be debated).
Boeing is a mess. As now general knowledge the company started downhill when the focus went from good engineering to “good” capitalism (aka MaccyD take over). Engineering is what made Boeing a powerhouse in the aviation industry from before WWII to recently. Sadly Ortberg, though coming in with plesant words of “we going to turn this around” has begun to make the same mistakes of his predecessor’s. Screw the workers, blame the workers, and protect the cash.
He made a mistake trying to force a union vote by going public on the deal, one could believe the union would have voted for. Did he think the union woudl roll over and say thank you? Now he wants to get ride of 10% of the work force, because management had F’d up royally since before the 737 MAX era.
Right now, Ortberg should take any reasonable deal with the unions and get people back to work. Boeing may be too big to fail, but it is not too big to fall to a point where it is taken over by another company as they bleed dollars by losing customers. Instead of reducing employment, reduce the pay or out right fire management that created the mess they are in today. Prompt engineers back into management and for gods sake, put quality over quantity.
Yet the unions need to help as well. Help figure way to make a quick end to the strike (as it hits more than Boeing) by suggesting profit sharing, or staggering better benifits over time with conditions to allow the company to stabilize financially.
Ortberg needs to energize the Boeing workforce, not beat them down, and if you have to writ off short term labor costs for long term regrowth of the company…FFS, do it. Frankly, I see Boeing as done. they do not have a new plane in design that won’t be done for years; the 737 has “maxxed out” and they cannot get their newest heavy out the door. Propping up the 757 (which they would nede to bring the tooling back) and 767 would only be a stopgap without innovation and Boeing blew it when they felt accounting more important than engineering for an aviation company. They screwed up Starliner, the KC refueler, and other military/space projects to a point where NASA may question whether to include Boeing in future space programs.