I’ve flown Boeing and other jets for over 35 years, designed and built industrial production machinery for longer. I’ve built machines for many industries, all over the world, including Boeing. I’m participating in the steady decline of human production workers, hastening it. They don’t feel valued or responsible, and they aren’t. Management is installing automation as fast as they can, as fast as we can build it, and setting up automated monitoring of human workers.
Your comparison with Toyota is interesting, their recent problems are more telling. My 200-series Land Cruiser has a 5.7-liter engine cast and built in Japan, while Tundra and Sequoia 5.7 engines are cast and built in America. Toyota has far more problems with the American built 5.7, despite the design and engineering being mostly the same. This is a quality problem, and a social problem.
After WWII, the Marshall Plan rebuilt Japanese industry, and it grew fast. American unions stepped in to help organize unions and protect Japanese workers from abusive, profit-focused management. The unions grew too powerful, and choked the Japanese economy. The Scanlon Plan was brought to Japan, and it worked well with traditional Japanese culture. That cooperative quality effort put Japanese industry ahead of the rest of the world, and is still a part of Japanese culture and management. It has been largely abandoned in the U.S., management is hyper-focused on short-term profits and cost cutting. Labor costs have become something to eliminate, and the automation I build has given management the keys. They no longer have to work with labor and they don’t.
It is unlikely Boeing management is going to shift back to involving non-management workers (including engineers) in real quality decisions. They don’t have to. They will put a lot of posters up, blast workers with extra quality training and programs and online apps. And buy more automated production and monitoring machinery. This Pandora has been opened.
I love the boxy 70-Series, but I’ll pass on owning one or suggesting Toyota sell them in the U.S. The Ineos Grenadier is a good example of why not. The Ineos is a fantastic modern production of an old-school off-roading truck. Like the 70, it isn’t great on the highway, but incredible off-road. A pretty good compromise. Give me an 80-series with lockers, that was the perfect modern daily-driver off-road vehicle. Even the Toyota engineers of the time said they didn’t know why it did so well on the road. My 100 was still tough, and my 200 is amazing on and off-road, but I still long for my old 80-series.