The NTSB was told employees at Boeing's 737 MAX plant in Renton, Washington felt they were under pressure to work too fast to ensure the work was completed correctly. According to CNN, the board heard testimony, mostly in the form of transcripts of interviews, from plant workers on Tuesday as part of a two-day hearing into the in-flight loss of a door plug on a MAX in Oregon last January. “As far as the workload, I feel like we were definitely trying to put out too much product, right?” an unidentified Boeing worker told an NTSB investigator in January. “That’s how mistakes are made. People try to work too fast. I mean, I can’t speak for anybody else, but we were busy. We were working a lot.”
Hmmm. Workers fail to do their jobs, then blame it on working too much and not getting paid enough. I believe working conditions, including hours, are federally mandated; do these folks think they should work less than the rest of the country? How will getting paid more reduces errors? Seems like what these folks need is better training and supervision, not fewer hours and more money.
Interesting take that article, Mark. I didn’t read anything that had to do with worker compensation, but a lot to do with them having to deal with upstream errors, insufficient training, and a management attitude that boiled down to “I don’t care as much about getting it done right, as getting it done right now.”
So how does this systemic multi-organization failure fall on the workers?