Boeing Still Can't Build Planes, Part 4⁹

In 2019, a sweeping transformation of Boeing’s quality system deliberately eliminated thousands of quality checks during production and cut 100s of quality inspector jobs.

Ernesto Gonzalez-Beltran, the architect of that shift, left the company in Decemberhttps://t.co/SbcHIzcnFp

— Dominic Gates (@dominicgates) May 18, 2021

Roll Tape!

Boeing has finally been forced to accept the fact that axing hundreds quality inspectors in order to bust the union did now work, and now they are rehiring the inspectors that they laid off, and they canned the architect of the failed program:

The Boeing Co. has quietly recalled at least some of as many as 900 quality control inspectors who were laid off in 2019 as part of a drive to adopt car-industry manufacturing processes in aerospace manufacturing.

The move comes after the union for the inspectors – Machinists District Lodge 751 – pushed the company to prove that getting rid of inspectors could be done without risking quality issues and would actually improve production times.

“Our union’s goal is to save Boeing from making decisions that could be detrimental to (its) future and ours,” union leaders said in its monthly AeroMechanic newsletter. “A second set of eyes is a critical component of building Boeing airplanes and necessary for the long-term success of the company.”

A union spokeswoman said she was unable to say precisely how many of the inspectors were initially laid off, and how many have been brought back since the recalls started. Boeing’s media relations team did not respond to a written list of questions on the topic.

………

In theory, if you eliminate the downtime and the inspections a few thousand times on each plane, that adds up to substantial savings in production time without any investment in people or tools.

IAM 751 appealed to the Federal Aviation Administration to look into Boeing’s plan and made rumblings about getting its supporters in Congress to intervene. Congress is now preparing an investigation into quality lapses at Boeing.

But the deciding factor, in this case, seems to have been the union’s demand to enter into what’s called effects bargaining. Since Boeing was eliminating 900 jobs, the union claimed the right to negotiate over the impact of those changes on its members.

As a result of these talks, Boeing and the union agreed that a team of union-appointed experts would begin reviewing data in areas where inspections were ending, with the ability to propose reinstating inspections when warranted, using Boeing’s own risk assessment criteria and FAA regulations as guidelines.

No Efficiency Gains

What the experts found was that eliminating inspections did not lead to a more efficient production process, the union said.

They f%$#ed up their quality processes for nothing more than the hope that they could fire some union members, and they failed.

If you fired Boeing's entire C-Suite and replaced them with dirnking bird toys, you would increase productiveity and product quality.