Machinists’ case overstated, again

Rhetoric during the recent IAM strike was to support the entitlement to high wages, benefits, jobs, etc. Those who called them greedy and a bunch of ingrates should be thankful when they fly Boeing. The fact of the matter is that the IAM workers, the ones who actually work on airplanes, aren’t what should define your safety. It’s the design engineers, manufacturing engineers and industrial engineers that define a Boeing airplane.

The mechanics and electricians who perform the work only follow the directions given to them by the engineering workforce. They simply read a manufacturing plan and perform the operations on the plan. Truth be told, those manufacturing plans are to be written at an eighth-grade level. Anyone with at least a GED can learn to do any of the IAM jobs. It’s not rocket science, it’s on-the-job training with some certifications renewed on a yearly basis.

They stood on that rhetoric and lost eight weeks of pay, only to accept little more than what they were originally offered. Now this workforce that expects so much for what they do and has such a great work ethic is playing the game of stalling. An average day of work is approximately six hours. That’s six hours of actual touch labor as measured by Industrial Engineering. Not all, but the majority, now only perform one to two hours of touch labor.

They look busy, but jobs aren’t being completed in the time allotted for them as they were before last September. If they can push Boeing farther behind, they can get all that high-dollar overtime to pay for their time off. It’s a game played out over the last few contracts.

Wayne Renfro