In 16 years at Forbes I've helped direct our coverage of everything from Asia to autos and healthcare to housing. Now I write about aerospace and defense. Send tips to jbogaisky[at]forbes.com
Thousands of the plane maker’s most experienced assembly workers exited during the pandemic. Young new hires aren’t getting enough training, Boeing veterans say.Workers are pictured under the wing of a Boeing 737 MAX airliner with American Airlines markings at Renton Airport adjacent to the Boeing Renton Factory in Renton, Washington on November 10, 2020.
Boeing declined to comment on the impact of turnover in its manufacturing workforce or the adequacy of its training. In 2022 and 2023, Boeing trimmed 2,000 white-collar jobs but roughly another 15,000 employees left of their own accord, company financial filings show, many of them engineers and manufacturing workers, in a combination of retirements and job-hopping in a hot market for skilled labor.
Ram says a spike in employee turnover has become a reliable predictor of trouble at A&D plants: “If your percentage of new employees in the factory increases, there is a high likelihood that you're going to have a quality problem three months down the road,” he said. Training for the flood of new hires has been insufficient, said Pierson. Former Boeing mechanic Brandon Sanders echoed those concerns as did a Boeing manufacturing insider who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Meanwhile experienced workers are leaned on to work mandatory overtime to fix problems, something that can lead to fatigue and mistakes, the Boeing veterans say. Under pressure from FAA and IAM, Boeing has restored many – but not all – of thousands of quality inspections that the company halted in 2019 in an erstwhile shift to sampling and monitoring of data from “smart” tools, like torque wrenches connected by Bluetooth so the amount of force applied can be tracked.
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