Tag Archives: jobs

Boeing Production Problems and Unions

Posted on by
Reply

Yes, the two are related. This is from a Wall Street Journal article on Boeing’s production sloppiness (my term) in its airline assembly operations. “Traveled work” is work done on the production line at a later station on the line than it should have been done, and generally by the personnel at that later step rather than by those who should have done it moving to the next station to complete it. For instance,

…the plane [whose door had blown out on an Alaska Airlines flight] spent nearly three weeks shuffling down an assembly line with faulty rivets in need of repair.
Workers had spotted the bad parts almost immediately after the plane’s fuselage arrived at the factory. But they didn’t make the fix right away, and the 737 continued on to the next workstation. When crews completed the repair 19 days later….

Boeing’s fix [emphasis added]?

Boeing told staff it was changing how it determines pay for tens of thousands of nonunion employees—from mechanics in South Carolina to its top brass. Quality measures, such as reducing traveled work, will now determine 60% of the annual bonuses for those working on its commercial aircraft.

Boeing’s union employees apparently get to continue to skate. The move appears to single out Boeing’s right-to-work state employees for punishment while not addressing the problem itself.

Impact of Biden’s Border and Immigration Policies on Employment

Posted on by
Reply

Another outcome of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s disdain for our national borders and for actually vetting who comes into our nation is this. Notice, too, that the graph isn’t some tenuously done aggregation of data from questionable sources; it’s a FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data, compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) graph.

In just February, 1.2 million immigrants (legal and illegal) gained a job. Meanwhile, 500k native-born Americans LOST their job.
Since Covid, native-born workers have actually LOST 2 million jobs. All of the net job gains are immigrants.

 

The sharp dip is from the Wuhan Virus Situation. After that, the sharp increase in employment is nearly exclusively from a mix of immigrants, temporary and otherwise, and illegal aliens, whom the poster euphemistically terms “illegal immigrants.”

In just February, there were those 1.2 million immigrants of one sort or another. In January, the latest month for which data are publicly available, there were more than 176,000 illegal aliens encountered at the Southern Border, and an unknown number of undetected illegal aliens. Those 176,000 are roughly one-seventh of that total.

The problem here isn’t that immigrants are successfully competing with “native born” Americans for jobs. It’s that all those illegal aliens appear to be successfully competing in an arena they should never have access to.

This Is Why Unions Need to be Busted

Posted on by
Reply

Iowa State Senator Adrian Dickey (R, Packwood) has introduced SF 2374, which is a bill that would

require each public employer to “submit to the [Public Employee Relations Board, or PERB] a list of employees in the bargaining unit” within 10 days of a union recertification election.

Never mind that Iowa’s taxpaying citizens have every right to know what their tax dollars are being used for and who’s being paid with them. Never mind, either, that the bill requires public employers, not unions, to submit lists of eligible employees. Never mind, either either, that unions insist on precisely this information when it’s useful for them; unions just call it card checking.

Jesse Case, Teamsters Local 238 Secretary-Treasurer, says that everything—including strikes—are on the table if that’s what it takes to stop the bill. He’s even proposing some wildly inappropriate, deliberately dangerous, union actions if his union doesn’t get its way:

Let’s say you’re a water treatment person and you get a call at three in the morning that says, “The water supply’s going down,” you’re not obligated to answer that call and that’s not a strike.
It’s not a work stoppage because you’re not getting paid at three o’clock in the morning to answer your phone. In fact, it’s against the law to make somebody answer their phone if they’re not receiving pay.
…
It’s [sic] there’s a blizzard moving in at three in the morning, you can go into work at seven or six or your regular scheduled time—call Senator Dickey to come plow your streets.

The union doesn’t care about the risks to businesses or lives; they want their way. The union doesn’t care that those hours already count as serious overtime, emergency or not, with serious extra pay associated.

These strike threats, these union flu work slowdowns, this you can’t have anything unless we get everything ideology, this legalized extortion—nice business/state/whatever you got there, be too bad if something was to happen to it—is exactly why today’s unions need to be busted.

The Iowa legislature and Governor need to stand tall and pass the bill and apply the consequences to these unions.

India vs PRC

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece comparing the People’s Republic of China’s economic future with India’s. In the second paragraph (the semi-lede?), there’s this:

The country’s population surpassed China’s last year. More than half of Indians are under 25.

A couple of graphs from the CIA World Factbook put the two nation’s population structures in sharp relief, and at this stage of the two nations’ economic development, those structures are their future.

This is the structure of India’s population (scroll down a skosh):

This is the structure of the PRC’s population (again, scroll a tad):

India’s population of new workers is growing, so the nation’s economic capacity is capable of growing. The PRC’s population of new workers is shrinking. Not only is the PRC incapable of growing very much, economically, it’s becoming and will continue to become increasingly difficult to support its old folks, even as that portion of the nation’s population continues to grow.

Here are the Jobs to Cut

Posted on by
Reply

A bunch of Washington Post journalists and staffers struck the print news outlet Thursday, upset over planned buyouts of 240 job holders, and layoffs if 240 don’t agree to buyouts.

WaPo reporter Marissa Lang:

We did not come to this decision to do this walkout lightly….

No, of course not….

The union, represented by the NewsGuild, said in an unsigned statement posted on X by New York Times(!) media reporter Ben Mullin,

Despite a year and a half of efforts, Post management has refused to bargain in good faith for a fair contract that keeps up with inflation and our competition[.]

The strike announcement subheadline reads, in part,

Unfair labor practice strike protests the Post’s disregard of the law in bargaining….

Because, of course it’s always management’s fault, the union always is lily-pure. Of course…. Unsubstantiated, smear claims like this are part of what gives unions a bad name.

No, it seems to me that “the union,” with its strike, has self-identified those 240 jobs and quite a few more that can, and should, be cut.