In the wake of the midair blowout of a door
on a Boeing 737 MAX 9 earlier this month, the lead that Airbus has
taken over Boeing in the manufacture and sales of the world’s commercial
aircraft has, not surprisingly, grown. It’s actually been growing for
some time: Last year, Airbus delivered 735 new planes to airlines and
leasing companies, The New York Times reported,
while Boeing delivered just 528. Airbus had an order backlog of 8,600
new planes, against Boeing’s 5,626. This month’s blowout
reinforced the public’s—and consequently, the airlines’—doubts about
Boeing’s commitment to safety, which soared after two disastrous crashes
of its 737s in 2018 and 2019.
"What used to be a duopoly" in the manufacture of commercial aircraft, Richard Aboulafia of AeroDynamic Advisory told the Times, "has become two-thirds Airbus, one-third Boeing."
The long descent of Boeing has now become the subject of widespread analysis in the mainstream media. A story last Saturday in The Wall Street Journal
began with an account of one Boeing engineer’s white paper in 2001 that
warned against the company’s new commitment to outsourcing production
of key parts of the aircraft it assembled. But continuing to produce the
parts in-house, with the work done by Boeing’s very experienced and
unionized workforce, cut no mustard with Wall Street and the company’s
new-model CEOs, who no longer came to their posts from careers in
production, but rather from the financial side of the industry. In 2005,
the company sold its Wichita plant to a private equity firm that
slashed costs before unloading the plant to Spirit AeroSystems, which
has become notorious for its deficient quality inspection practices.
But
this fish stunk from the head. Boeing continually objected to what it
said were Spirit’s high costs and inability to meet deadlines. As the
workers on the shop floor and their union repeatedly noted, this led to
rushed production and deficient oversight. Workers—members of the
International Association of Machinists—had "great quality and safety
concerns," one union representative wrote to union leaders, but their
concerns were routinely ignored by senior management, the Journal reported.
So how are work practices at Airbus different
from those at Boeing? I’m not arguing that Airbus provides a panacea
for 21st-century production; a chunk of their own production, for
instance, is
outsourced as well. But consider, for starters, who actually owns the
two companies. Airbus’s four largest shareholders,
in order, are the government of France, the government of Germany, the
Capital Research and Management Company, and the government of Spain.
Boeing’s four largest shareholders, in
order, are The Vanguard Group, Vanguard Group subfiler, Newport Trust
Company, and State Street Corporation (a bank and asset manager). In
other words, Airbus’s largest shareholders are mainly politically
accountable governments that must pay heed to such public concerns as
air safety; Boeing’s are entirely investors in business for profits.
Moreover,
as the merger of German, French, and Spanish companies, Airbus
production is centered in nations where workers historically and
currently have more power than their U.S. counterparts.
Forty-six thousand of Airbus’s roughly 130,000 employees work
in the company’s German factories, where workers, by law, routinely
discuss production and safety issues with managers in works councils. In
the U.S., the Machinists are a union in which workers do have voice and
power by American standards, but lack mechanisms like works councils
through which management must take at least some heed of their concerns.
In
sum, Airbus’s clear leadership over Boeing in matters of flight safety
stem in good measure from their differences in ownership and worker
power—that is, from the European model of mitigating laissez-faire
capitalism with a measure of public and worker power, and from the
American model of subjecting corporate policy almost entirely to the
demands of investment institutions. Which, if you track the value of
Boeing’s stock, hasn’t worked out that well for those investment
institutions, either.
By
the way, just how outsourced is Boeing production? Only yesterday, it
was revealed the door plug that blew out of the Alaska Airlines plane
wasn’t actually produced in Wichita. It was produced in Malaysia,
where I very much doubt that workers’ concerns about speed of
production and quality oversight have much impact on their managers.
More significantly, the fact that the Malaysian production of the door
plug didn’t come to light until yesterday—12 days after the
blowout—suggests just how
profoundly outsourcing can obscure the public visibility required for
corporate accountability. |
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