What the headline says.
That’s good news for Boeing, good news for the machinists, and good news for the region. And in a gubernatorial election where Dino Rossi has pegged much of his message on exploiting voters’ growing sense of economic insecurity, I suppose that’s marginally good news for Gov. Chris Gregoire.
Happy voters make for happy incumbents.
If this is a deal that workers can vote for, that’s good news for everyone — the workers, the company, customers, the state and region. I doubt it will have much impact on the governor’s race. On the other hand, I think the growing realization of voters that Rossi’s financial backers are criminals who broke the law may blow the race wide open. After all, if a financial scandal involving his campaign erupts, he won’t look like someone who can be trusted with public money to most voters.
bad news for Dino…
She would need to remove her 2.8 billion deficit that she screwed the taxpayers of the state.
Getting rid of her will be a blessing.
A week from tomorrow night, I’ll show up at DL late, if at all. That’s because I’ll be a pollworker and won’t get off work until 9:00 PM or later. And I’ll be tired after working a 14-hour shift at the polls. But that’s only a small personal sacrifice for democracy. My job is to help Americans vote, in contrast to our Republican friends who devote themselves body and soul and banknote to keeping as many Americans from voting as possible.
Being a pollworker is an intricate and demanding job, one well over the head of Stuffin Sucksgoatsoffsky, the proprietor of a pathetic little rival blog. Sucksgoatsoffsky didn’t last one day. He can’t follow a simple one-step instruction.
For example, Washington doesn’t allow challenges of a voter’s eligibility on Election Day, and requires that everyone be given at least a provisional ballot. All pollworkers are told about this in their training.
But when a guy showed up at Sucksgoatsoffsky’s polling station, Sucksgoatsoffsky took it upon himself to decide the guy wasn’t entitled to vote, and tried to send him away. At this point the Poll Inspector, who is the polling station supervisor, came over and instructed Sucksgoatsoffsky on the proper procedure. But Sucksgoatsoffsky refused to listen or follow his supervisor’s instructions. Hell, even kids working at minimum wage jobs in hamburger joints know how to do what their supervisor tells them! But not Sucksgoatsoffsky. His problem is he didn’t serve in a military unit where they know how to deal with people who refuse to do what they’re told. When the Poll Inspector insisted that Sucksgoatsoffsky do his job as the law requires and the way he had been trained, Sucksgoatsoffsky quit without notice and walked off the job. I sure hope the county didn’t pay him, because the taxpayers received nothing of value from him.
Obviously, an employee like that isn’t reliable and can’t be trusted with a difficult task like having a voter sign a poll book and handing him the correct ballot. Actually, this part of the job isn’t all that hard because the way they set it up all the ballots on your table are the same, so it’s almost impossible to give anyone the wrong ballot.
Well, my point is, if Sucksgoatsoffsky can’t even do that right, why should anyone believe he can do anything else right? In short, if he’s too stupid to be a pollworker, why would anyone believe anything he says on his sucky little blog?
@3 You’re not gonna be that lucky. In fact, next Tuesday will be very unlucky for you and your party. The GOP has used up its luck. It’s almost ass-kicking time. Get ready to bend over.
Roger
My parents were poll workers for literally decades and have several stories about folks like Sucksgoatsoffsky.
Keep up the good work for democracy, and I am not being sarcastic.
s/
Jim, a genuine musician who has not, does not, and will not ever attempt to operate a bagpipe assembly.
That reminds me — Stefan Sharansky sued Dean Logan and KCRE for monetary penalties under the Public Disclosure Act in 2005 because they gave him only 600,000 documents, free use of a county room, and the full-time assistance of a county employee for several weeks while he pored through election records hoping against hope to find at least imaginary shreds of evidence of election fraud that never happened. Lawsuits are expensive and Sharansky made a public appeal for funds to pay the legal expenses of this lawsuit. Last I heard, none of his donors had received a cut of the judgment. In fact, I haven’t heard anything, because Sharansky (I KNOW YOU READ THIS BLOG, STEFAN!) refused to answer my questions about whether he had received the money yet, even though I asked him well over 100 times over a period of a couple years. So how about it, Stefan, have you distributed the checks to the generous donors who paid for your lawsuit yet? Or did you stiff your supporters and keep all the money for yourself? Or did the judge dismiss your lawsuit for lack of a meritorious claim? Which is it?
That reminds me. Sharansky and his wife took their unruly kid (what other kind of kid would a guy like Sharansky have?) to a restaurant and the kid ran riot through the place disturbing other diners whose money is just as good as Sharansky’s and who were entitled to a quality dining experience. So a waitress who is a single mom working 2 jobs to make ends meet asked Sharansky to quiet down his kid and you know what Sharansky did? He complained to the manager and got the waitress fired. What kind of asshole would do that? Sharansky must be a Republican.
To clarify things, I should mention that Stefan’s name used to be Sharansky, but he changed it to Sharkansky. I suspect that may be because a lot of people are looking for him and he doesn’t want to be found. If so, I can’t say I blame him. I wouldn’t want people to find me, either, if I were him. Thank the Great Mother Rabbit Spirit I’m not him! Because I would look funny with his ears.
Good news.
@10 What news? Oh yeah, the strike settlement. The relevance of my comments to this topic is neither Boeing nor the machinists would put up with Sucksgoatsoffsky or Sharansky, and you can’t build airplanes with people like that. You need a team that works together to do something as complicated as building an airplane, and Boeing is smart enough to know you’ve gotta keep the workers happy to keep the team functioning, and you can’t let people like Sucksgoatsoffsky or Sharansky drag the whole team down to their level because then things won’t go right.
Roger- Thanks for helping our democracy limp along and happen. Its imperative that we do this.
I will also be protecting votes on Tuesday from the potentially fraudulent challenges of wingnuts who are themselves paranoid about people not white and northern European, and who do not have several credit cards and perhaps buildings named after their families, yet who are nonetheless believing they have a right to vote just because the law and the Constitution says they can. I agree that they have that right and will fight for it.
Then lets have a hell of celebration.
And good on the machinists and Boeing. Hope its a win-win for both of them.
@12 My understanding is the big issue was outsourcing and it looks like the company caved in because the union negotiators wouldn’t have initialed an agreement that sends their members’ jobs to outside contractors or other countries.
@13- Thats really good to hear. Lets help unions fight to keep jobs at home. I worked a year at Boeing before going back to the law after undergrad work. We were fighting like heck to keep jobs then in the early 80’s.
Seems like a patriotic thing to do- keep jobs at home and reward companies that do that. And lets not give tax breaks to sending jobs overseas. Hmmm, which presidential candidate supports that idea, and which one says its fine to reward companies in our tax code who send the jobs and profits offshore, on the backs of American workers??
But a Query- is it socialist to think that companies that our tax system should encourage companies that keep jobs here rather than maximizing shareholder profit by shipping them overseas? If our tax systenm says companies that keep jobs here should get rewarded, is that socialism?
Must be the case, since Obama is a socialist. Lets ask Palin to break it down for us.
@12 (continued) You won’t see any challenges on Election Day. Washington doesn’t allow Election Day challenges. If any Republican observers are present they have to sit quietly, watch, and not interfere with the pollworkers or voters just like you. Otherwise the Inspector can order them to leave and if they don’t she’ll call the cops.
I’ve been a pollworker in half a dozen elections, and I was an observer in the ’04 election, so I’ve been on both sides of the table. If you’re a first-time observer, my advice is watch (and take notes if you like) but don’t tell the pollworkers how to do their job. We know how to do our job, it’ll be a long day for us, and most King County pollworkers are Democrats that you don’t have to worry about. Where I’ve worked, we always got along fine with the GOP pollworkers, but we’ll watch them ourselves if necessary. The Inspector runs the polling place, and if there’s a problem, we’ll have our Inspector take care of it.
Things can definitely go wrong — voting machine failures, power outages, and so on. In ’04 a guy came in my polling place loudly expressing his dislike of Bush. Voters aren’t allowed to do that because it disrupts the other voters and violates the law that prohibits campaigning within 300 feet of a polling place. In ’06, someone lined the walkway into our polling place with McGavick signs. A voter complained to me about it, so I reported it to the Inspector, who told me and the GOP pollworker to go out and pull them up, and we did. That violates the electioneering laws.
Voters can wear t-shirts and campaign buttons into the polling place but they shouldn’t talk about how they’re voting when they get inside. You can have bumper stickers or signs on your car if you’re only going to be parked for a few minutes while you vote, but if you’re going to be there all day you must either remove them or park at least 300 feet away.
Pollworkers are not allowed to have TVs, radios, cell phones, MP3 players, newspapers, or reading material on political topics. They can knit or read and converse but they can’t talk about politics. The atmosphere typically is very collegial and you won’t be able to tell which pollworkers are Democrats or Republicans as we’ll be fraternizing throughout the day.
Observing a polling place is damned boring and you definitely want to bring reading material or something to occupy yourself during the slow times when no voters are present and nothing is happening.
@14 The Truth About Redistribution and Who’s For Socialism
All taxes redistribute wealth. So do deficits, because deficits create inflation, and inflation is a tax that takes money from the lower end of the income spectrum. Asset owners usually don’t suffer as much from inflation because asset values go up in response to lower currency values and company profits keep pace with inflation when companies raise prices.
The “socialist” rap against Obama is totally bogus. It was an unfortunate choice of words on his part but the Repugs have twisted what he said to mean something very different from what he intended.
We do need a redistribution of wealth in this country, but not the way socialists do it. In recent years, a huge amount of wealth has been redistributed from labor to capital. Labor used to get over 60% of U.S. GDP and now it’s under 50% of GDP. Wealth has gone up in this country but inflation-adjusted wages have been stagnant since 1970 and all of the economic gains have gone to the owning class, with most of the increased wealth accruing to the wealthiest 2% of the population, and within that subset, most of it going to the wealthiest 1/10th of 1% of the population. This wasn’t accidental. It resulted from the redistributive policies of the Republicans who have controlled our government since Reagan.
Besides taxes, government policies are redistributionist. One of the first redistributions that should take place under an Obama administration is axing corporate socialism. If companies have to live off taxpayers because they can’t make money by selling goods and services let ’em die.
Tax policies also redistribute wealth, and this is part of what Obama was talking about. A wage earner making an average income has a marginal tax rate of 32.65%. The maximum rate paid by hedge fund managers earning over $1 billion a year and multimillionaires on their capital gains and dividends is 15%. So, the average worker is paying more than twice as much as these very rich guys. Compared to the flat-rate tax Republicans have loudly demanded for years, these tax rates obviously are redistributing the tax burden and therefore wealth from rich people to average people. There needs to be a large redistribution of taxes from the middle class to the wealthy just to make everyone’s share of the tax burden equal, before you get into any progressive stuff.
Of course, we could cut taxes to zero for everyone and finance government by printing money. But you’ll still pay taxes, because you’ll end up with an enormous inflation tax. Instead of paying taxes to the IRS, you’ll pay taxes at the gas pump and grocery checkout. That’s partly been happening recently. Because Bush financed his tax cuts for the rich with deficits, we’re paying higher prices to give those tax breaks to billionaires.
Republicans claim people making over $250,000 need tax cuts so they have more money to invest in their businesses and create jobs for the working class. First of all, business owners and investors don’t create jobs, customers do. Second, why are they more deserving of these tax cuts than the working class? Why not give those tax cuts to workers to give them a chance to invest in businesses by buying stocks and own a piece of the profits? $1,000 invested by a wage earner creates just as many jobs as $1,000 invested by a guy who already has $1 million of equity in the business. This is what Obama means by “spreading the wealth around.” It has nothing to do with taking money from rich people and giving it to poor people. All Obama wants is for workers to get taxed on a level playing field so they have a chance to invest and own their fair share of America’s capital. This is what Republicans call “socialism.” That’s a pretty funny use of the term considering how stacked the deck is in their favor under the current system.
We have socialism in this country, all right, but it’s socialism for the rich. Obama stands for less socialism, not more. If you want to vote for the socialist candidate, then vote for McCain, because he’s for more socialism for the rich, i.e., another $300 billion of tax cuts for corporations that are mostly owned by the already-wealthy.
It’s absurd that we begin taxing workers when they make about $15,000 a year but let people born into rich families get 100 times as much income from inheritances before paying any taxes at all. How can you avoid destroying the incentive to work and be productive when the tax system punishes hard-working people for going to jobs and rewards lazy people for living off their inheritances? That makes no sense! We should eliminate death taxes and basis stepups, and tax inheritances as ordinary income with the same exemptions and deductions that workers get. This will help get heirs off their behinds and into jobs where they’re useful to society.
The right’s continuous harping on “the death tax” makes me want to vomit. It should more appropriately be called the “spoiled upper class twits who don’t have to do a single damned useful thing because they got lucky when Mummy and Daddy croaked” tax.
Roger & Tom;
I’m an AVU judge, but I fill in where ever I’m needed. I know I don’t need to remind you to ask “paper or electronic”. I expect we will be very busy this election.
I hope that the agreement is one that both Boeing and the IAW can agree on so everyone can get back to work.
I can’t help but wonder….word’s been going around that a lot of the trouble Boeing’s been having putting together a functional Dreamliner (as opposed to that rolling mockup they showed off) has been due to problems with the subassemblies built by all those suppliers scattered all over the planet.
Could it possibly be that during the downtime caused by the strike, Boeing’s engineers and management have had time to take stock of the situation, and come to realize that they can actually do more of the work under one roof and save money?
Art @ 20:
With the 787 program we are seeing the fruition of Harry Stonecipher’s vision to transform the Boeing company. Stonecipher came primarily from a finanical background, not manufacturing or engineering or aerospace, so he envisioned a company which consisted only of managers and purchasing agents, with the airplanes 90% built by sub-contractors. To make sure Boeing followed his vision in the future, he closed the parts fabrication facilities, sold or scrapped the tooling, and laid off the workers with 20+ years of experience. These were the guys you could call up when you had a grounded aircraft, and they could usually pull out the drawings and make you a new part within 24 hours if there weren’t any spares available (now lead times are often 180+ days).
It didn’t come without objection – some guy at Boeing a few years back was circulating a paper objecting to the change, pointing out that if you give up production of parts you give up the profit associated with it. In the aircraft business the ability to produce and sale parts on the after-market is pretty much a license to print money. An airline can’t just go down to Schuck’s and buy a cheaper substitute, in most cases it has to buy the part designed specifically for that aircraft or engine, and it better come with a Certificate of Conformity or FAA 8130-3 (Airworthiness Certificate) tag.
Of course, Stonecipher came originally from GE Finance (I think, without looking it up) and went to McDonnell-Douglas. That company always made great airplanes and was a fierce competitor of Boeing, but historically it’s finances were always as shambles. Stonecipher promised to clean it up, and for a while it looked like he had done so. But he did it by sacrificing future aircraft R&D, which cut costs in the short term. But as the MD aircraft designs aged, they couldn’t compete with Boeing and Airbus, and the company was eventually merged with Boeing just to save it from being acquired by Airbus. In other words, Stonecipher ran McDonnell-Douglass into the ground, and then became CEO of Boeing as a reward, where he made sure that every department was headed by a former MD manager who was loyal only to Stonecipher. Thus Stonecipher turned a maximum 2-year stint as CEO into ten years worth of trying to run Boeing into the ground, before he was finally kicked out for having an affair with a subordinate. But his management style still lives on within quite a few Boeing managers, often former McDonnell-Douglas managers (a lot of legacy Boeing managers quit over the years when they saw their careers dead-ended).
So fast-forward to the 787 program:
In a way, Boeing HAD to out-source a lot of the 787 program. The 767 which it replaces had virtually no orders in the stream, being an old airframe which had great difficulty competing with the slightly newer A350. Boeing had to have an airplane which filled the gap between the 737-800 and the shorter versions of the 777.
But thanks to Stonecipher, Boeing hadn’t invested in R&D and infrastructure to make large carbon fiber tubes (i.e., no autoclaves large enough). If it was going to offer a product this decade, it had to out-source a large portion of the fuselage and even the wing assemblies. In the process it also out-sourced some of the risk of the program, as well as the engineering tasks, which meant that the sub-contractors not only had a production contract, but actually OWNED the drawings for a substantial portion of the aircraft. In other words, Boeing couldn’t make any modifications to the aircraft, or find other vendors, without the permission of the original vendor.
It reminds me of IBM’s decision to use “off-the-shelf technology” to make it’s original PCs in the 1980’s. It allowed the company to enter the market in a hurry, but it also sowed the seeds of it’s own failure, as anybody could make a PC-clone using the same off-the-shelf technology along with a copy of Microsoft DOS. Boeing runs the same risk – Airbus is contracting with the same companies Boeing is using to produce it’s own new A350X carbon-fiber aircraft.
It is true that Boeing’s out-sourcing is the cause of quite a few problems with the 787 delays. Boeing told the vendors of the major assemblies that if they wanted the job they had to meet a certain schedule, to which they all enthusiastically replied “I think I can!”, despite everyone working with new materials and processes, and most of the vendors hiring a substantially new work force for the job. It was ludicrous for them, or Boeing, to base a schedule on the assumption that everything was going to go right, with only minor delays which could be made up later.
And the company’s insistence on meeting marketing’s plans to roll out the 787 on July 8, 2007 was an incredibly stupid idea. Somebody should have pulled the plug on that plan at least four months before the roll-out. That plane was in such poor shape it had to be substantially dismanted again in the factory and is STILL being re-assembled – workers couldn’t tell what jobs had been done, which ones hadn’t been done, and which ones were concealed with cosmetic patches for the roll-out ceremony. Fortunatly, that plane will probably never be in commercial service, as it will be used as a test plane and for promotional purposes only (as is the tradition for Boeing’s first-off-the-line aircraft).
As for outsourcing, there now there seems to be two camps within Boeing management.
The guy that led the 787 manufacturing team lost that job over the delays, but in a moment of frank comments (I think it was to the Everett Chamber of Commerce) he confessed that the outsourcing caused a lot of problems that they wouldn’t be repeating in future programs. But Boeing immediatly disputed his comments. And Boeing managers I have spoken to have insisted that this is just a “rough patch” which Boeing has to work through, and after that the program will finish on time. But part of overcoming those rough patches has included Boeing taking over a lot of Vought’s manufacturing facilities in order to get the aft-sections of the aircraft produced on time. And Boeing workers will, once they get back to work, continue to put in 7/10’s (seven days a week, ten hours a day) to try to get the first aircraft out of the factory (again).
But a lot of the middle-level managers at Boeing who are in their late 30’s and 40’s graduated from business school during the Reagan years, and they bring with them an anti-union bias and a penchant for outsourcing. That worries me for the long-term future of the company.
21 Absolutely agreed on all counts. Stonecipher was the kind of manager who exemplified the absolute worst of American corporate “quarterly report” disease. I doubt that he gave a rat’s ass about the long-term future of any place he worked at, especially as he got older. You can make a lot of money building a company up, but you can also make a lot of money tearing one down. Harry was a specialist at the latter.
rhp6033@21 – Fascinating post. Thanks!
21 The Vought reference brings to mind Boeing’s takeover of the Iron Fireman plant in Portland in the 70’s.