Boeing to cut 17,000 jobs as losses deepen during factory strike

When your cutting jobs fast as your worried about your cashflow while you still have a massive outstanding order book that is a big sign of trouble. The preliminary third quarter losses were a lot larger than market analysts had been predicting due to unexpectedly $2 more write-downs on military contracts including Air Force One yet again (the gift that never stops giving) & $700m on the tanker contract, $400m from ending 767 freighter production in 2027 and a $2.4bn write-down on the 777X.
 
Interesting to compare Boeing and Airbus assets and liabilities for 2023. Airbus is managing to pay-off debt and yet increase cash on hand, the opposite of Boeing.

Cash on hand:
Boeing $12bn, 8% down
Airbus $22bn, 1% up

Long-term debt:
Boeing $54bn, 12% up
Airbus $18bn, 16% down

Total liabilities:
Boeing $160bn, 7% up
Airbus $109bn, 1% up
 
We need to break up the big primes so that bankruptcy will not have an unrecoverable impact on national security. If Boeing has to be kept alive and bailed out, which is probably the case, then they either shouldn't be a private company or should be split up into smaller corporations that individually can survive and be replaceable.
 
This latest development will only add to the Democratic Party's woes.
 
Kiltonge said:
Interesting to compare Boeing and Airbus assets and liabilities for 2023. Airbus is managing to pay-off debt and yet increase cash on hand, the opposite of Boeing.

Cash on hand:
Boeing $12bn, 8% down
Airbus $22bn, 1% up

Long-term debt:
Boeing $54bn, 12% up
Airbus $18bn, 16% down

Total liabilities:
Boeing $160bn, 7% up
Airbus $109bn, 1% up
Click to expand...
Airbus seems to have avoided little mistakes like hiding significant changes in flight-control software & systems from both regulators and the pilots who fly their aircraft to save money - forgetting to bolt door plugs to the airframe due to a complete disregarding of basic accountability procedures on the assembly floor - etc.
 
BlackBat242 said:
Airbus seems to have avoided little mistakes like hiding significant changes in flight-control software & systems from both regulators and the pilots who fly their aircraft to save money - forgetting to bolt door plugs to the airframe due to a complete disregarding of basic accountability procedures on the assembly floor - etc.
Click to expand...
From the department of “it’s easy to have good financials when you’re not lighting sticks of dynamite and then sticking them in your pockets.”
 
Kiltonge said:
Interesting to compare Boeing and Airbus assets and liabilities for 2023. Airbus is managing to pay-off debt and yet increase cash on hand, the opposite of Boeing.

Cash on hand:
Boeing $12bn, 8% down
Airbus $22bn, 1% up

Long-term debt:
Boeing $54bn, 12% up
Airbus $18bn, 16% down

Total liabilities:
Boeing $160bn, 7% up
Airbus $109bn, 1% up
Click to expand...

Airbus are using their large pile of surplus cash to repurchase 4.25m (10%) of their shares over the next 12 months.
 
joshjosh said:
We need to break up the big primes so that bankruptcy will not have an unrecoverable impact on national security. If Boeing has to be kept alive and bailed out, which is probably the case, then they either shouldn't be a private company or should be split up into smaller corporations that individually can survive and be replaceable.
Click to expand...
If you want Boeing to be able to compete with Airbus, it needs to be the size it is. Air transport purchases are historically cyclical, which means you need to have a significant defence sector to cover the times that the airliner business is in the doldrums.

And a smaller company just can't handle the cost exposure of bringing a new aircraft to market. When Boeing last looked at bringing the New Midsize Aircraft to market in 2021 the estimate was development would cost $25Bn.

(And the primes are the size they are because DoD told them to combine or die at SecDef Les Aspin's 'Last Supper' in 1993)
 
news.slashdot.org

'Crises at Boeing and Intel Are a National Emergency' - Slashdot

Intel and Boeing, once exemplars of American manufacturing prowess, now face existential crises. Their market values have plummeted, jeopardizing not just shareholder wealth but national security. The U.S. is losing its edge in manufacturing high-tech products, crucial in its geopolitical...
news.slashdot.org

www.telegraph.co.uk

Boeing-made satellite breaks up in space

Crisis-hit aerospace giant dealt fresh blow after ‘anomaly’ causes explosion in orbit
www.telegraph.co.uk www.telegraph.co.uk
 
DWG said:
If you want Boeing to be able to compete with Airbus, it needs to be the size it is. Air transport purchases are historically cyclical...

(And the primes are the size they are because DoD told them to combine or die at SecDef Les Aspin's 'Last Supper' in 1993)
Click to expand...
That information needs to be repeated...such a situation allows poison pills to be absorbed however.

There was an article in Space News talking about how launch firms need to diversify---but if said company goes public--there will be those who see the space launch division as "underperforming" and try to get rid of it--instead of propping it up as intended

It seems the baby formula crisis came, what, after Gerber was known for life insurance and knives?
 
Looks like nationalization (at least, temporal) may be the best solution. After all, what US have to lose? Efficiency? Boeing is already highly inefficient, and direct government control would hardly make it MUCH worse. Money? They would require government money to survive anyway. And demonstrating that "sure, you may be too big to fail, but you aren't too big to be taken" would likely have a invigorating effect on other "old giants".
 
I doubt that nationalisation would be feasible - doctrinal reasons in the USA, and because it could well up open the state subsidy legal rift with Airbus again.
US corporations have always cried about their overseas competitors getting state money (while ignoring their own Federal-minted defence dollars pouring in). With neoliberal economics so rampant it's no surprise that profit and shareholder dividend has trumped all other considerations. The asset strippers and 'entrepreneurs' would feast on Boeing if they could get their hands on it and not bother at all about national interest.
 
With the failures that have come to light, the workers are hardly covering themselves with any kind of respectability are they?

While the Boing management are clearly fifty cents short of a dollar, it takes everyone fouling up together to create the mess we are seeing.

How can you demand the levels of pay and conditions desired, without huge improvements in standards and flexibility?

This will Shirley require jobs to be cut at most levels, including management/director level and investment in training continuity training/standards.....

If I ran an airline and had orders with Boing, I would seriously be considering cutting my losses and shifting those orders to airbus. Hack, cough.
 
Foo Fighter said:
How can you demand the levels of pay and conditions desired, without huge improvements in standards and flexibility?
Click to expand...
It may sound banal, but Boeing workers did not feel themselves appreciated or their efforts recognized. They aren't feeling themselves "part of the team" anymore - merely the replaceable resource controlled by orders of impersonal and indifferent managers far away, who cares only about financial reports, not actual work. Peoples don't like to be reduced to statistics.
 
Somewhere they're building the robot that can do what you do today, but without pay, without vacations, without illness, without Monday hangovers, without racial or gender quotas.

If you are replaceable, do not strike.

But how do you know if you're replaceable?

Everyone is.
 
Foo Fighter said:
How can you demand the levels of pay and conditions desired, without huge improvements in standards and flexibility?
Click to expand...
By pointing out that you're just trying to restore what's already been taken away by management and handed over to the shareholders instead.

How much the value of a Boeing worker's wages and benefits package has fallen I don't know, but the strikers seem pretty convinced it's a significant figure.

Boeing management is being frank that a major part of their current woes is systematically underbidding fixed price deals, they're not being as open about admitting another part of the problem is the inevitable consequence of a couple of decades of systematically playing hardball with their workforce.
 
I am not saying the workforce is solely culpable but perhaps there needs to be a new safety annopuncement before every flight. "The makers of this plane and the workforce do not give a hoot whether it crashes and burns. Just as long as the profit of management and comfort of the work force is maintained".

It takes two to tango, perhaps accepting that is the case and everyone needs to improve might help, in moving on?
 
Foo Fighter said:
I am not saying the workforce is solely culpable but perhaps there needs to be a new safety annopuncement before every flight. "The makers of this plane and the workforce do not give a hoot whether it crashes and burns. Just as long as the profit of management and comfort of the work force is maintained".

It takes two to tango, perhaps accepting that is the case and everyone needs to improve might help, in moving on?
Click to expand...
Boeing achieved the changed working conditions it wanted wrt Seattle by moving the 787 line to South Carolina. We've all seen how well that worked out.

It's not employee working conditions that Boeing needs to fix so much as assuring each work package on an aircraft is allocated the appropriate amount of time needed to 1) do it and 2) check it. You don't fix a job taking X men Y hours by allocating .9X Men and .7Y hours, no matter how good it looks in the company results.

It's worth considering that slashing 10% of your workforce across the board cannot make sense in engineering terms, some areas are already going to have insufficient staff while others will have had barely sufficient until now, and you're inevitably going to lose a significant chunk of corporate knowledge as those approaching retirement decide to go now rather than spend their last few years and months making sure their successors know the tips of the trade. However it does immediately boost _last year's_ earnings per employee by 11% in the annual report. It's an accountancy fix, not an engineering fix, and Boeing's already had too many of those.
 
Putting politics aside, the billionaires run things now. Employees are viewed as interchangeable parts. And even though slavery is no longer in vogue, no one wants to pay anyone anything. (Slavery has been relabeled as Human Trafficking.) Companies such as Vanguard and BlackRock are designed to generate more and more profits. That's all they do. Neither is a household name and they don't want to be. At Boeing, replacing CEOs is only going to work the first few times. After that, it's either get more government money or break the company up. The U.S. has troops scattered all over the globe and must supply them. No one wants to be in a "moving toward war" situation. Just the opposite.

But back to those billionaires. They meet once a year in Sun Valley, Idaho. I'm sure no one outside their circle has heard of it. And I'm sure Elon Musk regales them with stories of his robots working at at least one of his factories. About unmanned taxis coming next year. Or the head of OpenAI telling everyone about some "intelligent" programs that will replace people. So, the future looks like this: robots, which can be written off like any other piece of equipment, replacing workers and robotaxis replacing Uber drivers. https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/09/business/sun-valley-summer-camp-billionaires-nightcap/index.html

The goal is global control of as much business and assets as possible.
 
martinbayer said:
Note that at this time Boeing is not offering voluntary layoffs.
Click to expand...
Even if they aren't, there's often some flexibility around retirement age, and if people are annoyed enough, they'll go rather than put up with the crap, even if it means a slightly smaller pension. So any time you crack down on the workforce, you'll tend to haemorrhage experience whether you want to or not.
 
Justo Miranda said:
Somewhere they're building the robot that can do what you do today, but without pay, without vacations, without illness, without Monday hangovers, without racial or gender quotas.

If you are replaceable, do not strike.

But how do you know if you're replaceable?

Everyone is.
Click to expand...
And then they would be forced to start building post-scarity Communist future) Because if labor would worth nothing, it would shatter the whole Capitalist-type economy to the point of money being worth nothing also.
 
edwest4 said:
The goal is global control of as much business and assets as possible.
Click to expand...
And then what? If they replace all workers with the robots, who would buy the mass-produced goods? The billionaries became possible due to consumerism creating the essentially endless market, and if there is no billions of consumers, then billionaries money would just stop means anything.
 
Here's an alternative course of action.

Pay peanuts lots and lots of money, and you get... errr... monkeys. Not as many, but infinitely more apt to FUBAR than the kind that take peanuts.

This rare and expensive kind of monkey is attractive to investors who are
- too old to face the consequences of misrule or
- quick enough to offload their dodgy shares to those who are
- plain stupid

Any questions?
 
Dilandu said:
And then what? If they replace all workers with the robots, who would buy the mass-produced goods? The billionaries became possible due to consumerism creating the essentially endless market, and if there is no billions of consumers, then billionaries money would just stop means anything.
Click to expand...
Politicians of all eras and ideologies have refused to recognize that the law of supply and demand is a natural and immutable physical law that they cannot manipulate.

If people are used for agriculture, for mining or for war, politicians allow them to continue living, in the first half of this century they are no longer needed in offices but they still allow them to continue living to maintain the fiction of elections and order without the need for repression. To maintain the fiction, social benefits, free healthcare, unions, strike rights, social rights, civil rights, entertainment, sports... But all that is expensive and the value of office work no longer compensates for it.

Any idea what will happen when it is no longer necessary to maintain fiction?
 
www.flightglobal.com

Moody’s thinks Boeing still has negotiating room with union as cash crunch continues

Boeing faces the prospect of losing billions more dollars in the fourth quarter and may need to accelerate efforts to raise cash after machinists on 23 October voted down another of the company's contract offerings.
www.flightglobal.com www.flightglobal.com

This is interesting:
“We believe that an agreement will be reached with financial terms that Boeing can bear and that the company could accommodate the IAM’s pre-strike objective of a 40% compensation increase, but not the pension demand,” Moody’s says.
 
It is hard tro see how Boing can continue to be viable in it's current state for long. It might be better to break it up and see where the parts fall.
 
Foo Fighter said:
It is hard tro see how Boing can continue to be viable in it's current state for long. It might be better to break it up and see where the parts fall.
Click to expand...
How many ways could the company be split apart aside from separating the commercial and defense branches? And even if that were to occur what would the likely outcome be besides either Lockheed or Northrop buying them out?
 
Dilandu said:
And then what? If they replace all workers with the robots, who would buy the mass-produced goods? The billionaries became possible due to consumerism creating the essentially endless market, and if there is no billions of consumers, then billionaries money would just stop means anything.
Click to expand...
In the world of robots, paper money means little (and it never ment all the much) but the control of robots is what matters.

The powerful would control robots to produce goods and services for their own consumption.

Some very logical thing to get the robots to do is to research and implement immortality. Following that, building a interstellar ship just to bug out if Sol gets to hot. The rest would be down to personal taste, from terraforming planets to acting out personal feuds.

We have history of eras where trade and money account of small part of "economics" and slavery, serfdom and direct control of hard assets is what matters. With new slaves, that is what it is gonna look like.

DWG said:
However it does immediately boost _last year's_ earnings per employee by 11% in the annual report. It's an accountancy fix, not an engineering fix, and Boeing's already had too many of those.
Click to expand...
My theory for lifecycle of organizations is
1. Idealists create value and enables massive growth.
2. Opportunists sees success and tries to join
3. Conformists see social change and joins too
4. The ideals that drove growth gets lost in organizational dilution and idealists leave. The mission becomes lost as self interest of participants rule.

From this perspective the point isn't on how to save boeing, but how to grow new aerospace companies that is not dysfunctional. Once they grow up they can absorbs the chunks of boeing that have residue value.

I also think this is why social systems that have natural termination and succession processes are more successful than ones that assumes social systems are immortal and can self regenerate from errors.
 

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