re: The best explanation of what’s going on at Boeing

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There’s no part of me that believes that union workers are more skilled, motivated, or produce a higher quality product.

Quite the opposite in fact.

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20 odd years ago Im in the airport in NO and this guy sits down next to me at the bar, strikes up a conversation and asks me if Ive ever heard of a company down in the bayou called Cameco. I said I had, went near bankrupt in the oil bust and the employees scrapped together and bought it, and been rolling ever since.

He said he worked for a water pump company who sold water pumps to Caterpillar and had spent the previous two weeks at their plant in Ohio replacing faulty ones. Cameco is a subcontractor so he had to come down and swap theirs out the ones on the sprayers they were making for Cat.

He said Ohio is union, had to have a supervisor, train one guy at a time, took two weeks. Came to Cameco and the guy in operations met him and said, show me...but wait, and before he started the guy brought over two other fellas and they all climbed under a sprayer and he showed them how to swap the pump out. Went to call in the office and when he came back, the same three guys had three other guys and they were all under sprayers swaping out pumps.

Guy said what it took two weeks to do in a union shop these guys did the same amount in three days and every late afternoon, when he bought the beers, they took him fishing, crawfishing, and gator huntin.

Said it was a classic story for business schools, bullshite acronyms versus common sense.

They sold out to Cat, I hope all those baws made another few million on the deal (they bet the farm when they bought the place and most of them were millionaires by the time I had visited them).