Boeing will not fix its safety culture if it continues to have a hostile relationship with its workforce, says NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy.
As of Friday, the 13th of September, Boeing’s 32,000 IAM 751 workers in the Puget Sound area are on strike. The workers voted overwhelmingly in favour of this strike, despite their union’s official recommendation to accept it.
Both Boeing’s management and the union are keen to restart the talks, which will reportedly resume early next week. However, it is clear that Boeing has nothing like the leverage it enjoyed in previous such negotiations.
A decade ago, Boeing threatened to build the 777X away from Seattle if its workers didn’t agree to painful cuts. Those negotiations took place half a decade after IAM 751’s 52-day strike in 2008, following Boeing’s then-new outsourcing strategy. That era cemented Boeing’s hostile relationship with its workers.
That relationship and its safety implications was something that NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy brought up in a recent discussion with Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg. In a later interview, Homendy said that she told Ortberg that Boeing has a safety culture problem.
Homendy on Boeing Safety Culture
In the same interview, the NTSB chair said Ortberg responded by saying he was taking her statement “very seriously”. But more broadly, Homendy highlighted how incompatible meaningful safety fixes would be unless Boeing fixes its relationship with its workforce.
Homendy said:
“Unless have a partnership with their workforce, a lot of these issues are not going to be fixed.
“Right now they have a workforce that doesn’t trust Boeing, that is afraid of retaliation. As long as that continues, which is really anti-aviation safety… they’re going to have problems.”
Previously, Boeing’s new CEO told FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker that he wants to focus his efforts “on true culture change, empowering employees to speak up when they see potential issues and bringing the right resources together to solve them”.
Homendy and the Boeing CEO will continue their talks on safety culture in a future meeting at the 737 assembly site in Renton. Unsurprisingly, given the current strike, the timing of that meeting is currently in the air.
With regard to the strike, Boeing has no definitive new aircraft program to use as a carrot – or a stick – this time around. And with 737 production in particular suffering from long delays, Boeing really can’t afford a strike of ANY length.
