SEATTLE (AP) — Boeing and at least one other U.S. heavy-equipment manufacturer resumed production Monday amid pressure from President Donald Trump to reopen the economy and resistance from governors who warn there is not enough testing yet to keep the coronavirus from rebounding.
Relentless testing, quarantines, masks, distancing. Those might slow it down, but in 2 weeks we’ll start hearing about infections spreading through plants and work places. In a month, deaths. I hope sick employees sue the sh*t out of their employers for creating an unsafe work environment, and then requiring them to work there or lose their jobs.
I am not so sure with Boeing that this is responding to Trump. Washington State has bent the curve. If there is anyplace (other than the Bay Area) where a return of manufacturing jobs is appropriate, Washington State is it.
And I might add - if you have even been to an airframer, people are spaced out, you can do a lot of social distancing w/o much issues. It is not like meat packing where workers are clustered together, or the old cheek to jowell assembly line of the 50s.
p.s. North Dakota, I have no idea. I do know that South Dakota is screwed…
From this TPM-reprinted AP article’s photo caption:
So we’re not killing people fast enough with African and Middle Eastern wars and an uncontrolled coronavirus? We need to kill 'em faster with defective aircraft?
I don’t get it. Nobody’s flying. So why make more planes? Put those Boeing employees to work doing virus testing and contact tracing. Then maybe that will help end this so there will be people willing to fly.
Boeing’s top management has shown before that their idea of the proper tradeoff between lives and booked revenue is not the same as most people. Especially when it’s other people’s lives. Make the C suite walk the floor everyday.
They have to be able to stop it at the front door. When they can’t it’s on the door handle, forklift steering wheel, water fountains and you. I read about a nuke going thru refueling and the 1400 people, every day, in and out. Bunch of these workers live in campers, on couches and they are at risk, but need to carry on.
I have never toured Boeing’s facilities, so I don’t know what is theoretically possible, but prior to Boeing’s voluntary closure, covid-19 was spreading within the plant. There were news reports of a great deal of worker unease and frustration at lack of transparency around who was infected. When the first worker died, they shut the plants.
So, despite the fact that airplanes are quite large, standard business practices did in fact support coronavirus transmission. Tens of thousands of people work in those plants. I hope the new protocols work.
WTF? Trump ‘pressured’ Boeing? With WHAT? Pay off their debt? Make the bad planes go away? Not insult them at a press conference? This is disgusting and disturbing in so MANY ways!
Sometimes the 6 feet social distance axiom can lead to false confidence. Respiratory germs can linger in the air for two to three hours. So even if you are all alone in the coffee room without anybody within 20 feet of you, if someone coughed or sneezed in that same room an hour before you were there, you could be vulnerable.