Boeing, Other Manufacturing Company Reopening Amid Pressure From Trump

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.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1304963

Are they going to be selling off all the mask from their pales that aren’t running anymore?

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.

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I cannot see them bucking Hair Furror. Their biggest customer can tell them what is what.

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…

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With the airline industry at basically a standstill, is there really an urgency for Boeing to get their plant back up and running?

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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.

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They can piss test the workforce, but they can’t tell us that we are safe from the virus.

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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.

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They’ve got to rush some more 737 MAX planes out there to kill the few people still flying.

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The law suits around this will make the tobacco suits look like a nickle Pachinko game.

The Discovery process will be an absolute GOLD MINE!!

I hope they make locusts look like finicky eaters.

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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.

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I understand the need to reopen Boeing, what with the heavy demand for air travel these days.

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.

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I think about half of Boeing’s biz is DoD contracting. That and their attempt at orbital launch vehicles.

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“Hey Boeing! You got beat by an electric car! Tesla haw haw haw!”

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!

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Boeing needs to figure out what a safe aircraft looks like, before doing anything else.

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.