Boeing's 737 MAX Jet Affects Everyone

In a span of five months, Boeing’s aircraft 737 MAX Jet was involved in two separate crashes that brought the company under some heat.

In October of 2018, an unexplained crash of a Boeing 737 MAX 8 in Indonesia killed 189 people and in March 2019 a second disaster followed. Another Boeing 737 MAX 8 crashed, this time in Ethiopia, killing 157 people.

Since then, President Trump has joined in with over 40 countries and called for Boeing to ground its entire global fleet of the 737 MAX. And according to analyst estimates, every passing month Boeing is expected to lose between 1.8 billion and 2.5 billion dollars in revenue.

However, through all the coverage in the news, Boeing is doing its best to maintain its internal morale high.

Kim Cano, director of labor relations at Boeing, recently spoke at the Long Beach Rotary Club meeting where she gave some information on how Boeing is managing this situation from the inside along with other things happening in the $101 billion company.

“We focus a lot on quality so the issue with our 737 MAX is a huge blow for us,” said Cano. “From our work environment, our employees are feeling a lot of pain. The focus on safety and quality has been hitting at home with us.”

This in relation to the recent grounding and crashes of the 737 MAX jets.

Along with their commercial airplanes business, Boeing also offers a capital business, a defense business and a global service business.

Their defense business focuses in on their missile defense, bombs and decrypted coding. And their global services is a new business for Boeing that focuses on the maintenance of aircraft.

“Global service is a business where whether you have an apache helicopter or you have an airplane that’s on the ground, we’re the business that services those airplanes or products to get them running again,” said Cano.

The city of Long Beach itself is no stranger to Boeing. Along with having their own, rapid growing and convenient, airport, they are also home to a facility operated by Boeing.

“The Long Beach facility we have now supports engineers on the commercial airplane products,” said Cano. We also have our global services with around 1500 people working at that site and growing.”

But with growth in company size and income must also come growth in management and the way Boeing presents themselves to their employees in different situations and scenarios.

This was the case after Cano led a union in 2015 to build a site in South Carolina.

“Our tone before [was] very corporate, very formal, we walk the line, we didn’t say anything that will get us into legal trouble,” said Cano. “And what we started learning was that we really got to connect to people, we just put a business in the south and people [in the south] aren’t like people in Southern California.”

This transition also led to a different form of communication for Boeing. They went from digital communication to in-person communication. The workload at Boeing is heavy and Cano mentioned how employees are working 30-40 percent overtime every week, leading them to break.

“When I want to ask them how things are going, I can’t do it with digital communications, I need to go out to where they are,” said Cano.

A California State University, Fullerton graduate, Cano has been hard at work leading the development of labor relations and making sure that Boeing’s internal and employee morale stays high during this tough time.

franciso@beachcomber.news