By James S. Russell in Post Alley (thanks to Ed M.)
The 2018 crash of two airliners, one in Indonesia (in which 189 people died), the other in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which killed 157, underscore that America needs to revive its hollowed-out industry—suddenly beloved of politicians across the aisles. Yet those crashes, and the flaws they revealed in the nearly new planes involved, were the consequence of plane-maker Boeing’s fealty to the shareholder-value obsession of U.S. business that has predominated since the 1980s.
I am working on a book that examines the intertwining of city culture and successful and admired businesses—with Seattle (my hometown) as the backbone. Hence I have dived deeply into Boeing’s extraordinary success and its appalling downward spiral.
With the economy so high on peoples’ minds this election, Boeing’s story says much about America’s economic future.
A vibrant, innovative, and enduring industrial sector cannot grow without addressing the obsession with profits over all other considerations that continues to have much of American business in its grip. Boeing, which was long America’s industrial leader, is the most prominent of the many victims of such profit obsession.
Its extraordinary success since transforming air travel with the first commercially viable jets in 1958 had more than a little to do with the way engineers in vast drafting rooms could walk over to the factory floor and solve problems with machinists assembling the planes. Its no-glamour corporate headquarters was embedded in Plant 2, in South Seattle as well. That proximity—and the ease with which problems could be addressed, along with the need to get along day-to-day—forged a closeness that had long been one of Boeing’s secret weapons.
So what happened?
Boeing’s enduring success stood out amid decades of US industrial disinvestment that left a trail of abandoned factories and polluted land across much of the Northeast and Midwest. I grew up in Seattle when Boeing was the dominant employer and riding high. Its commitment to engineering prowess was woven into Seattle’s sense of itself as a place that hatched great companies which built quality products and aspired to great things. Boeing long has been—and perhaps remains for all its travails—America’s largest industrial exporter. (click on Page 2 to continue)