Management Information, the Seamless Merger, and Other Myths
About a year ago, Boeing employees were invited to attend a big outdoor ceremony (there was a chargeline for it) with banks of screens and speakers, to watch our fearless leader Phil Condit and his "Heritage Mac" counterpart Harry Stonecipher do a lot of promising and handshaking and such. We were assured that the merger would be a good thing for everyone, that problematic issues didn't exist, and all of us would live happily ever after.
This past spring, rumors began to surface. The cleaning lady assured us that there would be layoffs coming, on the order of 14% of the workforce. My friends in the factory, tooling, and the flightline (see, this is why I don't fit in at Structures Engineering) told me it would be less than 14%, but there would be a strike before the end of the contract in 1999. I soon learned not to pass these along to my Structures coworkers, because they laughed at me. Then we heard that some of our engineers were being told to circulate their resumes. Nobody's laughing now, thank you very much - one of the engineers who laughed at me for believing six months ago that things would get bad, just came by and said, "You know, we're at the top of the roller coaster."
Part of my job is customer support for a proprietary software tool, and occasionally I get hotline calls from folks in Wichita and Long Beach. While I'm looking up the solution to their problem in the user manual, we chat. One Mac engineer told me they have to share computers and can't get common office supplies. I thought about mailing him a few pens and a scratch pad, but then this past week our management forwarded an e-mail memo from somebody up the food chain, to the effect that "low-hanging fruit" was to be cut: this meant budget cuts for computing resources and office supplies. Today's rumors of huge workforce cuts (I may be in that 28,000 - I changed jobs two years ago and am no longer union-represented), are not surprising after being told there will be no money to maintain the software program we've spent 12 years building.
As upper-level mismanagement of every conceivable kind of business resource becomes more out of control, there is an attempt to save money by micro-managing the resources we all need in order to do our jobs. It's like my grandma used to say, "Save the pennies and throw away the dollars." I can hardly wait to see if my little blonde boss tries to make me fill out a five-carbon form to get a pencil; she already told me it won't get me a trip to a professional conference required by my job description. I don't mind providing my own ballpoint pens - goodness knows, I get enough free ones at the work-related seminars I attend on my own time and at my own expense.
All this reinforces something we were taught years ago, when Boeing started sending out those employee surveys to find out how happy we all are with our jobs. The most substantive finding was that the most reliable source of news at Big B is not management, not the weekly Boeing News, but the factory grapevine. All along, we knew that "management information" was an oxymoron.
Management continues to assure us that none of our jobs are in danger, yet these are the same supervisors who told me in 1995 that "Boeing is in the business of building airplanes, and the only employees who have anything to do with building airplanes are engineers," and that "there is no room for you at Boeing unless you want to be an engineer" while I was earning a degree in library and information science on my own time and at my own expense. (Another of them told me they had to lay me off in 1995, because I was expecting it and would be very angry if they rescinded my WARN notice). Is it any wonder we don't believe them? The more preposterous and elitist it is, the greater is the clear expectation that we will believe it because we heard it from our supervisors.
All this brings us back to last year's announcement that there would be no problems with the "harmonization" of multiple systems. This month we were told not to refer to ourselves as "Heritage Mac," or "Heritage Boeing" any more: we are all Boeing employees. (This neatly sidesteps the problem of whether it's "Northrup or "Northrop.") No matter how many trips and meetings are devoted to seeking consensus on records management, quality control, and product standards, the problems and issues are proliferating. But guess what - the "harmonization" process has created a new esprit de corps as we joke among ourselves across former corporate boundaries about the lies, mismanagement, and insecurity. As heads roll this winter, you may be assured none of them will be managers.