I worked at SCAB (lol) for a few years when the home building industry was in the crapper. I ran the Brotje machine in the 19 bldg.
Although there were some good workers, there were a lot of people (and managers!) that didn’t need to be there. Or anywhere. I saw stoopid **** happen all the time. Some friends and I used to joke that the 787 must be really over engineered to fly with all the mistakes that happened.
The funny thing was management wanted the plane moving down the line no matter how many jobs were not done. We moved it ahead of schedule! Yay!
My neighbor works on the flight line. Smart guy with all the certs and education. He hates it. A friend with 25 years on the flight line in the Air Force said the same thing.
I got out as soon as I could to go back to building homes and hope I never have to fly on a 787.
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Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins
Let's get back on track here. I was kind of reluctant to discuss the South Carolina thing, but what the hell, I'll share my experiences and observations.
Our union mechanics lovingly refer to them as the "South Carolina Airplane Builders" - SCAB. They have nothing but disdain for their Southern counterparts. Not just because they feel they are stealing their jobs, but mostly because they are tired of cleaning up their mess, airplane after airplane.
I cannot remember how many 787's roll out of Everett compared to SCAB, but I think I remember the numbers were about half a dozen or more out of Everett for every one out of South Carolina, and South Carolina has more people working on them. To add insult to injury, every airplane leaving SCAB flies directly to Everett, where it spends some time on the flight line getting reworked to correct all of its problems, and finished up so that it is ready for delivery.
Countless people from Everett have gone to South Carolina to try to help them through their production problems. They universally come back with two observations: the work ethic down there is quite poor, and the level of education of their mechanics and assembly workers is not high enough to allow them to work on something as complex as an airplane.
There is a certain minimum level of reading comprehension required to perform this kind of work. In airplane building, there are detailed work instructions that need to be read and understood, drawings that need to be read and understood, and that kind of thing. Their typical public school system high school graduate is incapable of doing either.
Much has been written about the sad state of affairs of their public education system down there. In speaking with their engineers, they will readily admit that anyone who can afford to send their kids to private schools does so and, as a result, they see no reason to adequately fund their public schools. The only kids attending public schools are only there because their parents cannot afford anything else. This is where SCAB's mechanics and assemblers come from. They function at what most of us would consider about a fifth grade level, if that. They simply do not possess the tools to do what they are being asked to do.
The guys that are tasked with going down there to help are met with that, and their horrible work ethic. Trying to deal with them quickly sees one rejected as some damn Yankee know-it-all, trying to tell these good ol' boys how to do their jobs. They're having none of it. They get pretty damn hostile about it... Even their own engineers, as a matter of fact, get the same treatment to some degree. Most of them are from somewhere else anyway, so they have an equally difficult time with these lazy, uneducated, stand off-ish factory workers.
I believe most companies who manufacture products of even modest complexity who have looked to The South as a ready pool of cheap labor have eventually left in frustration. It gets to be pretty obvious fairly quickly what they are up against. I wonder how much longer this situation will be allowed to fester. The only way I see it surviving is if all of the labor winds up being imported from somewhere else. Boy, talk about some local friction and unrest if it ever comes to that...
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