Boeing workers don’t have enough time on the job to learn all the changes the company has implemented meant to improve safety and quality, a representative from the Machinists’ union told the National Transportation Safety Board Tuesday.
Boeing holds its mechanics to a high rate of production, and often underestimates how long a job will take, leaving little time to study changes, testified Lloyd Catlin, a Boeing employee based in Everett and representative from the International Association of Machinists.
Catlin pointed to Boeing’s internal process for “removals,” a term to describe taking a part off a plane to fix another issue. Boeing’s written protocol for removals has grown by roughly 30 pages, Catlin said, but workers don’t have time to learn and act on that information.
It wasn’t always that way, Catlin continued. Boeing used to require workers to sign off that they had read and understood changes. The company eliminated that but continued sending out weekly emails detailing changes. Now, it does neither.
“There’s nothing that really tells our members when a [process] has changed,” Catlin said. “Nobody really knows what those changes are.”
Elizabeth Lund, Boeing’s senior vice president for quality, confirmed Tuesday that Boeing does not set aside time for mechanics to discuss the new processes, though it does so for quality inspectors.
Following the Jan. 5 panel blowout, Lund said Boeing changed who may initiate a removal. Now, it has put an assessment in place to test workers’ knowledge of the new protocol. And, it continues “simplifying” the process, to make it easier for workers to understand and harder for mistakes to slip through.
Catlin, from the Machinists union, said workers on the factory floor have not been consulted about the changes.
He said the company’s training process had already been in “really bad shape.”
“There have been changes but I don’t know that it’s enough.”
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