IN THE BAD old days, when airliner manufacturers were awash with orders they could not meet, it seemed natural that shopfloor workers would want a bigger reward for building those airliners - and would strike if they felt they were not getting a fair share. In the great recession of recent years, the strike weapon has lost its edge - most workers were happy to have a job at all, and were unwilling to jeopardise those jobs which still existed by withdrawing their labour.
Now, however, the strike weapon has been drawn from its scabbard again - but the industry would be most unwise to assume that this time around workers are striking for money, from a position of confidence. They are not.
Yes, the workers see companies such as Boeing recovering from the recession, and making real profits. Yes, they perceive that such companies can afford to improve conditions now where they could not afford to before. Yes, they see order-books swelling - a promise of good business for years to come. No, they do not see an increase in job security resulting from the improvement in business.
Ironically, Boeing's success in attracting orders serves only to weaken the positions of its manual workers in the USA. Many of the orders which it is now attracting come from countries which harbour strong ambitions to build up their own aerospace industries. The price of getting an order is increasingly not just a discount on price, but a promise to place manufacturing work in the customer country.
The same problem faces those companies which would sign up new partners to build new projects in those same developing aerospace countries. Those countries want not just the manufacturing work which goes into a new airliner, but they want the technology behind it. In the eyes of the workers at Boeing and elsewhere, the export of airliners increasingly equates with the export of jobs.
On the surface, their fears are very real. Most of these developing countries have wage rates far lower than those found in the USA or Europe. In some cases, the new arrivals in the industry, setting up without the encumbrances of history, have better and more automated plant with which to work well, giving them a near-unbeatable high-tech, low-wage advantage.
How can Western workers - and their employers - counter these advantages? Certainly not by trying to take on the developing countries at building conventional structures in conventional ways. Western social legislation and attitudes will not allow the sort of wage cut which would make a Seattle worker as cheap to employ and protect as one in China. Yet.
There is a parallel here with the motor industry: 30 years ago, the Japanese - armed with mainly secondhand Western technology and low wages - took on the established motor manufacturers and, in many cases, beat them with well-made, cheap products. Today, Japanese manufacturers can no longer undercut Western manufacturers - ironically, largely because Western manufacturers have now adopted Japanese technology and working practices, and because rising aspirations in Japan have wiped out the wages advantage. Those Western countries which once exported technology to Japan are once again exporting complete vehicles - albeit often from Japanese-owned factories - because they are cheaper than the Japanese product.
The cycle will not finish there: as costs and social attitudes change, the factors in the equation will change again. Perhaps Japan will regain the cost advantage; perhaps both sides will lose the advantage again to another country like South Korea.
All that any worker or employer can do is play the game of commerce as cannily as possible, shifting the minimum possible work abroad while retaining the maximum possible financial return to keep the business as a whole alive and profitable. Sometimes, that may mean fewer jobs in one country, and more in another. Sometimes, it will mean that one country takes a greater share of a project than another. The trick lies in keeping the intellectual advantage, and remembering that a job is only a job as long as there is an economic case for that job to be done.
Source: Flight International