Boeing's current sad mess is 100% of its own making. I spent decades working for them before retiring, and the environment was just completely toxic. Seattle hated St Louis, even though it was the Defense side that kept the Commercial side afloat for several years of catastrophically reduced/canceled orders after 9/11. Wars were being fought with the aircraft and helicopters and missiles and bombs that Boeing was producing, but the subject was strictly off-limits for Boeing's own internal corporate magazine; that's how much of a philosophical problem Corporate had with military products in general. In turn, St Louis bitterly resented Seattle for sending a succession of senior managers to run things, who had zero experience with military customers and no interest in learning how they and their procurement processes differ from commercial customers. Seattle mid-level managers and line workers similarly bitterly resented the opening of the Charleston production line, considering it (rightly) as a response to union strikes in Puget Sound that had disrupted too many programs over the years. That resentment, incidentally, was rumored to have resulted in deliberate sabotage to subassemblies shipped from Seattle to Charleston for final assembly there, causing SC's costs to go up due to the need to inspect for, and fix, any such damage before final assembly could begin. Or so we heard at the time, and even if it had turned out not to be true, the very fact that it was actually believable gives a good picture of how high feelings were running between the two sites.
The fatal blow, though, came in 2 phases. First, senior executives announced that the accumulated "excess cash" reserve, billions of dollars worth, was going to be distributed to shareholders instead of being retained for its intended purposes of tiding the Company over temporary setbacks, funding R&D, etc. We ordinary workers couldn't help noticing that this decision was made by people who themselves owned millions of shares of Boeing stock, so handing over the cash reserve to shareholders really meant adding hundreds of millions to their own wealth. Second, in order to cut costs (and thus increase profits) it was decided to replace high-grade workers with lower-grade ones who would be expected to do the same work for lower salaries. It's illegal to arrange layoffs using age as a criterion, so instead they were tailored to specific grade levels. But since the only way to get into those high grades is to put in decades of work, the end result was the same. The hidden "gotcha" though is that it's the workers in precisely those high grades who have the most experience, and so getting rid of them just naturally gets rid of the knowledge they have about designing and building and maintaining airplanes and missiles and everything else Boeing makes.
So that's the situation that Boeing is in. Cross-site mistrust, empty cash coffers, and massive loss of experience; how do you recover from a mess like that?
