Replacing quality control with political correctness through equity and diversity
 In the official drive to become more woke, each of us is to become more guiltily aware of the disparities in outcome of those on the Official Pity List, women, blacks, sexual deviants etc. A byproduct of this trend, has been an assault on competence and quality as these are deemed the deplorable characteristics of "whiteness".
To replace hard work and determination to create an environment of diversity, equity and inclusion, the corporate aim is to recruit members of underperforming groups, who have been weeded out through testing and give the second and third rate first rate treatment.
Because of woke-minded union, teachers and civil service pension funds, which have swollen as baby boomers reach retirement age, social justice considerations have trumped all else, even shareholder value, in corporate investment criteria.
Under the new rules, corporations must assign priority to environmental, social and governance matters or the investment funds will go elsewhere. If one cannot bring oneself to tick off the ESG and DEI boxes, one can no longer keep up with the corporate Joneses. So every recipient ends up supporting a balance of incompetence, which now takes on the appearance of a heartfelt political cause when it is nothing of the sort.
Like all major corporations, in an economic recession, into this vortex Boeing plane makers have been thrown, at a time of aviation accidents are not so much the result of pilot error, but substandard work in manufacture. Which turns out to be the result of a lack of regulatory independence.
To which we can now expect to have more accidents, or "incidents", as the industry likes to call them, because of the new wokeness, which allows the incompetent to rule the competent.
Already, whistleblowers are sounding the alarm of less than rigorous standards being applied to maintain greater factory output, professional competence is being sidelined to accommodate women, racial minorities and sexual deviants in positions of influence and authority.
Most affected are two plane makers, Europe's Airbus with a 55 per cent market share and America's Boeing with 45 per cent. In terms of accidents, Airbus has had 35 crashes in 28.3 million flights while Boeing leads with by a hair with its 251 crashes from 461 million flights. Using the UN's International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) statistics, from 2008 to 2019, it seems that Boeing had more accidents than expected while Airbus had fewer.
But Boeing whistleblowers are warning production defects on its planes haven't been addressed by the company or the US regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), putting plane at greater risk of accidents.
Former Boeing employees say their concern about production defects have been ignored.
Boeing has been under intense scrutiny after a panel on a 737 MAX 9 aircraft blew off mid-flight.
The FAA grounded all B737 MAX 9s while they investigated, but they soon gave the green light for flights to resume.
Boeing whistleblowers, speaking to the state-owned Australian Broadcasting Company, painted a picture of a company culture that prioritises production speed over quality and safety, leading to defects being missed or ignored to meet deadlines.
"This is a Boeing issue, this is not a 737 issue. Once you understand what's happening inside of Boeing, you'll see why we're seeing these kinds of issues," former Boeing quality manager John Barnett told ABC.
"Their culture is all about speed and production and getting aeroplanes out the door. And any issues, any concerns that you bring up are going to slow them down."
Mr Barnett said cultural issues at Boeing have contributed to lax safety standards on the aircraft production line. He reported several safety problems to his superiors at the company, including defective parts going missing and installed on aircraft without first being repaired.
When these reports met a dead end Mr Barnett took his concerns to the regulator, the FAA, who investigated and substantiated his complaints that Boeing had lost track of hundreds of faulty parts which could not be found.
While the fatal crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX 8s in 2018 and 2019 were attributed to a design issue with a new piece of software known as MCAS (maneuvering characteristics augmentation system), whistleblowers told ABC the "elephant in the room" was chronic manufacturing and quality control problems that show up as defects in planes shortly after leaving the factory.
After the more recent Alaska Airlines incident, in which a door fell off mid-flight leaving a gaping hole in the aircraft, and passengers were forced to put on emergency oxygen masks as the plane rapidly depressurised at 16,000 feet. But some masks didn't work.
Mr Barnett said he had raised the issue of faulty oxygen masks during his time at Boeing, but said the issue was "swept under the rug".
"When I heard that some of the passengers on the 737 MAX 9 were saying that their oxygen masks won't work, it's like, well, we've known about that since 2016. And they've done nothing about it," he said.
Years earlier at the Charleston, South Carolina, factory, Mr Barnett said he discovered that 25 per cent of oxygen mask systems and tanks didn't initiate properly in one instance.
He said when he reported it to his superiors at Boeing his concerns were dismissed so he filed a whistleblower complaint to the FAA in 2017.
When conditions were such to produce such substandard results, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and its partner in crime environment, social and governance (ESG), were becoming a reality in the boardroom, but a year or two from being a working reality on the shop floor.
But as the new Marxist slogan filtered from the top down, its implications became widely understood. Already undermined by a need to produce in its perpetual war with Europe's Airbus, Boeing, now uneasily merged with McDonnell Douglas, and now re-headquartered in Chicago, it ceased to be its old Seattle self, falling prey to soulless bean counters who could see no further than the next quarter's earnings.
So with quality control taking a back seat, it was now entirely ignored unless its findings were plainly, existentially and instantly catastrophic. Corners were cut and a flock of black swans were loosed upon the world. If, like black swans, there was only a one in a thousand chance of the accident happening, one makes that an inevitability if such QC oversights multiply as oversights in the thousands creep by over time.
And when we add the strictures of DEI and ESG to the mix, we no longer include job performance into the mix if that conflicts with diversity and equity goals, which have now been given highest priority. Under these circumstances quality control will have been replaced by politically correct control. So get ready!
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