Boeing's Labour Pains Could Be a Windfall for Its Rivals
There’s a certain grim satisfaction, isn’t there, in watching a titan stumble. For years, Boeing has been one of the undisputed kings of the aerospace jungle, a behemoth so large it seemed almost immune to the usual corporate maladies. But now, with its first major strike in St. Louis in a generation, the giant has tripped over its own feet. And as any good naturalist, or investor, will tell you, when a big beast shows weakness, the predators and scavengers are never far behind.
I find it rather poetic. Just as global tensions are ratcheting up and governments are flinging open their wallets for military upgrades, Boeing decides it’s the perfect time to have a domestic dispute. Production lines for the F-15 and F/A-18 fighter jets, the very backbone of many an allied air force, have ground to a halt. For a company whose primary customers are governments, entities that prize reliability above almost everything else, this is more than just bad press. It’s a catastrophic failure of the one thing they are paid to provide, certainty.