Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing’s former CEO, left the company with $80.7 million in pay and benefits, after being fired over two aircraft crashes that killed 346 people in total. His compensation dwarfs the $50 million set aside for families of the crash victims.
Boeing denied Muilenberg severance pay and forced him to forfeit stock awards worth tens of millions of dollars, but he keeps $62 million in pay and pension benefits. He also keeps unexercised stock options worth $18.5 million.
Records handed to Congress paint a picture of Boeing as an organization rife with cover-ups and attempts to dodge regulatory oversight. In an internal message, one employee described the 737 Max, the aircraft model which crashed in October 2018 and again in March 2019, as “designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys.”
Do you guys know how fired I would get if there was 80 million dollars in it for me?
I wouldn’t even bother to kill the 300-plus people in totally avoidable disasters, that’s how fired. Like forget the wide-ranging amount of fuckery this guy is accused of perpetrating. That’s just showing off. Just do some garden-variety Bad Shit, get myself canned, and step three is an in-ground pool full of ice and champagne.
If I had 80 million promised to me just for leaving the job I was supposed to do, I would leave that job in seconds. I would take my 80 million dollars, I would buy Barbados, and I would invite you all to come live there.
Provided the people of Barbados were cool with that. I assume they would be, because I would drop about 40 million of those dollars from a helicopter my first day there. Finders keepers, fuckers! Who cares, I got 40 million more. In my entire life, not if I bought all of an entire nation, would I be able to spend that kind of cash.
Course, I don’t have multiple wrongful death lawsuits headed my way.
This fucking guy, and every fucking guy like him: Excused from responsibility, and still getting paid to cock things up, while some of the best people on the planet go broke teaching preschool. This is the kind of horseshit we mean when we say “tax the rich out of existence,” not your cousin with the second Lexus. We mean this prick. Eighty MILLION dollars. What, and I cannot stress this enough, the fuck.
There are SO MANY OF HIM. So many shitty dudes out there who keep getting paid to screw up good people’s lives. Maybe that’s not new, I mean robber barons used to literally rob baronies, but the scale of it certainly is, and the speed with which they are hoovering up all the available resources of the earth seems to be increasing rapidly. The only people who should make this kind of money are hospice nurses and the 18-year-olds fighting the wars that fuel this company when they come home with missing limbs and brain damage.
These kinds of exorbitant exit packages are always justified with a mountain of bullshit about paying people to take risks and insulating them from the consequences of said risks so that they can be very special geniuses and shit. Most of them are boring idiots whose only good ideas are like, “what if we built a really big plane but instead of flying it crashed a lot,” don’t tell me this human conference call was worth one tenth of the lousiest janitor at the local park district field house. If we took every dollar he earned and used that paper to make pinatas it would be better spent.
I mean what incentive do you have to succeed, if you get paid no matter what? My incentive to work is to keep feeding my kid and my two asshole cats, maybe help a few folks, maybe die someplace warm. If I didn’t have to haul my two herniated discs and clicky knees onto a bus and a train every day it would not incentivize me to design a new airplane, it would incentivize me to do jack dick while under some blankets in front of the fire. I want to make stews and watch Band of Brothers for the 49th time but other people in this house have ideas like “keeping the electricity on” and “not getting foreclosed.” BORING.
Give me 80 million dollars after I do my job so badly they boot me out the door. I’ll sing as I pack up all my shit and buy the first round at the “fuck yeah you got fired” party I’m throwing with the bar I just purchased. In Ireland. Actually it’s Ireland. I bought the whole thing and you’re all invited.
Things make no fucking sense right now.
A.
Remember that Boeing built plant in the s. carolina specifically to break the unions (and got caught because they were to blatant -today they my get away with it) and moved corporate HQ to Chicago from Seattle because they wished to become “rootless” as an “international company” unbound by any historical or emotional ties. Their words.
I am sure the corporate welfare they scammed from Illinois had nothing to do with that.
So we have a company that is seeking a non-union labor force from a state that education ranking is 40th out of 50 states ( from Washington state- historical home of Boeing- that ranked either 19th or 2nd) to build as complex piece of equipment when workers have no protection if they saw and called out a obvious flaw. Versus Seattle where unions protect workers who are protecting the traveling public by encourageing workers to call out flaws.
Gee a purposely “rootless” company using low educated workers to build an airplane in an unsupervised ( by FAA) airplane what could possibly go wrong.
If only the government was run like a business!
Oh, it’s even worse than that. The company that used to be Sears, towards the end of their five year attempt to keep the lights on, negotiated a deal with the bankruptcy court to allow them to throw extra money at the new management team– and pay for it by no longer funding the pensions of the workers. So they were spending money on the spreadsheet warriors that they were contractually obligated to fund a safety net for the cashiers and warehouse workers. And the court was cool with that.
K’s point about union protection for whistleblowers is very important. In the before-times, Boeing Management, Design and Production cooperated and coordinated to a great extent. And it built the bombers that defeated fascism, and made intercontinental air-travel a thing. Through that Cooperative coordination workers made well-designed planes for house-and-college-and-braces wages. Somebody at Boeing, however, heard somebody talk about John Galt, was given a picture-book about Henry Ford’s ‘vision’ and paged through a confused 9th grader’s essay about Charles Dickens and then called a Meeting of the Board to talk about his Great Idea and started turning out the 300 passenger Pinto. Because of everybody’s hard-on for getting every goddamned thing on the planet for free, well – we just can’t have Nice Things, or airplanes that don’t crash.
Give me 80 million dollars and I am putting a down payment on a baseball team somewhere warm and dry, and a newspaper that tells everyone how Our local sports-ball team is superior to all other local sports-ball teams. In front of the stadium, I’d have statues of Molly Ivins swinging a bat and I.F. Stone as a Catcher. But I am weird that way.
In Solidarity-