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**JANUARY 18, 2024**

On the Prospect website

An Unequal Tax Trade

The business tax credits in the Wyden-Smith deal are five times as
generous as the Child Tax Credit expansion, according to government
scorekeepers. BY DAVID DAYEN

Florida Abortion Rights Supporters Mean What They Say

A proposed constitutional amendment pending before the state supreme
court puts direct democracy in the dock again. BY GABRIELLE GURLEY

The Ambassador for Crypto

Sean Patrick Maloney, an adviser to Coinbase, is nominated as the U.S.
representative to the OECD, which is building regulatory frameworks for
crypto. BY HENRY BURKE

Metaphors Journalists Live By (Part II)

The conclusion of our story of the bad things that can happen when
journalists refuse to criticize themselves BY RICK PERLSTEIN

Meyerson on TAP

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**** The Airbus Advantage

Why Europe's mixed economy produces safer planes than America's
financialized capitalism

In the wake of the midair blowout of a door on a Boeing 737 MAX 9
earlier this month, the lead that Airbus has taken over Boeing in the
manufacture and sales of the world's commercial aircraft has, not
surprisingly, grown. It's actually been growing for some time: Last
year, Airbus delivered 735 new planes to airlines and leasing companies,

**The New York Times**reported
, while
Boeing delivered just 528. Airbus had an order backlog of 8,600 new
planes, against Boeing's 5,626. This month's blowout reinforced the
public's-and consequently, the airlines'-doubts about Boeing's
commitment to safety, which soared after two disastrous crashes of its
737s in 2018 and 2019.

"What used to be a duopoly" in the manufacture of commercial aircraft,
Richard Aboulafia of AeroDynamic Advisory told the

**Times**, "has become two-thirds Airbus, one-third Boeing."

The long descent of Boeing has now become the subject of widespread
analysis in the mainstream media. A story

last Saturday in The Wall Street Journal began with an account of one
Boeing engineer's white paper in 2001 that warned against the
company's new commitment to outsourcing production of key parts of the
aircraft it assembled. But continuing to produce the parts in-house,
with the work done by Boeing's very experienced and unionized
workforce, cut no mustard with Wall Street and the company's new-model
CEOs, who no longer came to their posts from careers in production, but
rather from the financial side of the industry. In 2005, the company
sold its Wichita plant to a private equity firm that slashed costs
before unloading the plant to Spirit AeroSystems, which has become
notorious for its deficient quality inspection practices.

But this fish stunk from the head. Boeing continually objected to what
it said were Spirit's high costs and inability to meet deadlines. As
the workers on the shop floor and their union repeatedly noted, this led
to rushed production and deficient oversight. Workers-members of the
International Association of Machinists-had "great quality and safety
concerns," one union representative wrote to union leaders, but their
concerns were routinely ignored by senior management, the

**Journal**reported. 

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So how are work practices at Airbus different from those at Boeing?
I'm not arguing that Airbus provides a panacea for 21st-century
production; a chunk of their own production, for instance, is outsourced
as well. But consider, for starters, who actually owns the two
companies. Airbus's four largest shareholders
, in
order, are the government of France, the government of Germany, the
Capital Research and Management Company, and the government of Spain.
Boeing's four largest shareholders
, in
order, are The Vanguard Group, Vanguard Group subfiler, Newport Trust
Company, and State Street Corporation (a bank and asset manager). In
other words, Airbus's largest shareholders are mainly politically
accountable governments that must pay heed to such public concerns as
air safety; Boeing's are entirely investors in business for profits.

Moreover, as the merger of German, French, and Spanish companies, Airbus
production is centered in nations where workers historically and
currently have more power than their U.S. counterparts. Forty-six
thousand of Airbus's roughly 130,000 employees work

in the company's German factories, where workers, by law, routinely
discuss production and safety issues with managers in works councils. In
the U.S., the Machinists are a union in which workers do have voice and
power by American standards, but lack mechanisms like works councils
through which management must take at least some heed of their concerns.

In sum, Airbus's clear leadership over Boeing in matters of flight
safety stem in good measure from their differences in ownership and
worker power-that is, from the European model of mitigating
laissez-faire capitalism with a measure of public and worker power, and
from the American model of subjecting corporate policy almost entirely
to the demands of investment institutions. Which, if you track the value
of Boeing's stock, hasn't worked out that well for those investment
institutions, either.

By the way, just how outsourced is Boeing production? Only yesterday, it
was revealed the door plug that blew out of the Alaska Airlines plane
wasn't actually produced in Wichita. It was produced in Malaysia
,
where I very much doubt that workers' concerns about speed of
production and quality oversight have much impact on their managers.
More significantly, the fact that the Malaysian production of the door
plug didn't come to light until yesterday-12 days after the
blowout-suggests just how profoundly outsourcing can obscure the
public visibility required for corporate accountability.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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