By Scott Hamilton

 April 23, 2024, © Leeham News: Boeing and its engineers/technicians union, the Society for Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) are at an impasse over the proposed creation of a safety program widely used by airlines and other companies, the union says.

The Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP) is already in use by Boeing for flight testing. And the touch-labor union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) District 751 and Boeing recently adopted an ASAP that is in its early stages of implementation.

ASAP is a program, used across the airline and aerospace industries, by which employees may pass safety concerns to the regulators, in this case, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), without fear of retaliation or retribution.

“The ASAP program was designed for FAA-certified airmen—pilots, mechanics, dispatchers,” said a former Boeing employee whose duties at one time included safety. “In the airline world, nothing gets pre-screened. For a reason! The ASAP program is set up for Boeing flight tests. Production pilots at Boeing operate this way.”

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• SPEEA internal memo with its safety concerns: Safety culture memo 041024

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“We have offered SPEEA the same agreement we signed with the IAM and the FAA to strengthen safety, quality, and compliance,” a Boeing spokesperson said in an email to LNA. “We believe it will make a difference in ensuring product safety. This tri-party agreement is modeled after the longstanding and proven Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP) which is used in the airlines and elsewhere in Boeing.”

The impasse

“We are ready to move forward on an agreement that is working with the IAM. We encourage SPEEA leadership to engage with us in good faith to address the collective challenges of our company and our engineers. We remain open to productive conversations on how we can implement the proven industry-standard and best-practice agreement that empowers all SPEEA members to speak up,” the spokesperson wrote.

SPEEA proposed expanding the IAM program to its entire engineering and technician workforce. SPEEA represents workers in the greater Seattle area (Puget Sound), Portland (OR), and at Spirit AeroSystems in Wichita (KS).

Spirit builds the Boeing 737 fuselages and nose sections for Boeing’s 767 freighter, KC-46A refueling tanker, 777 and 787. Spirit was part of Boeing from pre-World War II until 2006 when it was spun off to a Canadian private equity group. Boeing and Spirit are in talks for the former to acquire Spirit.

Executive director Ray Goforth said the impasse is over Boeing’s insistence that it control the information flow to a tri-party panel that consists of Boeing, SPEEA, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). SPEEA wants information to flow directly to the panel, without Boeing’s filtering it. The FAA representative is sympathetic to SPEEA’s position, says Rich Plunkett, Director of Strategic Development and SPEEA’s lead on the project.

The FAA did not respond to a request for comments. Boeing did not respond specifically to this concern.

Consistent with the agreement Boeing has with the IAM, items escalated to the tri-party review committee would include reports on both design and manufacturing that involve SPEEA-represented employees and are within the FAA’s compliance jurisdiction. All Boeing employees, including SPEEA-represented employees, can raise concerns through the Speak Up confidential reporting system,  Boeing said on background.

Boeing’s labor relations takes the lead—not the safety unit

Although the ASAP is a safety process, SPEEA is dealing with three members of Boeing’s labor relations department—not Mike Delaney, the corporation’s chief aerospace safety officer and senior vice president of Global Aerospace Safety, or his representatives.

“Delaney is responsible for strengthening the safety practices and culture at Boeing and advancing the company’s comprehensive Global Aviation Safety strategy, including integrated responsibility for Product & Services Safety, Aerospace Safety Analytics, and Global Aviation Safety System. Delaney is accountable to the Aerospace Safety Committee of the Boeing Board of Directors,” it says on his official executive biography on Boeing’s website. But Boeing’s labor department is SPEEA’s contact.

SPEEA views the labor relations representatives rather than safety experts as inhibiting the process. However, the ASAP negotiated with the IAM 751 was with Boeing’s labor relations. Boeing took the IAM agreement, crossed out IAM, inserted SPEEA, and offered this as the contract. SPEEA rejected this, saying that engineers and technicians are involved in design and assembly processes far sooner than the touch-labor union. But SPEEA’s Plunkett sees Boeing’s labor relations involvement as part of a decades-long union containment effort.

 

 

More than 1,300 companies, unions, and individuals participate in the ASAP, according to a list compiled by the FAA. Included are Boeing’s own Executive Flight Operations, and Test and Evaluation unit. The IAM agreement is not yet on the FAA list.

IAM’s ASAP

The IAM 751 reached an agreement for its ASAP with Boeing’s labor relations department. The union first proposed establishing an ASAP in 2019, said union president Jon Holden. After three years of off-and-on negotiation, Boeing and 751 adopted the ASAP in 2022.

“When the company started to remove inspections through verification optimization, we demanded to bargain to try and stop it,” Holden said in an interview with LNA last week. “Our view was that this was a bad idea. This undermines the strength and the health of the manufacturing system.

“Ultimately, they weren’t listening to us, so we contacted the FAA. We hadn’t previously had a relationship with the FAA in the past. Speaking with the FAA, they suggested, and they share information on an ASAP program. They shared with us documents of other agreements with other airlines,” Holden said.

Holden said this ASAP was the first one within the aerospace manufacturing structure or infrastructure. The proposal to Boeing was a tri-party agreement, with visibility for the FAA, the IAM, and Boeing.

“We’d all be working together and solving issues,” Holden said. “It took several years. We got it in place in June of 2023 after negotiations. All three parties worked to negotiate this. We’re working through it. It’s not perfect, but it does allow visibility and the ability for us to address issues.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process and Procedure

The process works like this: A 751 member might file a Speak Up report. This is the name of Boeing’s internal process designed to promote information flow about safety issues. Many employees, and the union leadership of 751 and SPEEA, say Speak Up doesn’t protect the members from retaliation. Boeing says retaliation or retribution aren’t tolerated, but the unions claim there is evidence that this occurs anyway.

In any event, Speak Up is the tool that’s used for the ASAP agreed with the IAM.  Reports come in, evaluated, and “triaged.”

“We have a right to see all of the reports that come in, but there are things that aren’t going to go there,” Holden said. “If someone’s complaining about their individual treatment from a manager or with a co-worker or, something unrelated to the airworthiness of the aircraft or the build process infrastructure of our system, it might go to a different entity within Boeing.

“If it’s a safety concern, we already have a very robust safety process to address hazards to our health, whether it be things that will lead to work-related injuries or illnesses. We have a very robust system, so we’re not trying to take over those systems.”

Holden said the process is a contract with Boeing, outside of the traditional labor contract. Other events wouldn’t come through to the ASAP, to the Tri-Party ERC (Event Review Committee).

“It’s meant to address if somebody does something wrong or if there’s a change to a policy procedure that we perceive as putting the system in jeopardy, those things can be brought forth and evaluated,” Holden said.

Employee protections

Employee protections are built into the ASAP to provide a safe environment for reporting events. Airlines, for example, have a process with the FAA under which pilots, mechanics, flight attendants, etc., can report their own mistakes or safety concerns without fear of penalty. (An exception: flight crews reporting mental health issues. Pilots are loath to report they are having mental stress, depression, or other issues for fear of losing their license. The FAA is working to revise this system.)

Holden said that even though it’s been several months since adoption, “we’ve got to advertise it. We’ve got to get members to have confidence that they can do these things or use this system. That takes time.”

What’s Holden’s view of the progress under ASAP?

“I feel that an ASAP program within manufacturing can be successful. And I want to make it work. I want to provide opportunities for our members and for the FAA to have visibility over things that are important and maintain the integrity of the manufacturing infrastructure.”

SPEEA proposed ASAP Jan. 31

SPEEA first proposed the ASAP on Jan. 31, less than a month after the Jan. 5 accident on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282. An emergency exit door plug blew off the 737-9 MAX at 16,000 ft in an explosive decompression. Investigators determined that four bolts holding the plug in place were not reinstalled during final assembly by Boeing at the Renton (WA) plant.

Boeing’s adherence to safety and procedures announced after the 2018-19 MAX accidents in Indonesia and Ethiopia have been under a microscope since the Alaska accident. Nobody died, but several passengers were injured, and the cabin was damaged throughout the airplane.

Although it’s only been a few months since SPEEA first proposed adopting the ASAP, an impasse has already emerged, says Plunkett.

“It used to be we had this constant and continual interchange between design engineers and post-production. They each learned from each other. They went back and forth all the time. That synergy is gone. Boeing insists upon union containment, preventing interaction. Through the ASAP, we think it has to be there,” Plunkett says.

“Why wouldn’t we get the purview of Speak Ups associated with anything regulated by Federal Air Regulations or the FAA? We’ve got example after example after example. Boeing, alternatively, the polar opposite of us, has yet to cite a specific rationale for their union containment language that they continue to push on the ASAP program.”

“Boeing wants total control”

Plunkett claims Boeing wants to be in total control of what it is the tri-party ERC sees. He says the FAA agrees with SPEEA. “This should be very robust and leave it to the ERC to figure it out. The ERC is under strict confidentiality.” Boeing did not comment.

Goforth says the impasse is “Boeing’s insistence that they get to decide what people are allowed to report. They have a very constrained view of what that is, and that all the reports have to go through their system. They will determine which reports require follow-up.

“We’re saying, no, no, no. Our people get involved from the design discussions all the way to the production, and we need a broad funnel. We think that it should be the three stakeholders, Boeing, the FAA, and SPEEA, that determine which issues are significant enough that they should be investigated. There should be further processing of. So that seems to be the impasse. Boeing wants to squish everything through their own system that they completely control, and we’re saying no, no, no,” Goforth says.

Goforth said Boeing’s tight control has been a long-term issue. “Boeing decides what’s important to pay attention to. The whole world’s seen that now—” a reference to the quality control issues on the MAX, 787 and, allegedly, the 777.

“We need something that’s broader. There should be ideally a consensus, at least a vote of two or three parties, on which issues are important enough to proceed with. Boeing has no patience for any of that,” Goforth says.