Boeing Terrorized Employees Into Ignoring Missing 'Non-Conforming Parts' On Production Floor: Whistleblower

When I picture a nightmare working environment, I think about a surreal all-hands meeting where Auric Goldfinger tells his entire company that they’re going to irradiate Fort Knox with a weapon of mass destruction. Boeing South Carolina isn’t the first place to come to mind. However, the account of John Barnett details a workplace where supervisors harassed employees into breaking the law to meet Boeing’s high expectations. Barnett was the whistleblower who was found dead last month.

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The American Prospect detailed Barnett’s time at Boeing, including being assigned to the 787 assembly plant’s Material Review Segregation Area. The dedicated space for malfunctioning parts also functioned as a purgatory for blacklisted quality managers. Barnett’s time at the MRSA saw a massive portion of a Dreamliner’s fuselage just went missing without a trace. His calls to supervisors to look into the missing parts were literally laughed at in some circumstances and directly opposed in others:

But there were no signs anywhere of the missing 47-48 section, or hundreds of other parts that had gone missing from MRSA. “You know, we really need to find all these … lost nonconforming parts,” he remarked at his next big meeting, hoping that with 12 managers present it would be harder to blow him off. “And if we can’t find them, any that we can’t find, we need to report it to the FAA.”

No one burst out laughing, but it wasn’t because they were taking him seriously.

“We’re not going to report anything to the FAA,” a supervisor declared emphatically.

Boeing demanded that workers look the other way when non-conforming parts go missing, presumably to be putting on an aircraft, isn’t an insignificant matter. Falsifying documentation about any aircraft is a federal felony punishable by up to 15 years in person. Barnet wasn’t the only Boeing employee to voice their concerns, but management would fabricate reasons to terminate problem workers:

But he wasn’t alone. Once, a human resources officer asked him to look over a “weak” performance improvement plan the company had used to terminate William Hobek, another quality manager who had refused to “pencil whip” the lost section 47-48. The HR officer confided that he’d been feeling uneasy about the justifications corporate was using for the firing.

Be sure to read the entire piece at The American Prospect about John Barnett and the threats whistleblowers face when coming forward, especially in the aviation industry. Laws only allow a 90-day window for whistleblowers to file retaliation complaints against their employers. Those complaints are heard by a secret, slow-moving OSHA court that rules against whistleblowers in 97 percent of cases.