One of my major complaints about growing up in Seattle is that it was essentially a one-company town. My dad worked at Boeing when he could, but was frequently laid off — they could do that, just fire thousands of people on any downturn — and later rehired. The population was just a sponge that would serve the Boeing workforce as necessary, and when there was a major layoff the entire region would suffer. As a kid, my parents were good about insulating us from the major consequences, but did notice when suddenly we’d have to move to a more run-down house, and we’d have a lot of tuna casserole for dinner, and our dental appointments were cancelled.

Seattle has diversified since then, but Boeing is still the elephant swimming in Puget Sound, and when Boeing goes on strike, it hurts the entire region. The workers have good cause, though.

Alex Mutch, a striking aircraft inspector, said he had been saving up for the strike since he was hired five years ago.

“We have been left hanging on a leash for almost 16 years and missed out on a lot of opportunities for cost-of-living adjustments, especially with the rate inflation has gone up,” Mutch said. “My grocery bill has doubled since I moved down here. Not to mention the cost of rent.”

It’s not just Boeing that has caused this strike — it’s the whole damn system of predatory capitalism. Food prices have shot up where I live, while the grocery stores make record profits, and you can’t blame that on Boeing. There’s a whole industry thriving everywhere on buying up houses and renting them out to workers, at massive advantage to landlords. Seattle has a massive homelessness problem, with these horrible fences put up all over my old neighborhoods to prevent people from camping there, and no, they’re not building enough housing, because that would dilute the landlord’s profits. I’m supposed to be selling my mother’s old home, and I’ve gotten offers sight unseen from real estate companies that want to scoop it up fast and cheap.

Boeing offered a huge salary increase, and it wasn’t enough.

Under the agreement, the average pay for machinists would have risen from $75,608 to $106,350 per year without overtime, according to the company. But workers said the offer failed to take into account the high cost of living in the Seattle region and the years that employees had gone without significant raises.

There’s another major factor affecting workers. People don’t want to leave Washington state. It’s a beautiful, pleasant place to leave, but management would love to relocate the plants to a cheaper, less idyllic location, where they could save money with a new assortment of less highly trained workers. This has happened multiple times, where they announce that they want to relocate people who have built lives in that gorgeous state.

Union members said they have been frustrated for years with Boeing’s tactics, including threats to move airliner production out of the region.

My dad always wanted to work at Boeing, where the pay was good and the benefits were great, but I guarantee you that if he’d been told he was being relocated to Oklahoma he would have quit on the spot. Sorry, Oklahoma, I’m sure you’re a lovely state, but compared to the west coast…no, just no.

This issue comes up in multiple stories, but it’s always understated, for some reason. The WaPo has an article titled Why Boeing workers voted to strike after rejecting proposed deal, which doesn’t actually say much about why, except this one sentence, which also mention the relocation concerns.

Boeing machinists, who build the company’s flagship planes, have not had a new contract in 16 years and have been bargaining for months over higher pay, better benefits and a promise from the company that it will keep assembling its planes in Washington state.

I think this is probably a bigger issue than anyone is reporting. Boeing has a deep scar in its heart from the McDonnell-Douglas merger that ended up replacing expert, engineering-based management with a gang of clowns with MBAs who moved everything to Chicago, leading to the current crop of woes, such as airplane doors blowing out and a space capsule that wasn’t safe to return in. The damage to the company’s reputation was directly caused by the displacement of skilled leadership, so it’s no surprise that workers want assurances that they’re not going to be similarly replaced.

This is another consequence of predatory capitalism. You know who else is feeling the effects? NASA. A couple of billionaires decide to exploit the expertise generated by NASA, and suddenly there’s a brain drain that’s dismantling an institution. A panel met to review the status of the agency, and they did not have good things to say.

A panel of independent experts reported this week that NASA lacks funding to maintain most of its decades-old facilities, could lose its engineering prowess to the commercial space industry, and has a shortsighted roadmap for technology development.

SpaceX has not been an entirely positive force on the space industry.

The panel members also spotlighted concerns they heard from NASA employees that an increasing reliance on commercial partners could decay the skills of the agency’s workforce. The committee acknowledged the successes of NASA’s commercial cargo and crew program, which are based on fixed-price service contracts, but cautioned that excessive use of such contracts puts NASA employees in oversight roles rather than hands-on engineering jobs.

This puts NASA at risk of losing its most talented engineers, who might move to companies for more rewarding and higher-paying work. “Very few of the nation’s most innovative scientists and engineers would likely seek or remain in such pure oversight positions,” the panel wrote.

“I think it’s the committee’s consensus view that the United States would be best served for its future by continuing to have engineering prowess in NASA and not have the agency just become a funding pass-through or a contract monitor,” said Kathy Sullivan, a retired space shuttle astronaut and former administrator of NOAA.

Capitalists always undervalue the importance of people and expertise — they treat them as trivially fungible. I’m just reminded that one of the biggest obstacles to rebuilding Notre Dame, or building a new, equivalent construction, is that the knowledge and skill of expert stonemasons has faded away over the centuries. We’ve got stone, we’ve got timber, we have machines that enable heavy construction work, but we don’t have the deep knowledge of generations of masons anymore, and we’d have to reconstruct the appropriate technologies all over again, at great expense.

Boeing and NASA are repositories of practical knowledge that you can’t quickly replace, especially not when our current system would think you can just swap in Elon Musk to take over 75-100 years of hard-earned expertise.