The next time you’re in a 737 descending from 36,000 feet to a landing, take a moment and consider that the aircraft is a collection of over 300.000 parts, if you happen to be on a 747 there are over 6,000,000 parts.
Many of those parts are things like rivets, screws wires, or seat cushions, but the essential parts, especially the essential moving parts are mostly made in-house by Boeing Machinists, each of those parts must be machined to a tolerance of .0001 of an inch, and while there are a lot of people who took metal shop in high school, who could, if given enough time, machine a part at accurately, how many could so efficiently?
To become a competent machinist requires a four year apprenticeship, during which an apprentice make barely above minimum wage, Boeing Machinist specialize as either maintenance machinist, or production machinist, maintenance machinist repair the machinery that is used to build aircraft, production machinist fabricate the parts that go into building an aircraft itself.
The average salary for a journeymen machinist at Boeing is 61,000 per year, compared to Ford where a journeymen machinist makes an average 91,000 a year, or the 64,000 a year a journeymen machinist makes at BP.
After making record profits and receiving a record 8 billion dollar tax cut Boeing would like us to believe that 61,000 per year is to much to pay for a machinist.
Think about that the next time you’re descending from 36,000 feet