ALARMING

Ex-Boeing Manager Says ‘Hustling Parts’ Got People Promoted

Merle Meyers gave 30 years of his life to the company but says he was reprimanded after sounding the alarm over employees mishandling parts.

A former Boeing manager who spent three decades at the company says he left after his efforts to sound the alarm over the mishandling of parts were not taken seriously. Merle Meyers told The New York Times that he’ll always “love” the company where he spent so much of his life but that he noticed troubling trends in recent years. In particular, he said workers feeling the crunch of a deadline would often end up taking shortcuts to get the parts they needed, sometimes taking new parts before they’d been inspected, taking parts meant for other planes, or even trying to use parts that had been scrapped. “What gets rewarded gets repeated,” he told the paper. “People get promoted by hustling parts.” The company took action on some of the issues Meyers reported, according to the Times, but in other cases he said he felt he wasn’t being taken seriously. He said he became convinced he might be forced out after receiving a cryptic written reprimand early last year for “defective work product, service or output,” so he accepted a financial incentive to leave the company.