This story originally appeared in Jacobin on Sep. 18, 2024. It is shared here with permission.

On Friday, some 33,000 Boeing workers went on strike after voting down a tentative agreement (TA) reached on September 8 between their negotiating committee and the airplane manufacturing giant. The strike by the workers — members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), most of whom work at the company’s gigantic Everett, Washington, plant, the largest manufacturing building in the world — is now the largest active work stoppage in the United States. It’s the first strike at Boeing since 2008.

Boeing CEO Robert “Kelly” Ortberg, installed earlier this year after the company suffered yet another publicity nightmare when the cabin panel of a 737 MAX 9 came off midflight in January — not to mention the highly suspicious deaths of two whistleblowers at the company — practically begged the workers not to strike, stating that the walkout puts Boeing’s “recovery in jeopardy.”

“We encourage them to negotiate in good faith — toward an agreement that gives employees the benefits they deserve and makes the company stronger,” White House spokesperson Robyn Patterson said on Friday. Negotiations resumed on Tuesday, with a federal mediator present at the bargaining table.

Boeing machinists’ average pay has risen 15 percent over the past decade to $75,000. For workers faced with the soaring cost of housing in the Seattle area, that’s a far cry from the family-sustaining wage enjoyed by prior generations at the plant.

“Boeing is saying they are in a tough spot recovering yet their executive salaries haven’t changed,” a Boeing mechanic told the Guardian. “It is much deeper than pay and benefits. It is Boeing’s culture. We are a family here in my shop.”

Indeed, despite mounting debt, Boeing does not lack for money when it comes to executive pay: Ortberg stands to make $22 million next year, while his predecessor Dave Calhoun got a 45 percent raise in 2023; the company has spent some $68 billion on stock buybacks and dividends since 2010.

“This is about addressing the past, and this is about fighting for our future,” IAM District 751 president Jon Holden said in announcing the vote to strike, which saw 96 percent of ballots in favor of a strike. The TA was voted down by 94 percent.

The striking workers at Boeing want higher wages and stronger benefits — the TA they voted down included a 25 percent wage increase over the course of the four-year contract, compared to the 40 percent sought by the union, as well as the reinstatement of robust pensions given up in 2014. But worker power and product safety are intimately related at Boeing. The twin crashes of Boeing’s 737 MAX 8 airliners in 2018 and 2019, which killed 346 people, are very recent history, and the January malfunction suggests continued reason for concern. (Former CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who was ousted following the crashes, left with a golden parachute of $62 million.)

The company’s nonunion workforce has ballooned since the company began shifting production in 2009 to North Charleston, South Carolina, where it now produces the 787 Dreamliner jet. The move south was a way of undercutting the unionized workforce on the West Coast, who had just gone on strike — a blatant enough act of union busting that the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint against the company, alleging that the move had been taken to avoid labor unrest and was “inherently destructive” of workers’ rights. South Carolina has the lowest unionization rate of any state.

A company shifting production to a nonunion plant is worthy of criticism in itself; it’s undercutting workers’ wages, working conditions, and rights to collectively bargain. But at Boeing, it also poses enormous risks.

The manufacturer’s high wages and strong benefits in Washington ensured skilled workers remained at their posts for decades, accumulating expertise and experience that is critical in the production of airplanes. When higher-ups tried to cut corners to boost the bottom line, these workers could at least try to intervene to save lives. Workers with little experience and even less job security are far less equipped to do the same.

Take William Hobek, a quality manager at the South Carolina plant. Hobek filed suit in a federal court claiming that he’d been fired after reporting defects up the chain of command. As Peter Robison writes in Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, a supervisor told Hobek, “Bill, you know we can’t find all defects.” Writes Robison, “Hobek called over an inspector, who quickly found forty problems. Other employees describe defective manufacturing, debris left on planes — wrenches, metal silvers, even a ladder — and pressure not to come clean about it.” It’s one of several cases of workers alleging that they were pressured not to report faulty production.

That is what Boeing wants airplane production to look like. Perhaps more than any other major employer, they have proven themselves incapable of being trusted by the public and workers alike. The unionized workers in Washington may be striking for higher wages and benefits, but their victory will be a win for the public, both in the United States and around the world.

Would you rather fly on a plane built by people who take pride in their work and have long tenure at their post, or by harried workers, exhausted from overtime or a second job, green, with the most experienced among them having quit as soon as they could? We need workers who know when Boeing’s next cost-cutting measure will endanger the rest of us, and the only ones who have the proven experience to do so are currently on the picket line.

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The US Secret Service on Friday said the country was in a “hyperdynamic threat environment”, as it admitted “complacency” during the first of two apparent assassination attempts against Donald Trump in recent months.

The agency, which is charged with protecting presidential candidates, identified communication flaws in its handling of Trump’s security at a rally in July in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a gunman shot at the Republican candidate and killed a spectator.

The scrutiny on the Secret Service intensified this week after agents halted an apparent second assassination attempt on Sunday in Florida.

“In today’s hyperdynamic threat environment, the mission of the Secret Service is clear: we cannot afford to fail,” Secret Service acting director Ronald Rowe said. The “threat is not going to evaporate anytime soon”.

Rowe said that since the shooting in Pennsylvania, presidential candidates have been receiving the same level of Secret Service protection as US President Joe Biden.

The apparent second assassination attempt on Trump this week “demonstrates that the threat environment in which the secret service operates is tremendous and under constant threat, and we’ve been in this heightened and increasingly dynamic threat environment since July 13”, the date of the Butler rally, Rowe added.

Trump’s ear was injured by gunfire while he was addressing supporters at the open-air event in western Pennsylvania. The former president was rushed offstage by agents shortly after the shooting.

Rowe acknowledged there had been “communication deficiencies” between law enforcement officials on the ground.

“There was complacency” among some members of the agency’s advance team that “led to a breach of security protocols”, he said, as he unveiled the findings of an internal review. These included not giving “clear guidance or direction to our local law enforcement partners”. The agency relies on local police to help shore up security when people it is protecting travel.

Rowe said an “overreliance” on sharing critical information on mobile devices, rather than the agency’s radio network, resulted in “information being siloed”.

The acting director’s comments come just days after Trump was the apparent target of another alleged assassin while the ex-president was golfing at his own club in West Palm Beach on September 15.

Secret Service agents spotted the rifle of the alleged gunman, Ryan Wesley Routh, before he could shoot, and opened fire. Routh fled the shrubbery bordering the golf course, but was detained on a highway shortly after. An FBI-led investigation is ongoing.

The Secret Service has bolstered protection of people it is guarding, but Rowe called for more resources for the agency, including personnel, to get the service from “a state of reaction to a state of readiness”.

Biden has signalled his support for getting Congress to allocate more funding for the Secret Service.

The US state of Georgia has ordered a hand count of ballots cast in November’s election, potentially creating further delays in a system that took days to deliver a definitive result four years ago.

Georgia’s elections board voted 3-2 to require the hand count, despite the objections of state officials and poll workers.

Around five million votes for president were cast in Georgia in 2020, with Joe Biden beating Donald Trump in the key battleground state state by a margin of around 12,000.

While hand counting of ballots is common in many countries, including the UK, it is extremely rare in US elections.

The rule passed on Friday requires three poll workers in each of the state’s 6,500 voting precincts to begin counting ballots on election night.

The move was opposed by the state’s top election official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, who warned that a hand count would introduce the possibility of “error, lost or stolen ballots, and fraud”.

In a phone call following the 2020 election, Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” – a move which along with other alleged efforts to overturn the result led to criminal charges against Trump and some of his allies.

Raffensperger publicly tussled with Trump but also ordered a hand recount of the state’s ballots, which slightly changed vote totals but confirmed the overall result.

Trump’s supporters on the Georgia elections board argued that hand counting will make the forthcoming election more secure.

“What I don’t want to do is set a precedent that we are OK with speed over accuracy,” said board member Janelle King.

Opponents of the move included county elections supervisors, poll workers and voting rights organisations, several of whom testified at a hearing on Friday.

They warned of delays and possible chaos caused by changing the rules so close to the election. Early voting in Georgia starts on 15 October. Election day is on 5 November.

Ethan Compton, the election supervisor for Irwin County, said that ballots had already been sent to members of the military posted overseas.

“The election has begun,” Mr Compton said. “This is not the time to change the rules. That will only lower the integrity of our elections.”

The board’s chair, John Fervier, a Republican, voted against the rule for that reason.

“I do think it’s too close to the election,” he said.

Fervier warned that the board may not have the legal authority to require hand counting, and the change is almost certain to face legal challenges.

Voting rights organisations say hand counting would complicate the voting system and is less accurate than machine counting.

Many Republicans, meanwhile, believe Trump’s oft-repeated but false claims that the voting system is riddled with fraud and has been “rigged” by Democrats.

During an rally in Atlanta in August, Trump called the board members “pit bulls fighting for victory”.

Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, said of the election board prior to the vote: “They are fully trying to set up a scenario in which they could refuse to certify an election whose results they don’t like.”

The rule change came as early voting got under way on Friday in other states including Virginia, Minnesota and South Dakota.

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Steven Eisman, best known for betting on the collapse of the US housing market, has been put on indefinite leave of absence by his employer Neuberger Berman after saying he was “celebrating” the destruction of Gaza.

A managing director at New York-based Neuberger Berman since 2014, Eisman featured in the Michael Lewis book The Big Short. His character was played by actor Steve Carell in the 2016 film version. In the adaptation, Carell’s character was given the name of Mark Baum.

His comments on his X account, which included the Neuberger Berman logo, responded to a graphic post showing burning buildings, with people shouting in agony, apparently as a result of an Israeli attack.

The video was posted with comments about the lack of international concern over such incidents and said: “The world is silent.”

Eisman replied to the post on Thursday: “We are not silent. We are celebrating.”

He later apologised for his remark, writing that he had intended to refer to Israel’s attacks on Hizbollah in Lebanon. He has since deleted the account involved altogether.

Eisman became famous for shorting collateralised debt obligations backed by US housing mortgages before their collapse in 2007 and 2008.

Eisman’s future at the firm remains uncertain, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The company, which on Friday evening said Eisman had been put on indefinite leave of absence, had said earlier that his “personal comments on social media are his alone and he does not speak for Neuberger Berman. Even though Mr Eisman has acknowledged that he mistook the content of the post he responded to, his actions on social media were irresponsible and objectionable”.

Eisman has taken a strong pro-Israel stance on X and issued posts on the subject regularly against those who have criticised the country.

His strident commentary has extended to politics as well. Earlier this week he stated that if Kamala Harris won the US presidential election and the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress he expected the US market to go “straight down”. He has predicted that Donald Trump will win the election.

A Harvard lawyer by training, Eisman gave up the profession to become a financial analyst at Wall Street investment bank Oppenheimer. He later moved to the Connecticut-based hedge fund FrontPoint Partners, eventually focusing on the mispricing of subprime residential mortgages. He left FrontPoint in 2011 and set up his own fund, Emrys Partners, the following year. He joined Neuberger after Emrys closed.

Neuberger Berman, once owned by the collapsed Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers, spun off as an employee-run investment firm in 2009. Since then the company has prospered. The investment company at present has $481bn of assets under management with 739 employees, according to its website.