> Thatcher eliminated all this feather bedding and the UK was better for it.
You might want to catch up on the last few decades of UK history. To say it's unraveling would be generous. The once mighty British navy can hardly even build working ships anymore.
There was a BBC special on the Titan submarine before it imploded, and on one of the dives with the camera crew, it got stuck going in circles on the sea floor because the direction buttons on the gamepad used to steer it were incorrectly mapped.
We have a very progressive shipbuilding industry. They are overturning the timeless tradition that the honour of sinking ships should belong only to the enemy.
I don't know the specifics in the UK, but in the US this was a common belief among a certain political class in the 1960s and 70s. You had skilled blue collar laborers making the equivalent of $30/hr and politicians and some economists felt that was too high. Paul Volcker very famously carried around a card with US autoworker wages printed on it.
I expect cleaning aircraft factories requires more training and care than cleaning typical industrial facilities. They have to be trained in avoiding foreign object damage, for example. And aircraft assembly has a lot of vertical dimension, so they probably sometimes work on scaffolds with fall arrest harnesses. You can’t just hire the cheapest for that.
Dude, Thatcher was more the kind of person to be on the side of the locust executives that tank a company to cushion their short-term bonuses than on the side of actual workers...
Most of the predicament of Boeing is due to the same kind of anti-worker philosophy (nasty cost-cutting, lowering quality, anti-union, moving headquarters away) that Thatcher championed. The UK may have gotten rid of degenerated featherbedded companies, but they only destroyed it, and never rebuilt any excellence.
