ULA workers strike over latest contract offer

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ULA workers strike over latest contract offer

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Nearly 600 union workers at the United Launch Alliance — the US government’s primary rocket launch provider — went on strike on May 6th, just a day after the company launched a lander to Mars for NASA.

The employees are part of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW), and they’re responsible for assembling, testing, and helping to launch ULA’s rockets. They voted to go on strike after rejecting ULA’s final offer on a three-year contract that would have gone into effect on May 6th. Negotiations have been ongoing since April 16th.

The protesting workers are located at three of ULA’s main manufacturing and integration sites. That includes Decatur, Alabama, where the bulk of rocket manufacturing takes place, as well as Cape Canaveral, Florida and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California — ULA’s two launch locations. Picketing lines have already sprung up along the gates to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. While this strike is happening, ULA will need to find another way to get its rockets made and up into space.

An IAMAW representative says that the ULA employees have two main issues with the contract ULA proposed. One involves stipulations on travel between the two launch sites. ULA doesn’t launch out of Vandenberg very often, so the company maintains just a small workforce over there. So whenever there is a Vandenberg launch, employees from Florida are called to travel to Vandenberg to help with mission operations. Originally, employees only had to be in California for 30 days at a time and were then rotated out if needed.

However, IAMAW claims the new contract would allow ULA to call Florida employees back to Vandenberg after they had already returned home from a 30-day stint. “If you come back, they can send you back again,” Johnny Walker, a representative for IAMAW in Cape Canaveral, Florida, tells The Verge. “The family life is gone, and you can’t say no.”

Additionally, IAMAW says the contract gives ULA the option to sub-contract any job that it wants, meaning a full-time employee’s work could be given to an outside company at any time. The union sees that as ULA’s attempt to reduce the size of its workforce and pay lower wages. “Our guys have certification beyond belief,” says Walker. “We have a perfect record for launching rockets. We never have lost a rocket or had a failure. We were part of it being successful, and now they’re turning it around and treating us like dirt.”

ULA has not responded to these specific issues, but did release the following statement about the strike: “We’re disappointed that the IAM members rejected ULA’s last, best, and final offer and voted to strike,” said Tory Bruno, ULA’s CEO. “We believe our proposed contract is very competitive with other companies. Importantly, ULA’s final offer contributes to ULA’s long term viability in an increasingly competitive launch business environment.”

In the meantime, ULA said it would be “implementing its strike contingency plans,” though the company did not explain what those would be. The company is focused on meeting all of its obligations to its customers, according to the statement. ULA’s closest upcoming mission is the launch of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, a spacecraft that will travel closer to the Sun than any previous vehicle to study its outer atmosphere. The probe is slated to launch at the end of July on top of ULA’s Delta IV Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It’s unclear if the strike will affect that mission, though there’s still plenty of time to find a resolution.
Interesting. This may just be naivete on my part, but that statement by the ULA CEO sounds kind of arrogant.
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Re: ULA workers strike over latest contract offer

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SolarpunkFan wrote: 2018-05-08 08:06pmInteresting. This may just be naivete on my part, but that statement by the ULA CEO sounds kind of arrogant.
ULA's competition in the US is right now, SpaceX. It is my understanding that SpaceX is completely non-Union (I don't know how it is with them now, but in years past the working hours flexibility at SpaceX consisted of 'work any eighty hour week you want'). Also, right now, ULA is desperately trying to get the programs in place to stay relevant in a market where there are at least three competitors (ULA's Vulcan, SpaceX's Falcon & BFR, and OrbitalATK's OmegA*) for the next generation of assured government space launch. in the face of that, the main advantage ULA has is the fact that they have never failed to deliver a payload on time into an orbit that the customer didn't find acceptable. They can afford to be more expensive than SpaceX, but they do have to manage costs lest the congresscritters come and cut them out of the assured launch business. They'll be in better shape once they get down to just Vulcan (right now they are supporting Atlas V, Detla II, Delta IVM/M+, & Delta IVH), but they have to get there first.

That said, I do totally understand their desire to not get sucked into perpetual deployment to Vandenberg when everything is at Decatur and the Cape.

*No, that's not a typo, the name is stylized with the A capitalized
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Re: ULA workers strike over latest contract offer

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TimothyC wrote: 2018-05-09 01:05am *SNIP*
Of course, but making that kind of statement is probably just going to make the strikers angrier. Rather counterproductive for ULA I'd imagine. :?
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Re: ULA workers strike over latest contract offer

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TimothyC wrote: 2018-05-09 01:05am ULA's competition in the US is right now, SpaceX. It is my understanding that SpaceX is completely non-Union (I don't know how it is with them now, but in years past the working hours flexibility at SpaceX consisted of 'work any eighty hour week you want').
SpaceX literally supplies beds for its engineers. Not to take a nap on, to sleep at the building overnight on. They also do a rather large fraction of their total work using engineering interns that make 8 dollars an hour. In fact they boost heavily about how many interns they hire and use.

Stuff like this is why Musk is such a public bullshit artist. If he can make people believe his bullshit they'll be more willing to work for him, and the more he can undercut the competition the less alternative jobs exist for anyone in this industry. Not helped by the US military having heavily cut back on related sectors the past 10 years. The whole large solid rocket industry basically evaporated.

Speaking of this, I can't help but wonder if at least some of the Model 3 delays are linked to the fact that Telsa's attempts to 'motivate' more work out of employees haven't worked so well with a car plant as they do for a rocket. With earlier Tesla models the company just built them by hand in the manner all xxx,xxx dollar cars are built, it's hard to go wrong at that kind of price point. But once manhours per vehicle began to matter, and the company decided it was somehow going to out automate big automakers with far more experience, suddenly just asking people to do better didn't work out so well me thinks.
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Re: ULA workers strike over latest contract offer

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Just for the record, ULA's corporate parents Boeing and Lockheed are not blameless. For years they have been basically been taking the money the DoD has been paying ULA for assured launch out of ULA as profit for them (the parents). Furthermore, the concepts behind Vulcan (Hydrocarbon core with the diameter of Delta IV, full wide centaur, Integral Vehicle Fluids) all predate the formation of ULA, but the parents didn't allow the money that was coming into ULA to be used to improve the product.
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Re: ULA workers strike over latest contract offer

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Strike is over.

This is good for both, as hopefully it didn't delay any of the upcoming launches (Parker Solar Probe, CST-100 Orbital Flight Test, ect).
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Re: ULA workers strike over latest contract offer

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Sea Skimmer wrote: 2018-05-17 12:39amStuff like this is why Musk is such a public bullshit artist. If he can make people believe his bullshit they'll be more willing to work for him, and the more he can undercut the competition the less alternative jobs exist for anyone in this industry. Not helped by the US military having heavily cut back on related sectors the past 10 years. The whole large solid rocket industry basically evaporated.

Speaking of this, I can't help but wonder if at least some of the Model 3 delays are linked to the fact that Telsa's attempts to 'motivate' more work out of employees haven't worked so well with a car plant as they do for a rocket. With earlier Tesla models the company just built them by hand in the manner all xxx,xxx dollar cars are built, it's hard to go wrong at that kind of price point. But once manhours per vehicle began to matter, and the company decided it was somehow going to out automate big automakers with far more experience, suddenly just asking people to do better didn't work out so well me thinks.
Musk isn't a bullshit artist. Falcon Heavy performance 64 tonnes to LEO fully expendable for like $100M or so; and the repeated landings of the Falcon 9 cores, plus the new Block 5 Falcon 9 with water cooled heat sheild etc.

That said, SpaceX is working in a dramatically different industry than Tesla.

Boeing/Lockheed/ULA have had schemes to enable the reuse of rocket engines via jettisoning the engines in a breakaway pod following first stage burnout and aerial capture of the parachuted pod via helicopter....going back to god, I don't know, 1990? They actually dunked a SSME in water IIRC and fired it as part of the old Bush I SEI initiatives.

Yet, Vulcan won't even offer reuse of the engines until 2024>.

Meanwhile, SpaceX went from "gee that's a nice idea" to sticking landings on drone barges in a few years.

Almost everyone in the big military-industrial corporate space complex is very slow. Space X doesn't have to be "perfect", they just have to move faster than the glacial pace of BoeingMartinGrumman.

But...in the car business, there's actual genuine competition. Musk had a pretty good start with the early Tesla models; but at this point I think he's dug himself into a hole with the Model 3 -- there's no way they can actually recover money from Model 3 production fast enough to pay off the debts coming due, and they can't keep printing more debt forever.
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Re: ULA workers strike over latest contract offer

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No, Musk is absolutely /the/ bullshit artist of our age
Tesla currently has 2.67 billion in cash.

About 1.1 billion of this is in loans that need to be returned early next year

Around 40% of their cash in hand is from refundable deposits, from people who thought they would get a $35k car

Tesla cannot make $35k M3s at a profit(this is widely accepted, and even Tesla hinted at it), they'll lose money even making $42k cars. They need to make $50k cars to earn a decent profit

When asked in the earning call last week about reservations and how many people chose to cancel/take up their car once offered, Musk stunningly called the question "boring" and "boneheaded" and went on take questions from a youtuber for 20 mins. This was considered unprecedented and bizarre and stock dove.

Tesla is losing about 800-900 million a quarter, so they will run out of money without a cash infusion. Literally everyone knows that Tesla will need to raise capital this year.

Musk though, has insisted that Tesla will not need to raise cash because they will be "profitable by Q3 or Q4". Reminder that they lost 780 million in Q1, and even small profits won't be enough to prevent running out of cash. In order to make profits they need to sell 10,000 cars a week. They were supposed to produce 5000 cars a week in 2017. They have just now been able to produce 2500/week.

Even bulls say that Musk is bluffing and he will eventually raise cash this year. Moody's downgrade of Tesla to essentially junk stocks makes it harder to raise cash at good interest rates. Moreover, there is speculation and some evidence that the reason Tesla haven't already done so, is that they are under SEC investigation which would prevent them from raising cash without disclosing a lot of details harmful to them.

Tesla has access to standard credit lines for about 500 million, but they recently had to pledge their Fremont factory to just maintain these credit lines.

A lot of Tesla's financial executives have left the company - a red flag to many including Jim Chanos, who famously shorted Enron due to similar indicators. The head of autopilot left and the head of engineering left 'for vacation' yesterday.

Tesla's autopilot is complete false advertising. Their original autopilot was developed by MobilEye. MobilEye hate tesla's exaggeration of the system's capabilities and withdrew their supply after a person died using autopilot. Tesla responded that mobileye was jealous of Tesla's superior "Enhanced Autopilot" which has hardware capable of full self driving. It is universally accepted that enhanced autopilot is worse than mobileye's system right now, and in general both are basically lane-keeping system with AEB. Waymo and GM/Cruise are far ahead with their FSD capabilities than Tesla(again, widely accepted)

Part of Tesla's debt comes from bailing out Solar City, a completely unprofitable company loaded with debt that was run by Musk's cousins.

Starting from 2019 and 2020, all the major automakers are bringing out electric models. This will further damage Tesla's competitiveness, since they have the wost QA and build quality due to their haphazard and panicked development process.
If you want specific sources on these claims, r/RealTesla is the place to look.
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Re: ULA workers strike over latest contract offer

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First, you'll note that I separated the claims between SpaceX and Tesla.

Second, Existential Comics.... I saw that on Facebook. :lol:

Third; SpaceX works because they're in a market where there hasn't been any real competition since....ever. So Cost-Plus and slow rolling are the order of the day -- look at the leaning tower of Mobile Launcher 1 that will have to be fixed for SLS to launch; and Mobile Launcher 1 (ML-1) effectively already cost about as much as the cost to develop the first generation of Falcon 9.

Meanwhile, in the car industry; there's actual competition. So while Tesla was able to get an early lead in production electric performance cars with not-shitty range and performance because that was a market that was neglected for so long, once the big automakers put Tesla into their gunsights; the wheels started to come off. GM and Ford have long spent lots of money into EV/Alternate vehicle research; but there wasn't a real competitive reason to put that research into play.

So when Tesla showed up, instead of sitting on their asses like ULA/Arianespace/Boeing/Lockheed did, they aggressively moved to develop their own counters:

2018 Chevrolet Bolt EV
200~ mile range on 60 kWH battery
$36,600~ MSRP

Meanwhile...

2018 Tesla Model 3:
300~ mile range on 75 kWH battery
$49,000~ actual price.

The 200 mile range version with a 50 kWH battery costing $35,000~ is in development hell.

Plus, there's that fucking dashboard.

Tesla should have stayed as a boutique semi luxury marquee -- but in trying to develop the Model 3 and mass produce it; Musk probably put TSLA into a death spiral of debt, not helped by design decisions more suited to low scale production -- case in point, Teslas use castings for large parts of their frames -- it's how they get such great crash performance, etc...but stamped frame parts are much much cheaper and faster to produce.
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Re: ULA workers strike over latest contract offer

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Oh yeah, and "Autopilot" of death on Teslas, great job making people think it's an actual autopilot!
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Re: ULA workers strike over latest contract offer

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I guess based on Tesla's financial performance, it raises the highly pertinent question as to whether or not SpaceX actually did anything that a government agency couldn't have already done themselves if they took a notion to doing so, and whether or not SpaceX's rates on payloads aren't an illusion being underwritten by reams of gullible investor lucre.
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Re: ULA workers strike over latest contract offer

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TithonusSyndrome wrote: 2018-05-21 09:10pm I guess based on Tesla's financial performance, it raises the highly pertinent question as to whether or not SpaceX actually did anything that a government agency couldn't have already done themselves if they took a notion to doing so, and whether or not SpaceX's rates on payloads aren't an illusion being underwritten by reams of gullible investor lucre.
http://www.parabolicarc.com/2011/05/31/ ... -approach/

Under methodology #1, the cost model predicted that the Falcon 9 would cost $4.0 billion based on a traditional approach. Under methodology #2, NAFCOM predicted $1.7 billion when the inputs were adjusted to a more commercial development approach. Thus, the predicted the cost to develop the Falcon 9 if done by NASA would have been between $1.7 billion and $4.0 billion.

SpaceX has publicly indicated that the development cost for Falcon 9 launch vehicle was approximately $300 million. Additionally, approximately $90 million was spent developing the Falcon 1 launch vehicle which did contribute to some extent to the Falcon 9, for a total of $390 million. NASA has verified these costs.
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Re: ULA workers strike over latest contract offer

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Back in 2011 when the veneer hadn't peeled off Musk's Potemkin village facade yet? Yeah... I reserve the right to be skeptical. Without knowing more about how or what exactly it is that NASA verified, it's hardly beyond the realm of possibility that they accepted wildly fraudulent figures from Musk that were goosed along by his ability to inspire people to soft fanaticism.
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Re: ULA workers strike over latest contract offer

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TithonusSyndrome wrote: 2018-05-21 09:30pm Back in 2011 when the veneer hadn't peeled off Musk's Potemkin village facade yet? Yeah... I reserve the right to be skeptical. Without knowing more about how or what exactly it is that NASA verified, it's hardly beyond the realm of possibility that they accepted wildly fraudulent figures from Musk that were goosed along by his ability to inspire people to soft fanaticism.
I think it's more likely that his ability to get SpaceX people to work for him for absurdly cheap salaries and insane hours did allow him to develop an orbital launcher for less than NASA or its typical contractors could have.

Sure, Musk is capable of bullshitting everyone (including himself) over something like Tesla augering into the ground. Turns out that crying "NO ONE UNDERSTANDS MY GENIUS!" isn't enough to let you break into the auto industry and compete with Ford and General Motors, who've been making cars and crushing competitors for a century. But contrary to what you might think by observing Donald Trump in action, just because a person is a bullshit artist sometimes doesn't mean bullshit is all they have.

Now, you can argue that SpaceX's achievement isn't very impressive because it was effectively the product of a massive subsidized labor program, only with the subsidy being provided by the workers themselves being willing to work eighty hours a week for a pittance and sleep on cots in the office. But that's not the same thing as "SpaceX didn't actually accomplish anything."
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Re: ULA workers strike over latest contract offer

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Well, anything is possible, but Tesla/Musk certainly are guilty of lying to their auditors in the past:
Tesla has failed to report some worker injuries at its California factory on legally mandated reports, which helped make “the company’s injury numbers look better than they actually are,” according to a new report from the Center for Investigative Reporting’s magazine Reveal. Tesla disputed every one of Reval’s findings, and accused the news outlet of being a tool of an ongoing unionization drive.

Reveal says it interviewed more than three dozen current and former employees—some who are named in the story—and reviewed hundreds of pages of documents. Injuries on sprains, strains, and stress injuries never made it onto state and federal reports that companies must keep, Reveal reported, and instead:

company officials labeled the injuries personal medical issues or minor incidents requiring only first aid, according to internal company records obtained by Reveal.

Undercounting injuries is one symptom of a more fundamental problem at Tesla: The company has put its manufacturing of electric cars above safety concerns, according to five former members of its environment, health and safety team who left the company last year. That, they said, has put workers unnecessarily in harm’s way.

Tesla has been facing an ongoing unionization drive led by the United Auto Workers union, which began over some of the very claims highlighted in the piece. The company’s been accused of firing workers for supporting the union effort, something the National Labor Relations Board is challenging the company on; the company’s previous claim that it now has a better injury rate than the industry average has now been reduced to... the same as the industry average, according to Reveal.

Here’s how Tesla explained the change:

“Our 2017 data showed that we are at industry average, so we’re happy about that,” Shelby said, explaining the earlier claims as a “snapshot in time.”

In response, Tesla accused Reveal—which has produced high-quality journalism for years and has previously been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes among other awards—of merely being a tool of the UAW.

We welcome constructive criticism, but those who care about journalistic integrity should strive for the truth above all. Unfortunately, the writers at Reveal paint a completely false picture of Tesla and what it is actually like to work here. In our view, what they portray as investigative journalism is in fact an ideologically motivated attack by an extremist organization working directly with union supporters to create a calculated disinformation campaign against Tesla.

I asked Tesla for additional comments on what they disputed in the story—which you can read entirely here—and will update the post if I hear back.

Update, 2 p.m.: Tesla has responded with a lengthy statement that reiterates much of what Reveal already included in its story. In a blog post, the company included a TRUTH TABLE:

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I’ve asked Tesla for evidence on why it believes Reveal is an extremist organization that worked directly with the UAW to publish a story. I’ll update if I hear back.

Update, 2:28 p.m.: A Tesla spokesperson declined to offer any additional comment, when asked bubble Jalopnik for evidence of why it believes Reveal worked “directly” with union supporters.
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Re: ULA workers strike over latest contract offer

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SpaceX has gotten about $2 billion in funding rounds over the past 16 years, and some of that was from Musk himself. Given the business and the development costs of all this, I don't think that's enough to say that he's just been providing subsidized flights off the backs of gullible investors.

For comparison, Tesla has had about $12.59 billion in funding rounds and investments since 2004.
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Re: ULA workers strike over latest contract offer

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Guardsman Bass wrote: 2018-05-31 01:14am SpaceX has gotten about $2 billion in funding rounds over the past 16 years, and some of that was from Musk himself. Given the business and the development costs of all this, I don't think that's enough to say that he's just been providing subsidized flights off the backs of gullible investors.

For comparison, Tesla has had about $12.59 billion in funding rounds and investments since 2004.
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