Boeing execs said they held nothing back. The union members took that to be threatening. I genuinely wonder how much profit was actually reserved and how much executive comp is still available to drop into the pool. To me, “holding nothing back” means the company genuinely cannot to fund anything else without going into the red. Holding nothing back means fat was cut, executive pay was reduced, and shareholders understand their dividends are gone because the people that make them money need to get some too. Holding nothing back means some rainy day assets are sold and corporate, non-union members experience some austerity (granted you have to remain competitive so as to not lose your value creators so you can’t cut everything or they’d leave; executives are almost never value creators so they can have austerity measures). Holding nothing back means jobs could be cut if more hardship appears.
Something tells me Boeing was holding stuff back with that offer. It could be all the deferred stock executives have or the lack of shareholder expectation management. Not sure! We’ll never know.
This is complicated to unravel and has lots of similarities to the Tri-State Crematory Scandal.
Who owns a dead body? Does the state? Does the family? Take religion out of the picture for a few minutes as well so we can properly separate church and state. Someone dies without (available at that moment) relatives or a will defining what happens with the body. Alternatively someone dies and has not actually paid for the stuff stipulated in their will and does not have the resources to do so. What should happen? Something possibly like, in order,
Dead bodies can’t just sit around. They can cause serious health and environmental problems if not properly disposed of, so something has to be done. Remember, we’ve set aside religion, so a dead body is literally just a resource. It can be turned into cremains, it can be buried, or it can be sold for various uses. What should the state regulate here? What’s wrong with the state turning a dead body into some money? How much responsibility do families have in respecting last wishes? How much time and effort should the state put into investigating those? Do dead bodies really matter? How much land are we willing to turn over to cemeteries today? In ten years? In one hundred years?
Now if you bore with me this long and agree that dead bodies can be sold, I also strongly feel like there should be compensation to these families with interest for that shit. If you steal my resources and don’t tell me, the state already requires repayment. That’s what should happen here. It gets murkier once you add religion back in because you can’t really undo a lot of these things.
Dallas County is doing something wrong. But it’s way more complicated underneath the hood than normal Texas government shenanigans.