John Barnett was born in 1962 and grew up in Central Louisiana with his three brothers. He worked in quality control at the Boeing Company for 32 years. From 2010 to 2017 he worked as a quality control manager for the Boeing South Carolina plant. He would later say that this plant had a different culture from the other Boeing facilities where he worked. The South Carolina plant was managed by the U.S. military, and Barnett reported that he was pressured not to document defects in the design and construction of aircraft. “[W]e’re in Charleston and we can do anything we want,” was management’s attitude, and they needed to “push planes out of the door and make the cash registers ring.”
In 2013, Barnett was demoted and removed from his management position for writing an email that documented quality control issues with the 787. He was suggested that he “shouldn’t put problems in writing.” In 2017 he filed an FAA whistleblower complaint against Boeing with OSHA. That same year, he retired from Boeing, after his doctor said that job-related stress would be responsible for a heart attack unless he quit.
In 2021, after a four-year investigation, OSHA found in favor of Boeing and closed Barnett’s complaint. He immediately appealed the decision, claiming the firm had “undermined his career because he had raised safety concerns at the Charleston plant.” Barnett was a featured interviewee on the 2022 Netflix documentary Downfall: The Case Against Boeing.
On March 9, 2024, Barnett was in Charleston as part of a week-long series of depositions for his suit. He had another deposition scheduled that day, but he didn’t respond to calls from his lawyers on the 9th. He was discovered in his truck, in the parking lot of the hotel where he had been staying, with a pistol in his hand. He had been shot in the head.
Official reports from the police all claim that Barnett killed himself in the middle of his suit. His lawyers, friends, and family disagree.
On January 5 of this year, at 5:07 p.m., Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 took off from Portland, Oregon on its way to Ontario, California. At 16,000 feet, an emergency exit door blew off the side of the plane. Flight 1282 was a Boeing 737 Max 9, and within days the FAA ordered all Boeing 737 Max 9s to be grounded for checks. Boeing admitted that all the Max 9s may have “loose hardware” — meaning improperly fastened bolts that could lead to just such an explosive decompression.
Sam Salehpour, who worked for Boeing for 10 years, came forward in 2019 after sending his concerns to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and said publicly that Boeing’s new Dreamliner 787 could “break apart” due to its safety flaws. He also sent his allegations to the FAA, telling them that changes in the construction process had introduced shortcuts that caused parts of the fuselage, the plane’s body, to be improperly fastened together. Salehpour was transferred to work on the 777, and he said he found safety problems with that plane too.
“This is a culture,” said Debra Katz, Salehpour’s lawyer, “that prioritizes the production of planes and pushes them off the line even when there are serious concerns about the structural integrity of those planes and their production process.”
The corporation’s public response to all this was to fire the executive in charge of the 737 Max program. It was only when Boeing’s major buyers — Southwest, United, Alaska, and American — demanded to meet the board without the presence of the CEO that the CEO, Dave Calhoun, was quickly fired by the board.
In the past three years, Boeing has been the subject of an unprecedented 32 whistleblower claims. Of these, 13 were related to aviation safety. Fifteen were related to workplace safety, two were filed as claims of fraud, and one was filed concerning the handling of toxic chemicals.
If you guessed the root cause behind all of these problems, the driving force that has spurred Boeing to make these disastrous changes was the profit incentive, you guessed correctly. The COVID pandemic saw Boeing deep in the red for several years, and even as it began to recover, its margin of profit is in the toilet. Even today, the stock price (which helps us track how bourgeois economists value the company) of the Boeing Corporation is half of what it was in 2019. But the trends run even longer — and we can see the precipitous rise in Boeing’s stock prices starting in 2016, after the illegal, dangerous, and poor manufacturing techniques took hold and began paying off.
Of course, this isn’t all. Boeing is not only the enemy of the people here at home, where they steal, lie, cheat, and sell planes that fall apart in the air — they are the enemy of the world proletariat, as they sell their ramshackle planes to the U.S. empire, where they are used to defend global capital. They also produce a $5 billion missile defense system and other tools of empire.
No American corporation would be complete without its direct connection to U.S. imperialism abroad. In 2023 alone, the Boeing Corporation received $2.35 billion in contracts from the Department of Defense (DoD) to produce planes for the U.S. war machine. In 2021, Boeing was awarded a $23 billion DoD contract. Despite the whistleblowers, the government continues to award these enormous contracts. Will Boeing cheat the DoD and the imperialist armed forces of important parts and safety checks to pad their accounts? If they do, we must be ready to take advantage of it.
