Whistleblower Laws That Protect Lawbreakers

[Passages]

The late whistleblower John Barnett described Boeing as a psychological torture chamber for anyone who cared about safety. A 2000 law makes fighting back nearly impossible.

BY MAUREEN TKACIK APRIL 30, 2024

Sections 47 and 48 of a 787 Boeing Dreamliner fuselage consist of the back four rows of the plane’s passenger seating, bathrooms, meal prep area, flight attendant seating, and rear exit doors. “Not the kind of thing you could sneak out on the back of a pickup truck,” says Rob Turkewitz, an attorney who represents the estate of John Barnett, the whistleblower who was found dead last month the morning he’d been scheduled to finish a deposition in his whistleblower lawsuit against the company. And yet around 2015, someone caused a massive hunk of this fuselage to vanish from the Material Review Segregation Area (MRSA) of the Charleston, South Carolina, 787 assembly plant, without leaving any kind of paper trail. As near as Turkewitz and his former client have been able to figure, no one ever determined what became of the thing.

MRSA was supposed to be a sanatorium of sorts for malfunctioning airplane parts. Damaged, defective, or otherwise “nonconforming” parts were sent there to be tagged, logged, and painted red, so that no one would confuse them for parts that could be installed on an aircraft. MRSA was also understood as a kind of sanatorium of defective personnel, where blacklisted quality managers like Barnett were sent as punishment, because it felt more like an inventory management job than the awe-inspiring enterprise of building an airplane.

But Barnett quickly realized that MRSA was an extremely central part of another kind of enterprise at Boeing South Carolina: the mad dash for parts to install on airplanes that managers were under pressure to get out the door as quickly as possible.
https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-04-30-whistleblower-laws-protect-lawbreakers/