Open Dialog Keeps Production Rolling, Planemaker Says

Airbus and Boeing are facing many of the same concerns, from slumping economies and increasing fuel prices, to outsourcing strategies and labor union woes. Yet Airbus is taking a big step towards maintaining its leadership in airliner production numbers, by keeping its production lines moving ahead while Boeing's now sit idle.

A key difference seems to be in dealing with their labor problems, benefiting from a better level of communication. Regular forums for discussion such as work councils have provided greater and more frequent communication between labor unions and management... a contrast to the three-year cycle of contract negotiations at Boeing, reports the International Herald Tribune.

That relationship with management has allowed Airbus to avoid large-scale labor issues in 2008, and have helped keep deliveries of the planemaker's troubled flagship A380 on schedule.

"We have pretty good working relations with the unions, which are not nearly as adversarial as in Seattle," Airbus Chief Operating Officer John Leahy said. "We have a partnership here, and whether you are on the assembly line or an engineer you can understand the euro-dollar problem, and see the foreign exchange rate going in the wrong direction."

Still, Airbus is not without its own problems. The planemaker's assembly lines were shut down three times in 2007 as 33,000 workers demonstrated against planned job cuts, and smaller hiccups in production have occurred sporadically.

More recently, plants have been hit with random strikes as workers protest the company's planned Power8 restructuring plan, that calls for the elimination of some 10,000 jobs. But strikes tend to be of shorter duration at Airbus than at Boeing, analysts observed.

FMI: www.airbus.com, www.qantas.com