My perception of the situation is based on a lot more than this article.
The airplane was late before an IAM mechanic ever turned a wrench.
Was it 3 years late? Read the link to the article I posted. The strike alone cost them $2 billion. And that is a small part of the cost of unionism. Think of all the extra workers, supplies and equipment they could have bought with that money to keep this thing on track.
The instant I learned that Boeing was having labor trouble, I knew Boeing was going to face difficulty getting this job done on time—or done at all for that matter, and that I would someday find myself trying to explain to someone why they are wrong when they insist that it’s not the union’s fault. A business model where the workers are adversarial to management is a business model which is sure to fail in the end. Yet for some folks, it’s never the union’s fault. You can always make a defensible argument that it’s management’s fault. Afterall, management makes the decisions. But what you’re ignoring is that management’s decisions are often not really discretionary. They make decisions based on the economic realities that they are presented with, and the union is one of those realities.
If it were only about justice, then I would say, “Fine. They get what they deserve, which in the end will be an unemployment check.” But unfortunately, these institutions are wreaking havoc on our entire society.