Wichita has been building the 737 fuselages since at least the late eighties when I worked in that plant. As a tool designer, I did some work on fixtures used to join the cockpit (41 section) to the forward passenger compartment (43 section). Boeing didn't relocate their headquarters to Chicago until 2001. Wichita considered taking on the entire 747 cockpit section, as they were already doing a lot of the sub-assemblies already. After a little research, they realized that the railroad tunnels on the way to Everett were too narrow (or too low?) to accommodate the 747's cockpit section.
As for the ass hat commenting on non-union workers at that plant, they were definitely unionized then, because I had to "cross" their picket lines a few weeks one year when they were on strike. As a tool designer, I was not under the IAM (International Machinist's Union) umbrella, and our work was not affected. The IAM didn't like us crossing the lines, because under certain circumstances, management could order us to work on the shop floor as scabs. That never happened, and since I wasn't going to collect any strike pay from the IAM, I went to work. As far as I know, they are still unionized under the IAM. I also worked for several years in the early nineties at a smaller Boeing plant in Macon, GA, which was also very unionized, even though Georgia was a "right to work" state. If you weren't "union", you had a hard time working on the shop floor at either of those facilities.
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Wichita has been building the 737 fuselages since at least the late eighties when I worked in that plant. As a tool designer, I did some work on fixtures used to join the cockpit (41 section) to the forward passenger compartment (43 section). Boeing didn't relocate their headquarters to Chicago until 2001. Wichita considered taking on the entire 747 cockpit section, as they were already doing a lot of the sub-assemblies already. After a little research, they realized that the railroad tunnels on the way to Everett were too narrow (or too low?) to accommodate the 747's cockpit section. As for the ass hat commenting on non-union workers at that plant, they were definitely unionized then, because I had to "cross" their picket lines a few weeks one year when they were on strike. As a tool designer, I was not under the IAM (International Machinist's Union) umbrella, and our work was not affected. The IAM didn't like us crossing the lines, because under certain circumstances, management could order us to work on the shop floor as scabs. That never happened, and since I wasn't going to collect any strike pay from the IAM, I went to work. As far as I know, they are still unionized under the IAM. I also worked for several years in the early nineties at a smaller Boeing plant in Macon, GA, which was also very unionized, even though Georgia was a "right to work" state. If you weren't "union", you had a hard time working on the shop floor at either of those facilities.