A quick analogy

Imagine that the National Football League (NFL) decided that every football team should have at least one wide receiver that was White. Then imagine that there simply aren’t enough White players for the teams to fill those roles or that many just preferred a group of starting receivers that happened to be African American. Now imagine that the solution to this problem was to let a White male create a “company” and the NFL team would then “contract” with that company to hire the African America player that they wanted in the first place. The NFL could then claim that it “hired” a White male for that role. The receiver in question would be required to surrender a significant portion of their salaries to that company for the privilege of getting that spot. The player would not be covered under any ethics, professional, or developmental policies that the NFL or the individual team had in place and could be forced to play when injured or moved to another position or to another team or simply let go without any discussion.

No one would believe that this system is anything but absurd. However, this is the system that the US government has in place for the space program (and others).

This football analogy breaks down in two important areas. First, the NFL has somewhat of a monopoly on players in both pay and prestige. While many of us White males have wanted to work in the space program for most of our lives, there are other options and many of us leave.

The second place that this analogy breaks down is in quality. An NFL team has a limited number of spaces. If you put players out there that are unqualified, you will lose and it will be obvious. That isn’t the case at NASA. The government can hire and retain unqualified people and then hire subcontractors that are “technical people” to do the work. In this way, the government and large companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin can hire people of preferred races and gender directly no matter what their skill level and then hire technical subcontractors as needed to do the work.

So, what is happening at NASA?

Believe it or not, the football analogy isn’t far off. The federal government has decided that there are too many White men in engineering positions. There simply aren’t enough qualified engineers of other races to fill the required positions by directly discriminating against those men on the basis of race. The government has therefore allowed people of the proper race and gender to form “companies” and given those companies certain “seats” or positions at the larger companies. White male engineers must then subcontract through those companies to obtain those “seats”. Those engineers work in the same Lockheed Martin (LM), Boeing, or NASA buildings and do the same work (or all the technical work),, but are not treated the same.

How are these engineers mistreated?

• Subcontractors are hired for a “seat”. They have no chance of advancement within whatever company they are working for like LM, Boeing, or NASA. Their work ethic and technical abilities do not matter.

• When the project they are working on ends, that “seat” ends and the subcontracting employee has to find a new job. This is in contrast with engineers that work directly for NASA or for those larger companies that can transfer to new projects or promote to different jobs. We are taking people with advanced degrees in aerospace engineering and making them temp employees.

• They make less money, as some of their salary goes to the company. They often have far less generous packages for health care, dental, etc

• They are not covered by any ethics, professional, or developmental plans. This means that they can be required to work overtime, can have any amount of work given to them, and can be treated unprofessionally, and this doesn’t go against any policy for the larger company as the engineer in question isn’t an employee.

Are all engineers mistreated?

Not all subcontractors may feel like they are being mistreated and in fact many managers do indeed treat those employees as equally as possible. Many do not experience the type of abuse, fraud, and illegality that I saw. However, no matter how they feel, they are in fact unequal to those direct employees in terms of both compensation and opportunities.

What is this doing to NASA?

As you can see in the page on this site labeled “The Money”, the amount of money being spent on the Orion program has already exceeded 2/3 of that spent on the equivalent part of the Apollo program and tripled the money spent on the Gemini program (all adjusted for inflation). While there are numerous other problems at NASA, the subcontracting scam and the racial/gender scam is one of the largest contributors of this excessive cost.

The subcontracting scam has led to many cases where people doing much of the technical work are subcontractors while the managers at that company have little to no technical experience. The NASA counterparts that are liaisons for that work also have no technical skills in that area. So, you have the people doing the actual work of designing the space vehicles in terms of mathematics, CAD, Finite Elements, Computational Fluid Dynamics, etc that are subcontractors with the fewest rights and opportunities and then you have a subcontracting company making a living off of their work as well as managers at LM or Boeing and then managers at NASA all making better careers out of the work being done by those subcontractors.

An inherently immoral system?

This system facilitates a great deal of fraud, corruption, and abuse. It is dragging down the space program as well as every other part of the government where it is implemented. Even if the opposite of these things were true, the system should still be ended. At its heart, the system is based on a racist view that some races have the right to claim the fruits of the labor of people of another race. Americans do not lose their right to work or their rights to legal protections at work because they are White and male. It’s time that the laws reflect this fact of basic human dignity.

How do state laws assist in this abuse?

Much of the work for the space program is done at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Texas is a “Right to Work” state, which means that workers can be terminated with no reason and no warning. The problem with this is that anyone that is not a straight, White male can oppose their termination on the basis or race, gender, or sexual orientation. So, if an employee covered by these laws is fired because they refused to go along with fraud that they discovered at Lockheed Martin or Boeing, or any other company, they can still get their day in court by claiming that a termination with no basis was due to race, gender, etc. No company is going to come into court and argue that they didn’t fire an employee because of race, they did it because that employee wouldn’t go along with fraud and abuse. This then provides another layer of protection not available to White men.

Companies can be caught breaking laws and lying to the Texas Workforce Commission and even when caught doing so, White males are completely reliant upon the TWC to take legal action. In. my case, the TWC simply refused to do so.

My Story?

I would encourage you to read my story on this site. I worked as a subcontractor for Lockheed Martin on the Orion program. The managers gave me work that their friends could not or would not do, demanded that I work extraordinary hours, refused to take part in a yearly review and repeatedly claimed to have already done so, and hid under their desk when I called them out on this. At one point, a manager placed software on basement computers behind locked doors.

In addition to this, the subcontracting company routinely assisted LM in carrying out this mistreatment.