I don't know... I work for a (non-unionized) company about half the size of Boeing, and we don't have anywhere near that level of bureaucracy, so I have a hard time accepting the premise that "that's just how things have to be." I'm sure there are a lot of contributing factors, but I don't have a hard time imagining unions contributing to process creep by mandating the allocation of tasks in a non-optimal way.

I'm no hardcore anti-unionist, but this particular situation seems like a very plausible late-stage union failure mode.

But your company is smaller. I work for a company smaller still and the amount of dumb bureaucracy is even less than yours probably.

Also, culturally the aerospace industry is very rule and procedure heavy, for good reason.

I've seen it in big and small (10 people companies), it just depends on having someone in HR that cares about shit like this and the authority to do something about it.

Sometimes you can't change a light bulb at a small company, sometimes at a big one you're first job is to assembly you're own desk.

I could easily imagine an incident where someone plugged something in the wrong socket, something got destroyed, and it was codified in policy that only the people who certifiably know what they're doing are allowed to plug stuff into sockets. It takes just one to ruin it for everyone.

Like plugging a vacuum cleaner into a UPS.

Which actually happened at a subsidiary of British telecom I worked at - the cleaners unplugged the accounts receivable unix system.

It was a POS system the finance director brought and caused no end of problems at one point we were unable to cut a BACS tape for over 6 months

Verizon is union too.

Perhaps, but the point is true. Large, traditional companies do this sort of thing.

Sometimes because of unions. Others times for "security reasons" or "3rd party contract" reasons, etc.

I work at Verizon and they gave me a MBP with root access...so this is not universal at the company.