<Begin Segment 9>

TI: In the thirty-year period since then, how do you think Boeing did in addressing this issue? I mean at some point did they, did they address it, or do you think those inequalities still exist at Boeing?

HM: Okay, the people that I knew that got some major jumps in their salary, I think were directly affected by this situation.

TI: And when did this happen, do you think?

HM: Well, it took place... probably in about ten years' spread, time period, during that process that we were going through this exercise. And I think they realized that maybe there was some discrimination on the part of the supervisors for looking at Asians. Because they didn't speak out very much. They were very docile. I never heard of an engineer pounding the table to a human resources person. They had us under their control, basically.

TI: Well how does that make you feel? Because you said earlier that you were kind of labeled as this crazy activist who actually did, brought the attention to this issue. And then ten years later the engineers who perhaps weren't pounding the table and were more -- as you consider -- docile got the benefits of that activism?

HM: Well --

TI: How does that feel?

HM: I thought maybe we did some good. It might have not affected us directly, but it did our entire population of Asian engineers some good. And well, in Ken Nakano's case, I know he did very well after that. And he was a lead man in his Flight Deck Group, and so forth. Some of these things really did come to fruition.

TI: And you're comfortable with your role in doing that, even though you weren't directly -- you didn't directly benefit?

HM: Yeah, but my situation was kinda different because I wasn't in a fixed project group. So I was going from one preliminary design function to another one. And as soon as you finished -- these preliminary design groups aren't pools of merit. Your home organization is some staff organization or project organization, so no matter how well you did in these proposal and preliminary design groups, you never might see the merit consideration. So I was in a different situation. I was getting -- my home organization was just saying, "Oh hell, you needn't worry about him. He's gonna be around here. So what if he got a commendation letter. We'll just put 'em in his file, but we'll forget about 'em." So I was going from like a 757 program, 767 program, every program that they had, well we were being shifted. It's like a proposal effort. You're in the preliminary design, conceptual design, do analysis of the key costs of ownership, elements of the new airplane, what you can improve and all this kind of stuff. So we were always going from preliminary design, and once it got into a project mode then they would shift us to another one in a preliminary design group. So we were being shifted around, so I never really had a home organization that protected us. So we were in a different situation. All of us were pretty well qualified, but we didn't have enough attachment to our project organization to merit sufficient consideration for increase in salary or for status.

TI: But those Nikkei engineers or Asian American engineers who were in more of those fixed positions benefit the most from...

HM: Yeah, because they were key members of their organizations. And people that I know of, well, they used to -- well, one comment that was made to me when I opened up my paycheck one day was, "Is that all the salary you get?" he says to me. [Laughs] Well, he was making about twice as much as I was. And we were in the same class in school and we were approximately equal caliber, but I think some of our directions in the company were different. The person I was speaking of, he became the, one of these engineering representatives for the FAA when they certify an airplane. All the stuff that Boeing does goes through him before it goes to the FAA. So he acts as an intermediary. And he was in a very good position. He was a Designated Engineering Representative, DER, they used to call him.

TI: And yet he was a peer of yours. How did it make you feel? When he said --

HM: Well, he was in a fixed organization.

TI: Right. So that goes back to that issue you talked about earlier.

HM: Yeah, he went all the way up through the ranks. He started off as the low man in his organization and he became the top technical person in his organization. So when we used to have trouble, well, like an air conditioning system, well they would send this guy out to the airline. So he would be going out with the head of the engineering department, so I mean, they were well known to each other. Whereas guys like us in preliminary design, hell we never saw the VP's, even though the programs that we were directing had a lot of influence on the direction the company was gonna go. But they never saw us. For one thing it was difficult for them to address us because most of the guys in our group were very highly technically specialized individuals and they didn't want to show their ignorance. And this was part of the problem that we had. Because we were dealing with a very interesting model economically as well as technically in terms of what can we do for the next airplane to make it a salable item that could justify itself economically from a customer's standpoint, from a Boeing manufacturing standpoint and all this kind of stuff. So we had a lot of the sharpest guys around that would enable us to give us this picture.

TI: That's interesting. Because you would think that model -- you're right, I think a lot of times these early planning teams are your best and brightest, and the fact that it was such that they weren't compensated seems to be out of whack.

HM: Yeah, but this is the norm. Like in the wind tunnel test program, these guys were really sharp people, and yet we weren't recognized in terms of what happened. The project guys get the glory, and they say hey, we got this airplane out. Well, that was grinding the crank to us. But it's a different whole situation. But in terms of redress, when were working on redress, it was about the same way. I mean we were trying to innovate different ideas and trying to get people interested in the subject of redress, and it was a very difficult operation just to get the inertia going. To get people interested enough to make this an active program. So I guess going from a preliminary design area to a preliminary design for redress had some of the similar type of problems.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.