I don't believe it is strictly thread drift. Although US trades unionism (like so much in the USA) has had more than its fair share of criminality, corruption, and protection of vested interests, the desire to move to a non-union workforce is of a piece with the downgrading of the role of engineers, and the general tendency to treat Boeing as a machine for making money for a few, rather than an organisation for making machines, and making a profit by doing it well. And part of the complexity comes from the use euphemisms, such as "imbalance of power" and "right to work states."