by Samuel Messidor
33,000 Boeing manufacturing workers in the Northwest are on the picket line as of midnight Friday after voting overwhelmingly to reject the tentative contract with the aerospace monopoly approved by their union’s negotiation team. After voting 99.9% in favor of Strike Authorization previously, the workers flew past the 2/3rds threshold needed to strike with a 96% strike vote Thursday. Boeing manufactures commercial airplanes, and is one of the top 5 corporations forming the US military-industrial complex, bringing home a sizable share of the massive spoils of the US imperialist war machine.
The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), under which the Boeing workers are organized, began negotiations by demanding a 40% pay increase, reinstatement of pensions, guarantees for newly-designed planes to be built at the company’s unionized facilities in the Northwest, and a voice on the board of directors.
Boeing workers have been under the same contract since 2008, and workers in 2014 lost their pensions and faced raised healthcare costs, a common refrain as the bosses squeeze tighter and tighter to extract their profits.
The tentative deal only proposed a 25% pay raise over the life of the contract, and contained a guarantee from Boeing that newly-designed planes will be built in the northwest’s unionized facilities rather than the newer, non-union Boeing facilities in the South. However, it is unlikely these new planes will come into being before the new contract expires. The proposal did not address any new Cost of Living Adjustments and gave a paltry $3000 signing “bonus”—a bribe to accept the contract—while removing yearly bonuses. Further, the tentative deal offered some reduction in mandatory weekend overtime, but without eliminating it as the workers have demanded.
According to monopoly media, workers on social media were posting the lone word “STRIKE” and on the shop floor workers were handing out flyers in the factories demanding a NO vote and a return to the original demands of a 40% wage hike, return of pension plans, and worker representation on Boeing’s board of directors. Workers have demonstrated in the factories, sounding horns and rallying with the slogan REJECT / STRIKE and posting signs reading “The union sold us out.” Boeing workers are angry following years of speed-ups, layoffs, and cuts to their pay and working conditions. One Spirit (the upstream manufacturing concern spun-off from Boeing) worker told Federal safety investigations during an investigative hearing: “We [workers] are the cockroaches of the factory”, going on to describe rush jobs, unfinished work being chased down the line from station to station, and high employee turnover.
Jon Holden, President of IAM District 751, said during negotiations: “The company should want to take care of its workforce so that we can succeed together…. Not too long ago, Boeing had a reputation for greatness… our Members shared that pride, knowing that our livelihoods and legacy were, and still are, tied to every plane that leaves the factory”. He defended the tentative deal, saying, “We got as much as we could in collective bargaining, short of a strike”, which is to say: the union bureaucrats do not want a strike, or else they would have proposed it themselves, and are aligned with the federal government and Boeing on this question.
The last time Boeing workers hit the picket line was for 8 weeks in 2008, and the union now has a paltry $250 a week strike fund for each striking worker.
The acting federal labor secretary also appealed for labor peace, for the union and its workers and the company to work together to “accomplish the mission of the company in a way that prioritizes the workers”, which is to say, to fool the workers into not intensifying their fight with the sickly monopoly in the interests of the company rebounding in the midst of its crisis of overproduction. It is unsurprising that the government wants to avoid a strike at Boeing which may cost the company billions, considering that it struggles to keep up with the pace of weapons orders for Ukraine and the US-Zionist genocide of the Palestinian people.
Boeing has been battered recently by controversy and failure—extending even to its space program—and has not posted profits since 2018. The controversy intensified when the Alaska Air plane’s door blew off mid-flight at the beginning of this year.
Multiple whistle-blowers have come forward since the door blow-out, detailing shoddy safety standards, management rushing workers, pushing them to cut corners to push out products faster, dangerous working conditions, and high employee turnover. Boeing has laid off tens of thousands since 2020 and shifted production from its unionized plants in the Northwest to non-unionized plants in the South. Two whistle-blowers have been found dead recently within a short time frame in suspicious circumstances.
Boeing recently received the second in a string of sweetheart deal from the federal government to avoid prosecution for two deadly crashes of Boeing planes, in 2018-2019, which together killed 346 people. This second deal came after they failed to live up to government-mandated assurances when the crashes were first investigated—the company admitted it had lied to federal regulators checking in on the first sweetheart deal in which they had entirely avoided criminal liability. The newest deal has been denounced by the families of those killed and their lawyers.
