Boeing employees reject deal of union and company and go on strike
In another blow to the company, Boeing’s employees have gone on strike after overwhelming voting to reject a new deal their union officials had negotiated with the company that had called for a 25% salary increase across the board.
Members of the International Association of Machinists District 751, which represents about 33,000 Boeing workers in Washington state, walked off the job when their contract expired at midnight on Thursday night. Almost 95 per cent rejected the deal endorsed by their bargaining team on Sunday and 96 per cent voted to strike, easily exceeding the two-thirds majority needed to trigger a walkout.
Many of the union’s members expressed anger on social media, criticising the deal and accusing IAM leaders of settling for too little. Many had been ready to strike, partly fuelled by residual anger from a 2014 deal that eliminated defined-benefit pensions.
Boeing on Thursday said it was ready to renegotiate a deal to halt a crippling strike.
Right now Boeing’s credit rating is “one notch above junk” and if the strike isn’t settled quickly that rating could drop more. It will also prevent the company from taking any action to recover from its numerous problems that are limiting sales of its airplanes and its military and space products.
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In another blow to the company, Boeing’s employees have gone on strike after overwhelming voting to reject a new deal their union officials had negotiated with the company that had called for a 25% salary increase across the board.
Members of the International Association of Machinists District 751, which represents about 33,000 Boeing workers in Washington state, walked off the job when their contract expired at midnight on Thursday night. Almost 95 per cent rejected the deal endorsed by their bargaining team on Sunday and 96 per cent voted to strike, easily exceeding the two-thirds majority needed to trigger a walkout.
Many of the union’s members expressed anger on social media, criticising the deal and accusing IAM leaders of settling for too little. Many had been ready to strike, partly fuelled by residual anger from a 2014 deal that eliminated defined-benefit pensions.
Boeing on Thursday said it was ready to renegotiate a deal to halt a crippling strike.
Right now Boeing’s credit rating is “one notch above junk” and if the strike isn’t settled quickly that rating could drop more. It will also prevent the company from taking any action to recover from its numerous problems that are limiting sales of its airplanes and its military and space products.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in the past two weeks has the mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuses to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
CNBC this morning announced that Airbus was now first (again) in revenue. Probably not just the fault of management, but some responsibility rests on the hourly workers as well.
I still expect one major U.S. airliner crash this year – due to ATC incompetence; to pilot incompetence; or aircraft maintenance incompetence. DEI policies are showing up in quantities that allow them to be measured.
I’ve never trusted Airbus aircraft owing to a corporate history of wonky avionics software even more egregious than that of Boeing. Boeing, unfortunately, has, if anything, long since descended to an even lower general state than Airbus. The decidedly iffy nature of all large commercial aircraft these days makes me grateful that, even before retirement, the last job I held that required routine business travel dated back to before 9-11. So I have been spared, this past quarter century, from both the indignities of the TSA and the derelictions of the legacy large airframe makers. And now that DEI appears to have thoroughly invaded the entire civil aviation ecosystem, there is simply one more reason to breathe a sigh of relief that my flying days are long-vanished. As one who never traveled, by choice, to pursue leisure activities and who tried his best to keep required business-related flying to a bare minimum, I don’t miss the myriad hassles even a tiny bit.
And then there are the unions. The IAMAW has long been dicing with the longshoremen for the title of Most Marxist Union. Just as their brother unions in the AFL-CIO have destroyed the American steel and tire industries and grievously wounded the legacy automakers, it seems legacy aerospace is now in for a thorough dragging by organized labor despite its generally fading fortunes.
The former employees of a lot of now long-dead erstwhile U.S. industrial titans, like Bethlehem Steel, could perhaps explain to their still-working younger brothers in aerospace just what happens to all those sky-high wages and seemingly fat pensions once their overburdened employers actually go broke and are liquidated. Spending a penurious old age on the pittance doled out by the government’s Orwellian-ly named Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation isn’t exactly what most of these folks had in mind when they were also strike-happy and self-righteously entitled during their own working lives. Karma is a – well, I won’t say what, exactly, out of deference to ZimmerBob’s dislike of rough language.
But, hey, while they were still seemingly on their uppers, these now starveling former knights of labor paid hundreds of millions in dues money straight into the coffers of the Democratic Party – which spares them nary a thought nor a backward glance now that they have served their purpose. The Left always seems to wind up being harder on its own even than it does on the rest of the general population.
If I was Boeing’s CEO, I would use whatever is left of my company’s line of credit to move my manufacturing facilities to a right-to-work state. Maybe Rivian would take a few pennies on the dollar for their never-to-be finished EV manufacturing plant in Georgia, or maybe Ford’s never-gonna-be finished EV plant in Tennessee. At such an early stage in their development, surely they could be repurposed into something much more useful. Then flip the ol’ bird finger to those precious proletarians that just voted to strike, right after I’ve sent all the DEI hires to the showers… metaphorically speaking, of course.
Kinda like smoking that first cigarette, those workers made a choice detrimental to the health of their livelihoods. Make them smoke the whole pack.
”It will also prevent the company from taking any action to recover from its numerous problems that are limiting sales of its airplanes and its military and space products.”
To be clear, only the shop floor in Seattle is on strike. The military and space divisions are not affected.
Here are my predictions.
1) The strike will go on for three or more months.
2) Boeing’s stock price will tank and their bonds will be rated as junk.
3) Airbus’s market share will rise and Boeing’s will fall.
4) The union’s raise will go up to 35% but not to the 40% they are asking for.
5) The commitment to build the next airplane using union workers will be stricken from the contract.
6) Boeing’s next airplane will not be built in Seattle or using union workers. It will be built in a non-union factory.
7) Employment at Boeing Seattle will fall significantly over the life of the new contract.
8) When that contract comes up for renegotiation in a few years, Boeing will offer cuts to the contract and tell the union to take it or stuff it.
9) Employment at Boeing Seattle will fall precipitously after the next union contract goes through.
But on the bright side… Boeing’s airplanes can’t fail if they don’t deliver any airplanes.
The only reason I had a place to live as a child was because my Dad was UTU.
That having been said, the good employees already left Boeing and the dregs who don’t even know how to put door plugs in deserve NOTHING.
To Mr. Eagleson,
Is it true that Airbus tailfins are less well-attached than Boeing’s?
I seem to remember hearing that.
Jeff Wright,
To settle the matter of relative vertical stabilizer strength one would have to, at a minimum, run a trial on, say, a 767 simulator using the control inputs commanded for the rudder of the Airbus A300 that was flying as American Airlines flight 587 when it had its tail fin snap off from a combination of wake turbulence from a just-departed 747 and inadvisably violent control commands by the flight deck crew. The plane crashed in Queens NYC in Nov. 2001 and killed all 260 aboard plus five more on the ground. I have no idea whether such a simulated test of a comparable Boeing airframe was ever done.
This crash can, with some justice, be blamed on the pilots of the Airbus as the 300 – which entered production and service in the early 1970s – did not have a fly-by-wire control system in which software would overrule a pilot that entered flight surface commands that would result in damage to the aircraft.
But what I was mainly referring to was the infamous 1988 crash of a very early-production Airbus A320 into a forested area off the end of a runway as the plane was attempting a sharp pull-up after a low pass made down the runway as part of a promotional outing. It seems that the A320’s fly-by-wire system had some rate or nose-up angle limits that doomed the aircraft as they could not be overridden by pilot control inputs. The avionics software did allow the plane to fly below safe, or even legal, altitudes – which it was doing just prior to the crash. So the avionics allowed the plane to be flown into a situation in which the only control inputs that might have saved the plane would not be honored. This accident, involving pathological interactions among complex avionics subsystems, bears at least a modest familial resemblance to what happened far more recently with the two crashed 737 MAXes that were running MCAS.
wwJames:
Your predictions would be reasonable in ordinary circumstances, but Boeing doesn’t find itself in ordinary circumstances at the moment. The 787 program is a $27 billion financial hole in the ground that Boeing can’t seem to dig itself out of. Then the 737 Max became a $25 billion financial hole in the ground as of two years ago when I stopped paying attention to it.
Boeing is fighting like crazy just to stabilize itself and will be in no position to launch a new airplane in the next five or six years. Giving the union cash now to move future production to nonunion sites is crazy, because they don’t have the cash to give, and there won’t be any future production if they don’t stop bleeding cash.
Which doesn’t mean Boeing management won’t do it, of course. In woke management circles, unions outrank shareholders.
An article on all composite Airbus tail connections
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/05/23/need-to-ground-airbus-disputed/02ca1dcf-1e15-4524-9c35-a5e5d3f1809c/
https://www.faa.gov/lessons_learned/transport_airplane/accidents/N14053
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587
Well we will see if the company can afford to pay the union more and stay profitable.
Inside of 5 years they will place the company up for sale The union has already lost their company paid for retirements and I bet Boeing has come to a deal with medical insurance companies and no longer really pay the bulk of the insurance premiums.
My local area went through the very same thing with the auto union. They kept asking for more, They went to a two tier pay system and that was the last thing the union won. After that the company just moved and folded the local.