Union officials have accused Boeing of being “unprepared” after talks resumed to end the US’s largest strike.
Boeing workers will be joined on picket lines by the president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), Brian Bryant on Thursday a day after the company announced plans to furlough “large numbers” of employees.
Around 33,000 workers at Boeing in Washington and Oregon began striking on 13 September. Union officials have said talks between the two sides have gotten off to a poor start.
“Boeing must deliver a contract that reflects the hard work and sacrifices that workers have made over the past decade,” said Bryant. “The IAM and our 600,000 members have the backs of every single striking Boeing worker in this nation.”
The company has announced a freeze recruitment efforts and is planning to enact furloughs affecting thousands of workers as the strike halts production, and costs to the company reach an estimated $100m per day.
Workers voted 96% in favor of the strike after rejecting a tentative agreement that included 25% wage increases over the four-year contract, but workers have argued that came with takeaways.
IAM Local 751 went into negotiations with Boeing and a federal mediator on Tuesday, but talks reportedly did not initially go well with union officials accusing the company of coming into the negotiation unprepared.
“We will not mince words – after a full day of mediation, we are frustrated. The company was not prepared and was unwilling to address the issues you’ve made clear are essential for ending this strike: Wages and Pension,” the union’s negotiating committee said in a letter to members.
“The company doesn’t seem to be taking mediation seriously,” the negotiating committee said. “We are fighting for what is right and just – for what we have earned over the past 16 years.”
Bruce McFarland, an instrumentation technician who has worked at Boeing for 36 years, explained he waited to get hired for a year after leaving the military because of how coveted jobs at Boeing were. That is no longer the case, he said, and the company now has difficulty hiring and retaining workers.
He explained that in previous contract renewals, workers lost their pension, faced climbing healthcare costs and did not receive wage increases that kept up with inflation.
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“We lost our pension, our buying power stagnated like crazy and our medical was going up,” he said. “We’ve been losing, and everybody feels it. Covid hit us hard. We’ve just been paying more and more, and what we expect in the contract is no takeaways. So what happens? We get a 25% pay raise over four years that doesn’t match or keep up with the cost of inflation over the last eight years and before, because we came off another bad extension before that, when we were giving the company concessions for the economy.”
He compared the proposals to the exorbitant executive pay at Boeing, the “golden parachutes” of exiting CEOs Dave Calhoun in 2024 and Dennis Muilenburg in 2019, and the billions of dollars the company has spent on stock buybacks in the last decade.
“It makes us feel unvalued by the company,” added McFarland. “They took away the bonus, they take away more medical and they make you pay more, and they’ll find a way to make you pay more – the company is good at that. The pay just doesn’t cut it. It doesn’t keep up with inflation and it hurts our members. If the company wants to be world class, it needs to start treating its workers as world class.
“The days are over of us just rolling over. We did that eight years ago, and we’re not doing that again,” concluded McFarland. “We’re not backing down.”