The 33,000 Boeing workers who walked off the job Friday morning, despite an offer of 25 percent wage gains over four years, join a wave of American union members telling U.S. employers that a good deal just won’t cut it.
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Many striking Boeing workers told The Washington Post they would not settle until Boeing offered a deal with wage gains closer to the 40 percent over four years requested by the union — up from the 25 percent offered. They also told The Post they had been saving up to go on strike for months and even years.
“If we have any power to show the world that Boeing is continuing to make bad decisions, it would be now,” said Alex Mutch, a quality inspector at Boeing’s 737 Max storage facility in Victorville, Calif. He has worked there for five years and said his family has given up movies and dining out because wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living.
Part of the opportunism is because Boeing machinists have been working under the same contract since 2008, and they gave up major concessions, including their pensions, in intervening years to keep airplane production in Washington state.
At the same time, the embattled aerospace giant is in a particularly vulnerable state and can’t afford to lose what could be as much as $1 billion a week in production. And two rating agencies reported they are considering downgrading Boeing’s credit.
“We’ve got a lot of leverage — why waste that?” said Joe Philbin, a structures mechanic, outside the Renton, Wash., voting hall Thursday.
Boeing’s work stoppage follows a wave of high-profile union strikes levied against major industries, including auto manufacturing, hospitality and health care. An unusually tight labor market gave workers far more leverage to demand higher wages, giving way to the largest number of major strikes in more than two decades even as the share of American workers in unions hit an all-time low last year.
However, the labor market has eased considerably over the past year and is expected to weaken further in the months to come, meaning opportunities for unions could narrow by next year.
Last Sunday, the IAM union and Boeing announced that they had reached a tentative four-year agreement, including the 25 percent raise and enhanced health and retirement benefits. Boeing also committed to building its next new aircraft in the Pacific Northwest, a key union demand.
But when machinists filled a large room at the Seattle union hall to hear the results of the ratification vote Thursday night, many of them were already primed for a strike — and carrying picket signs. When IAM District 751 President Jon Holden entered the room, calls of “Strike!” rang out before he even announced the results of the vote.
Under the agreement, the average pay for machinists would have risen from $75,608 to $106,350 per year without overtime, according to the company. But workers said the offer didn’t take into account the high cost of living in the Seattle region and the years that employees had gone without significant raises.
Widespread rank-and-file criticism of the deal also hinges on the elimination of bonuses tied to productivity, quality and safety improvements, which they say detract from wage gains.
Workers also express concern that the guarantee to build the next plane in the Pacific Northwest does not extend beyond the four-year contract. Boeing has not announced plans to launch a new aircraft.
“This deal is a slap in the face,” Daniel Bowyer, a 12-year Boeing aircraft mechanic, said from a picket line Friday. “We’re just trying to get higher wages because it’s been stagnant for years.”
The Post spoke to eight striking Boeing workers who said they had been saving up for months, and in some cases years, in preparation for a strike.
“I, and many of us who were here when our pension was stolen from us, have been saving since January 3, 2014,” said Jon Voss, a union steward who has worked at Boeing for 14 years.
The Boeing strike caps a period of increased militancy by unions eager to secure stronger contracts amid a tighter labor market that has afforded workers more leverage. Last fall, the United Auto Workers secured pay gains of at least 25 percent over four years after a six-week strike against the Big Three Detroit automakers. In July 2023, the Teamsters won one of the strongest contracts in UPS history.
“There’s this contagion effect where there’s a lot of examples now of workers fighting for more and winning more,” said Barry Eidlin, a labor sociologist at McGill University.
Many of the strikes of the past few years have focused on themes motivating Boeing’s union members: wages that have not kept up with inflation; threatened job security; corporate relocation of jobs to the South where right-to-work laws sideline unions; and bloated executive compensation.
Union workers are now increasingly willing to vote against strong contracts with the hope of winning something even better. In August, Alaska Airlines flight attendants rejected a deal with average raises of 32 percent over three years. Thousands of machinists at Spirit AeroSystems in Kansas, a supplier in the process of being acquired by Boeing, voted down a contract deal last year and went on a six-day strike, securing bigger raises.
Despite recent victories at the bargaining table, union membership rates in the United States — a widely used indicator of union power — continue to decline, hitting a new low of 10 percent last year. And only 6 percent of private sector workers were in unions. At their peak in the 1950s, unions represented more than 1 in 3 U.S. workers.
Labor experts say it is highly unusual for workers to so overwhelmingly reject a contract recommended by union leadership. Boeing workers voted 96 percent to oppose the contract, which “sends a very strong message to Boeing to dig in the pockets deeper,” said Arthur Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
Raymond Fultz, a 27-year Boeing employee, said he’s never seen workers vote so uniformly in favor of a strike as they did now. It’s an accumulation of the last 10 years of pay stagnation and disappearing benefits, he said.
“I’m out here to fight for the younger generation to get the pension back,” he said.
Lori Aratani contributed to this report.
