Posted on 09/01/2005 8:38:22 PM PDT by anymouse
Boeing Co. Machinists voted Thursday to strike as union members overwhelmingly rejected a three-year contract proposal their leaders had deemed "insulting." Union members voted 86 percent in favor of a strike beginning at 12:01 a.m. local time Friday. Under union rules, the contract would have been automatically ratified -- and workers would have stayed on the job -- unless two-thirds of the union members voted to strike.
The strike will affect about 18,400 Machinists who assemble Boeing's commercial airplanes and some key components in the Seattle area, Gresham, Ore., and Wichita, Kan.
Company officials said earlier in the week that a strike would be devastating, forcing the company to slowly shut down commercial airplane production.
Leaders of the Seattle-based Machinists Lodge 751 had urged its members to "reject this insulting Boeing proposal," saying it fell woefully short on top issues including pension payments and increased health care costs. District Lodge 751 is negotiating for employees in all three states, although some terms differ based on location.
Chicago-based Boeing has defended its retirement proposal as one of the best in the industry, and the company said that despite some medical-cost increases it would continue to shoulder the bulk of workers' health care costs.
The union last went on strike in 1995, when workers walked out for 69 days.
They knew just when to strike-Damn Unions Suck.
Many of these people listen to the constant drip and deluge of Marxism in the labor meetings and magazines year after year. The goal of these Michael Moore loving, gimme-gimme types is that they are anti-American and anti-Constitution.
While on strike how much will they make?
If I recall about 50.00 a week
You'd think the guys who build and design their planes would become an owner one day and pay themselves gigantic amounts for having the best airline flying.
I guess it's just easier to pay another slug to represent you and leave you high and dry when their negotiations break down.
Let's hope there are some who are really giving this strike serious thought.
well i was optomistic myself but it appears some 86% voted for the strike. They are really an ungrateful bunch!!
my brother works for a subsidary of boeing and makes half the wages they do, pays a good chunk of his own healthcare for him, the wife and kids and has a meager pension plan. his company wont even hire laid off or X boeing employees, say they are too lazy.
maybe they are striking cuz they got used to sitting around the house watching jerry springer LOL
Nobody has commented on the fact that this contract went down with an 86% vote. It wasn't close. Not everybody in the union is a hothead looking for a reason to strike. Aslo compared to years past (when they had meetings in the kingdome and would rile everybody up before the vote) people had time to look at this contract with a calm head and see what it was about.
I don't believe that everybody on this board immediately t5hinks the company is dong the right thing and the only thing they can afford to do.
We just paid $22M for a new CEO. That is before he walked in the door. We have spent $10B in the last few years buying back our own stock. And then we turned around and borrowed $10B to go into the leasing business (which we had always avoided). And then we complain that we don't have the money to develp new airplanes so we have to give away bigger chunks of it.
Oh lets see some of the other brilliant decisions: We just sold Witchita (at a loss).
We have had to take write downs or have sold at a loss several of the businesses we aquired in the last few years.
We are on our 4th CEO in 2 years. And yet none of you have any questions about the decisions the company makes. Just what 18,000 individuals decided.
Soome of the problems this company has are coming right out of the Harvard business school not the union ranks.
Keep reminding yourselves that the company could settle this strike very quickly if they wanted to. And it wouldn't cost them much money to do it.
I hear you and my heart aches for your dilema. For some reason this thought keeps coming to mind that if you're not the lead dog the scenery never changes.
Will the strike really help in the long term? Can those striking be fired and out of a job anyway? What are realistic alternatives? There are more workers in this country than jobs that require skilled labor it appears. We're not living in the days when striking made management take notice. There are too many alternatives now for decision-makers that hold the purse strings. Of course I could be wrong. My family haven't been under union control in at least 19 years and we've fared well by God's grace.
Who is John Galt?
Why they are doing the same thinf the company is doing? They are looking for the best deal they can get.
What is job protection? In my job, you work more hours and see more patients to get paid more. The gov't restricts our fees.
If Boeing is making too much profit, the labor should go where they're paid more. But I don't like unions and I don't like strikes.
Mob mentality and skimming union dues out of those salaries just gets ugly.
As in a strike by the producers vice a strike by the laborers? Even Ayn Rand acknowledged the right of workers to form unions and pursue collective bargaining, although reluctantly.
how long after the strike ended did it take for the stock to go back up over the $12? If it increased more than $12 in the say five years after the strike then it was a great move by the company to let the workers strike. (they recovered their investment in five years as opposed to paying 120M per year extra forever)
The contract gives them $66 per month per year of work (that is, for a 40 year retiree, $2,640 per month in pension) PLUS an instant $9000 stake in the company's 401K plan. (4500 in the first year and 4500 in the second year). So rather than take a lucrative retirement plan (with both fixed pension component and funded 401K component) and wages higher than almost everyone else in the region (or industry as I understand it) the machinists would rather break the company and lose their jobs entirely?
You're right they are not mind numbed robots. They are either communists or totally brain dead. Boeing is better off finding permanent replacements or relocating the plant to Texas or one of the other free states.
(I'd bet lots of those soon to be displaced Northwest Mechanics would love to have some of these jobs. similar skill set, easy to re-train for)
Roger that ~ with brilliant moves like this, is their any wonder why union membership in the private sector has dropped to 8% from 30+% back in the 50's when I first became a union member.
That and the unions support for liberal democrats only has doomed them to extinction, except in gov't, for now.
Airbus is building a plant in the South some place, aren't they?
Airbus is going to build a plant down there IF they win the Airforce tanker deal.
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