Striking Is in the Air at Boeing

Mondays and Wednesdays are loud at the vast Boeing factory in Everett, Washington. As the Machinists’ contract campaign heats up, the workforce has been serenading management at lunch with air horns, train horns, and vuvuzelas—plus chants of “Out the Door in ’24.”

Forty miles south, in Renton, where workers construct the moneymaking 737, second shift workers have used their meal breaks to blast Bluetooth speakers at top volume with ’90s rap, death metal, ’80s pop, and opera—all simultaneously, said Jon Voss, a 13-year mechanic in the wings building. The resulting racket “really drove management and HR nuts.”

The Boeing contract expires September 12 for 31,000 members of Machinists (IAM) District Lodge 751 in Washington and 1,300 District W24 members in Gresham, Oregon. The last time a full contract was negotiated was 2008, with a 58-day strike.

A workday rally July 17 at the Seattle Mariners baseball stadium drew 25,000—including a procession of 800 motorcyclists—and 99.9 percent of members attending voted to sanction a strike, the first step towards a walkout under the Machinists constitution. They will vote again when they see a proposed contract.

Stonecipher was a total jerk but the decision to outsource was actually created by Boeing unions.

Boeing was really hard pressed in the 90s with the Aerospace consolidation of the post Cold War era and the development of 777.

They were dealing with tons of red ink from Triple Seven development costs and the need get cash flow from production contracts - some of which had really tough non delivery penalties.

The Unions realized the leverage they had over Boeing and launched a series of extortionate strikes with terms that Boeing could not afford to accept but simply could afford to turn down.

Boeing was forced to cave in to union demands under extreme duress but but the contract negotiations led to a serious break between Boeing and it's labor unions.

In reality, Boeing had been very, very good to it's workers over the years and they were a very well compensated and pretty entitled and pampered work force.

Boeing management saw the Unions tactic of negotiating with a gun pointed at the companies head and a willingness to pull the trigger as a fundamental betrayal of a company that treated it's workers very well. In addition, the costs of the new union contracts that Boeing was extorted into knuckling into were not economically viable

At that point, the decision was made to subcontract as much of the production that had previsously been an exclusive for Boeing production workers down to it's subs.

Boeing really had no choice in the matter - they had pre existing contracts with fixed pricing that simply was not practicable under the new labor contracts.

This subcontracting resulted in a slow erosion of Boeing's in house manufacturing capability which over the last 30 years has resulting in a situation where Boeing is reliant on subs and no longer has full control or viability over it's manufacturing process.

Boeing aircraft are becoming increasingly more and more complex to produce at a time when the adoption of DEI across it's in house production and subcontractor network is producing a dumbed down, lower skill but even more entitled labor force that is increasingly less and less capable of dealing with that complexity.

Add in the supply chain stress of Covid and you have a lot of hard and complex challenges for a crew that is increasingly unable to deal with even simple challenges.

“Boeing labor troubles on top of everything else.”

That’s why most US companies closed shop and headed to China or Mexico for production when they could no longer hold off the labor unions. It’s also a HUGE REASON why TSMC gave up on producing their top-grade semi-conductor chips in the US and now will only produce lower-grade, if even that. Smart companies know enough to NEVER come here, if it means dealing with unions, but I suspect that TSMC was pushed here by Taiwan’s government, for obvious reasons.

Bottom line is that it’s next to impossible for any company to operate when they have malicious entity operating on the production floor and until unions are FULLY done-away with, there is NO WAY that the US can ever become an industrial superpower again, whether we like it or not.

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