The other day I left a post on a forum started by a striking Boeing employee. I must has struck a cord that twisted their panties into a really tight bunch. I have been banned from the forum. Some others started some hate threads towards me and some threats to me and my family were made. I contacted the police, they took the threats seriously and forum was taken down. As a now retired 40 year employee and union member that went through 6 strikes, I think I have a little knowledge of what is happening. Here is basically what I told those on the picket line:
Stop with the complaint about the Boeing CEO getting an 8 million dollar bonus. It’s a lame argument. That has to be one of the toughest jobs anyone could have right now. 99.99% of the current employees could not do it. Divide that 8 million up for each Boeing employee, you each get $46.87. Don’t spend that all in one place.
A 25% pay increase over 4 years is very generous. In my 40 years, the biggest increase I ever got over 4 years was 16%. Roll in the permanent COLA increases you get, that will get you well over the 40% pay increase you want.
Your medical costs are rediculously low compared to the average working stiff in the real world. You pay $20 a month for your self and another $20 a month for your family. When I was an active employee, I rarely spent more than a few hundred bucks a year for other expenses related to healthcare. As a retired employee, the costs for my wife and I are almost $700 a month and we are looking at some significant increases in costs in 2025. One prescription my wife got at no cost while I was working now costs us almost $200 a month.
Forget about Boeing bringing back the pension. There was a time almost every Boeing employee got a pension, that number is now down to about 12% of the current workforce. Most that still have a pension such as SPEEA members have had amount per year of service locked and it will go no higher. The current financial situation for Boeing also has me worried about the future of my pension. When I retired from the company I was reminded that my pension was good only as long as Boeing was a viable company. Boeing right now is barely viable and needs to get back to where they were. Take advantage of the 401K matching Boeing is offering, I wish I would have done a lot more of this when I was working.
Enjoy your time off. I truly believe that 3 of the six strikes I went through were just an excuse to get time off without using any benefits. Hope you saved up some money to get through the strike. I hear on the news that a lot of you are looking for jobs to get by. You are not going to make anything close to your Boeing paycheck. During the strike in 2008, I got a job at $8 an hour. I was sad to see my first weekly paycheck was barely more than I made in one day at Boeing. You all got your last full paycheck last week, reality will hit next Thursday when that paycheck does not hit your bank account. It sucks when you visit your doctor and they want full payment for the visit because you no longer have insurance. Maybe you elected to get COBRA coverage. Expensive isn’t it? $400 a month. I wish my medical cost that little.
Here is a short primer on how Boeing negotiates contracts with unions. The company goes in with a set dollar amount per employee per hour. The negotiations are generally how to split that amount among all the pay and benefits your will receive in the new contract. In the 6 strikes I went through, Boeing never added a penny to that amount. The way every strike ended was Boeing taking a little bit from here, a little bit from there and offering a nice bonus to go with everything else. By then those on strike are seeing the financial effects of being on strike, bills and rent are about to be behind, paying for things our of pocket that were covered by benefits, you are worried about having your car repossessed. The six strikes I went through lasted from 49 to 66 days. So will this one.
That’s kind of you to offer them your unsolicited advice! I can’t imagine why anyone would object to it. You clearly researched their complaints carefully, understand their specific situations, and bent over backwards to show respect and compassion to them. Don’t let a few bad apples sour you on continuing to offer unsolicited advice to striking workers. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, people love it when retired people tell them they’re being silly and ridiculous.
Edit: wait, I just saw you have “a little knowledge of what’s happening.” Maybe–here’s a thought–next time, don’t offer your little knowledge to those who have a lot of knowledge.
I’m curious (we were a Boeing family for 30+ years when my ex-husband worked there) - do you happen to know what the deductible and out-of-pocket is nowadays on their non-HMO health insurance plan (is it still Regence)?
It’s a Blue Cross Blue Shield plan now. They also have Kaiser for those that like HMO’s. I’ll ask my neighbor next time I see him, he’s one of those enjoying time off from Boeing.
IIRC, he recently retired from Boeing after a long career there and may have been a union rep. He does happen to have more than a little knowledge of what’s happening.
Frankly, pretty much everyone in the Seattle/Tacoma/Everett area knows a great deal about what’s happening. It’s reported endlessly and nearly everyone here has at least one family member who works or worked there.
One thing I am fully supportive of the strikers about is their demand that Boeing let them have more say in safety/quality. The whole reason Boeing’s reputation is in tatters is because they let the profit-above-all bean counters from McDonnell Douglas change the priority from quality to profit. Two 737 MAX crashes later, I think the strikers are right to demand that Boeing become a company of engineers rather than a company of accountants.
And if Boeing could afford to spend $40 billion on stock buybacks and are deep in debt now…hard to feel sympathy for the company. They could have redirected that money towards wages, pension, etc.
you really think the rank and file employee has “a lot of knowledge” about what is going on, or are they simply following the union rep’s instructions?
I’m taking it from the reaction he got that his sneering, condescending list of advice bits weren’t super welcome. The people who are on the line and whose insurance is in discussion are likelier to have a deeper understanding of the issues than he.
That’s weird - if what you’re saying is true, it sounds like in those strikes, the employees really were effectively negotiating between themselves for what sort of slice of a fixed pie they’d get, with only the appearance of having a negotiation with Boeing.
How did you know this was the case, though? Did Boeing publicly make an initial offer that they never wavered from, other than in allocation? After going through this a few times, did employees ask why this time would be any different? And if so, what was the union’s answer? (What is its answer this time?)
The issue with this, as discussed by the union, is that Boeing hourly employees have gotten sub-par merit increases and COLA (especially for costs in the Seattle area) over the last couple of decades. I cannot attest to whether this is objectively true or not I but it is a common problem with all industry in the region where housing and other cost-of-living expenses have gone up at a dramatically higher rate compared to national averages over that period.
I will opine that a lot of the frustration beyond the direct financial impact on workers is with how Boeing itself has performed as a company, including spending cash on stock buybacks, multiple relocation of its headquarters away from manufacturing, massive job cuts (especially in 2020), the outsourcing of a lot of critical manufacturing (which in part led to the door plug blowout on Alaska Airlines 1282), and the massive pay increases to top executives, including the succession of CEOs from Harry Stonecipher, James McNerney, Dennis Muilenburg, and David Calhoun, who are collectively responsible for the situation the company is in today, while the workers and line management saw little benefit or employment stability, and all of the reputational damage done by a company focused on schedule and profit over quality. Boeing itself has been restructured such that the two product divisions (Commercial Airplanes and Defense, Space & Security) consistently show losses (allowing them to argue for limited pay increases and bonuses), while what is essentially its financial services division disguised as a parts house somehow has earned record profits.
I don’t know if the strikers are justified or not, and I’m often skeptical about how well large unions actually serve their members (along the lines of the primer you outline in item 6) but my general sense about the company is that the executive management and board of directors thinks that it can keep profiteering at the expense of its workers, customers, and reputation as long as the stockholders are satisfied, which is a perspective that should be tempered by the object lesson of General Electric. Of course, a lot of analysts believe that Boeing is literally “too big to fail” and will be bailed out by the federal government because of how dependent they are upon it for major defense projects and the domestic air transport industry, and unfortunately this is probably true, at least in the near term and while Boeing keeps pumping extraordinary amounts of money into lobbying and campaign finance. They’ve recently earned the top spot in my list of “Most Reviled Aerospace Contractors”, knocking Lockheed Martin which held the crown for many years.
I don’t know how long the strike will last but Boeing is reportedly losing $50M/day and is facing being downgraded by Moody’s, so “49 to 66 days” amounts to a few billion dollars, which even to a company like Boeing isn’t chump change not withstanding what a downgrade will do for capital fund investment in the company. This strike may or may not materially benefit union workers but it may be the final blow that sends Boeing on a downward spiral.
If I were Airbus, I’d step in right now and offer to pay all striking Boeing workers a stipend of several hundred dollars (or euros?..) per day of striking to keep that strike going as long as possible, while encouraging them to demand even higher raises and pensions. But I digress.
One reason I would like to see the Boeing workers succeed in getting the pension back (unlikely though it may be) is that it could gradually reverse the precedent and put pressure on other big corporations to do the same.
Not only would that be highly illegal in numerous ways but also completely unnecessary, as Boeing is doing its level best to cede the commercial market to its competitors all on its own, and frankly it isn’t doing great shakes on the space and defense side of the house, either.
Pensions are long gone, never to return. They existed in a world where most workers worked decades for the same company (which wasn’t bought or consolidated every few years), lived a few years into retirement and died quickly from effectively untreatable chronic medical issues, and where corporations consistently grew their employ base such that there were always more people paying in larger amounts of money than were being paid out. The world we live in today is retirees living longer, companies often contracting their worker base and outsourcing everything they can to reduce costs, and a general constriction of demographics of working-aged people who are even theoretically able to pay into a pension fund, notwithstanding the corruption that poorly regulated pension funds have engendered. While I’m not entirely thrilled with investment-based retirement solutions like 401(k) accounts, they do provide a self-directed base of wealth that can be managed to ensure a livable income for decades of retirement. They also, of course, force people to invest their retirement wealth into the stock market, which was the real motivation for such retirement vehicles.
Something I forgot to mention, I was on the union negotiation committee from 1999 to 2011. I saw company officials try to squeeze 12 cents out of a dime. The union knew the pension was done in 2009, the company ended the pension for most non-represented employees and they knew the union members were next. The union should have gone out in 2014 over the pension, only 47% of the membership accepted the contract. The union also needed a 2/3 yes vote on the strike authorization vote but got only 56%. This meant the contract was automatically accepted.
The thing that gets me is that all else being equal, pensions are in a better position to deal with increasing retirement lifespans than 401ks/IRAs, because a pension can use windfalls from people who die early to fund the payouts to people who die late. With individual accounts, everyone has to save/invest for the 99th-percentile lifespan to be sure to have enough, and then their heirs get a windfall when they die if they don’t live that long. Pension funds only have to save for more-or-less the mean lifespan of their beneficiaries.
I can definitely see why people would prefer a pension (although probably not one managed by Boeing).
When we meet in the local hall I’ll be voting with them all With a hell of a shout, it’s “Out brothers, out!” And the rise of the factory’s fall
And I always get my way If I strike for higher pay When I show my card to the Scotland Yard And this is what I say
Oh, you don’t get me, I’m part of the union You don’t get me, I’m part of the union You don’t get me, I’m part of the union Til the day I die Til the day I die
Except people are living longer in general, which increases the burden on a pension fund even if it was fully funded to match actuarial projections from several decades previous. It has also become an “above and beyond” cost above salary and other benefits as many employees do not expect to spend decades at one employer, or potentially even the time it takes to vest and receive benefits. Traditionally, pensions come with survivor benefits, so a spouse or dependents would continue to collect but that wasn’t the burden it would be today.
Regardless, company-provided pensions are not going to make a comeback, and Social Security (in the United States) probably doesn’t have much longer, either, even at the pittance it provides.