Open letter to striking Boeing employees

In My Humble Opinion
21

Correct me if I’m wrong, as my memory isnt getting better with age, but at that time, didn’t the union vote to do away with the pension for all new hires? What happened to the pensions of the existing workers, did they stop getting funded at that point? If so, were they offered 401ks?

And was that the contract where all new hires would come on at a new, low pay scale, while the existing workers kept their high pay scales? That would cause a lot of resentment with the new employees, who now, 10 years later, want some parity.

Such a mess all around. My ex took an early retirement a few years ago due to failing health, but finances caused him to go back a month ago, at the low pay scale, despite 40+ years experience, just in time for the strike.

22

There are more verses to the Strawbs’s song, but I popped in to add that it is more or less a version of Woody Guthrie’s 1940 song, “Union Maid,” to the tune of the Tin Pan Alley song, “Red Wing,” to wit:

There once was a union maid, she never was afraid
Of the goons and the ginks and the company finks
And the deputy sheriffs that made the raid
She went to the union hall when a meeting, it was called
And when the company boys come around
She always stood her ground

Chorus:
Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union
I’m sticking to the union, I’m sticking to the union
Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union
I’m sticking to the union till the day I die

This union maid was wise to the tricks of the company spies
She’d never be fooled by a company stool
She’d always organize the guys
She’d always get her way when she asked for better pay
She’d show her card to the company guard
And this is what she’d say

Chorus

Now, you gals who want to be free,
You gotta take a little tip from me
Get you a man who’s a union man and fight together for liberty
'Cause married life ain’t hard if you got a union card
And a union man has a happy life if he’s got a union wife

Chorus

Various people have replaced the last verse with more timely ones. One goes

You women who want to be free, take a little tip from me
Break outa that mold we’ve all been sold, you got a fighting hist-to-ree
The fight for women’s rights with workers must unite
Like Mother Jones, move those bones to the front of every fight!

While the Strawbs’s song has been called an anti-union song, and I can see how one might think that, the Strawbs have insisted it is a pro-union song. Sometime in the 1970s, workers at a Vancouver, BC radio station went on strike, left the building, locked the studio, and had the song playing on a loop for ages.

23

I was a union bigwig at an airline in an analagous position to Boeing’s current predicament. Complete with “shareholders first last and only” management, a bad product, a collapsing revenue stream, and a top-heavy workforce that wanted everything they’d lost in prior concessions and then some.

It was a very toxic environment.

Lots of people among the rank and file and a few among the union leaders were willing to spread the lie that all we need to do is keep shouting “NO!!1!”, and the other side will blink first, then cave completely.

More realistically, and this is specific to the airline (and railroad) industry, the government = President would never give their required consent for us to strike. So we’d be holding our breath like a 3yo until management couldn’t contain their laughter any more.

The OP was impolitic in how he expressed the sentiment, but that is totally how it goes inside union HQ. You have two “parties”, commonly called the “Silly Party” and the “Sensible Party”. @Racer72 delivered the Sensible party speech to the Silly Party public. And was duly tarred and feathered.

BTDT.

24

From the sound of it, the things Boeing workers are asking for - better pay, improved insurance, paid leave, a pension - are by and large things that I already get at my job as a stocker and shift supervisor at a grocery store.

I absolutely want the people building airplanes to be compensated better than I am for taking boxes out of boxes and putting them into other boxes.

25

In general, also, the more specialized a trade, the more leverage the strikers would have (in theory.)

Walmart cashiers who strike could all be replaced in a week’s time. You can’t replace 33,000 machinists, engineers, etc. with scabs.

26

Engineers aren’t on strike. That’s a completely different union.

The machinists at the very lowest grades can be replaced without a moment’s thought. The job I hired in at took 10 minutes to learn. The job i moved into took about a day to learn. The job my husband had took a lot more training.

27

The Strawbs’ “Part of the Union” was played during a 60 Minutes segment decades ago about frequent strikes crippling the British economy. Not sure if the producers got the group’s permission to use the song.

28

But this is a stress on 401ks and other individual retirement schemes, too. The only difference is that if some retiree is destitute because they outlived what they saved their 401k it feels more like it’s “their own fault” than if they had a pension that went defunct. “They should have saved more/invested more wisely” vs. “the pension manager was crooked/incompetent”.

Fundamentally both pensions and 401ks are just mechanisms for retirees to claim some of the goods and services of the productive economy that they are no longer contributing to. If the economy doesn’t produce enough surplus to make that happen for as long and as much as is needed/desired, both pensions and 401ks are going to have problems.

29

no they don’t. They could put all their money into an immediate annuity, which would have roughly the same effect as an individual pension, giving them a payout during their lifetime and $0 left over when they pass.

30

I don’t know current Boeing salaries, but you don’t think a machinist at Boeing isn’t ALREADY getting more compensation than a stock person at a grocery store?

31

I don’t know about their salaries either, but going from OP’s rant it sounds like I pay less for my health insurance than they do, and I have a pension which they don’t.

32

I worked for Boeing Computer Services (so non-union) in Wichita from 1988 to 1992. There was a strike during that time and I felt sorry for the guys standing out in the cold during a Kansas winter. About 10 years ago I got a letter from Boeing asking if I wanted to cash in my pension,which I did. I wonder if that pension would have evaporated when the Wichita division became Spirit Aerosystems.

33

Correct, pensions ended for new hires, but any existing employee who was already vested retained their pension.

To the OP, in general your arguments consist of a “be happy with what you already have, shame on you for wanting to improve your lot in life”.

I’m in the Puget Sound region and have a lot of friends/family/history directly and indirectly with Boeing and partner businesses in the area. The largest issue, very justified IMO, is the 25% over 4-years does not even keep pace with national inflation recently and is even more reduced with the addition of one of the highest cost-of-living regions in the nation. IAM and SPEEA are essentially seeing their incomes devalued from year to year, making it a struggle to build a life/family/career with no effective wage growth.

Boeing as a company over the last 10-20 years has become progressively more anti-union and anti-labor, offshoring as much tech and build work as possible to non-union states, overseas to Russia (pre-war) and India divisions. For an industry whose product lifespan is around 20 years for a particular airplane model type, it is perfectly reasonable for an employee to expect long-term career opportunity and security rather than being expendable commoditized labor.

It will be very interesting what the union accepts as their carrot, in the past having been placated with short-term bonuses at the expense of long-term benefits and security.

34

Don’t forget fucking the people who will be hired next like with elimination of pensions.

35

Pensions went away for new hires in the 2005 contract.

36

Pensions in general have all but completely disappeared from the corporate workspace. Except for public employees and union managed pension funds (which themselves are in serious trouble requiring and government bailouts) pensions are pretty much off the table for employment anywhere in the United States.

Stranger

37

I may not have been clear. Getting rid of pensions was an earlier fucking. This time it may be something else. Maybe a lower pay structure for the next guys.

38

For sure the union will throw younger and future workers under the bus of expedience to realize some gains for their current membership. It is part of the way that unions undermine their own future efficacy and make it easy for companies to argue for “right to work” laws without any other worker protections. At some point when unions get large enough, they just become their own kind of self-perpetuating business that exploits workers almost as much as the companies they are ostensibly protecting against.

Stranger

39

Did Boeing require employees to work for a certain period of time before they qualified for a pension? ie., the pension only kicks in if you worked for 10+ years and it’s weighted based off of how many years you worked when you retired

40

how would you square the circle of producing a product that is extremely labor intensive in one of the most expensive regions of one of the most expensive countries on this planet? …

…when your 2nd most important competitor is a brazilian company (whose planes stay in the air quite nicely)?

there is simply no NICE way out of their dilema - so any solution will have to be NOT NICE.

Possible solutions:

  • bring wages down
  • increase productivity per work hour (which opens a whole can of worms in terms of compliance/quality of work/“shortcuts”)
  • automatization
  • outsourcing
  • others?

bear in mind: those options are all NOT NICE for a union located in Seattle