These options don’t seem too sunny for making their plains stay nicely in the air either.
Seeing that inflation has averaged about 4.8% annually over the past 4 years and the proposed 25% hike would average out to a 6.3% increase per year, the offer does seem to be more than keeping pace with inflation. Regional cost of living factors may well figure into its rejection.
I saw it as more like “be realistic in what you demand”.
I lost 7 years of pension time, I have the right to be pissy about their lot in life. Them getting a pension does nothing to bring back what I lost.
Federal SS COLA for the last 3 years has been 3.2, 8.7, 5.9, so folks (me included) are now very sensitive to contracts that have a fixed adjustment and no COLA provision. It sucks to see any of your career and lifestyle gains wiped out by a couple of bad years.
I worked union for 35 years. We never once got a contract with an automatic COLA. That simply doesn’t exist in US industry. You can get a contract with fixed “raises” every year for at least a few years, but there’s no connection between the “raise” amount and what inflation was, is, or might be. Actually, there is a soft connection: Management will make a guess on future inflation and their absolute top offer on future raises will be less than that estimate.
My 8 years in the military was the same. No COLA. No sane management or government in the USA will sign what amounts to a blank check on payroll costs.
The OP could have perhaps taken a different tone and avoided the banning and the threats. But there is a certain type of union member who is unrealistic and I suspect that type both has the loudest voice and is overly represented in various forums.
I’m going to give some examples of what I mean from my own union experience (in the public sector.)
-
There are certain jobs such as police officer and firefighter who have “20 and out” pensions, They also have what is called a heart bill, in which disability or death due to heart disease is presumed to be job-related which provides disability pension benefits that are much better than non-job related disabilities. Some of my coworkers were outraged that the union wasn’t fighting harder to get these benefits for us. It was never going to happen for a number of reasons but for some reason, my college-educated workers refused to see that.
-
They also wanted the union to fight for unlimited sick leave - but swore to me that the downside of that would never happen to them. There are jobs in the area that provide unlimited sick leave - and people in those jobs have restrictions on leaving their home while they are out sick. We would probably never get unlimited sick leave - but if we did, it would certainly come with restrictions.
-
The union and the state came to an agreement on a contract that would prevent layoffs. The membership refused to ratify it. The governor’s team directly said that they would continue to negotiate but any new agreement would have to be revenue neutral. I had to explain to my coworkers what 'revenue neutral" meant. The layoff notices went out - and although this was a decade ago, the rift between union members still hasn’t completely healed. Because although the layoffs were ultimately averted, there was no shortage of people who said they were voting against the second agreement because they had not received a layoff notice. They didn’t do this quietly or anonymously and therefore people who were going to be laid off found out exactly which of their co-workers didn’t care about the layoffs , causing the rift.
Strikes very often don’t pay off in the long run and people who haven’t seen one don’t always realize that. If the strike lasts long enough either the union members find other jobs, or they will be in bad enough financial straits that they will agree to a worse contract than they could have gotten just to start bringing in a paycheck. Striking Boeing employees are almost certainly going to lose their health insurance tomorrow. Apparently , the major sticking point is unfreezing the pension. Boeing is never going to do that. They might get Boenig to contribute more to a 401K but defined benefit pensions are disappearing - they aren’t going to re-activate this one.
I work in an industry where literally millions of people have worked for decades and retired with higher wages and better health insurance and pensions than they would have had without unions. Financed mostly by higher prices for consumers, partly in exchange for more convenience and service.
Yes, the unionized players have been declining in the last three decades. But if at the negotiations 30 years ago, union membership had listened to the “You are putting us out of business, and NONE of you will have jobs” voices, a whole generation of workers would have given up over $100k in pay and benefits EACH. That’s a lot of money for a grocery worker, many of them part timers.
Dang, Boeing workers voted down a new contract proposal, and the strike continues.
Oh no. Now who is going to make our half-assed defective airplanes, spacecraft, and satellites?
I wonder just what the precise pain point is for Boeing to agree to restore the pension plan. Everyone says it’s never coming back, but there’s got to be a certain stretching point where the company would cave in. Maybe if the strikes continues another 6 weeks.
It’s not coming back, period. It ended 10 years ago. Employees now have 401K’s and that’s where it will stand.
Boeing officials have said there is no scenario in which the benefit would return
It will never come back - it’s almost inaccurate to refer to it coming back , as anyone hired in the last ten years was never in it to begin with. They might have had a chance if they had struck over the pension ten years ago, but it’s too late now, ten years after the union agreed to the contract that eliminated the pension. It’s not Boeing that’s going to reach a breaking point, it’s the union - or really the individual workers because it appears that the union agreed to a contract, indicating that union negotiators got the best deal they thought they could and the membership did not ratify it. Boeing can last a lot longer not making planes than the employees can last on the $250 or so a week they get from the strike fund - and they 100% will not find a new job that will provide a pension and everything else they are seeking from Boeing.
There’s another type of union member who doesn’t appreciate how good they have it, and I think they’re the ones overly represented in various forums.
Teaching in one of the two states left where public sector collective bargaining is illegal, I’ve talked with dozens of educators who come here from states with powerful unions, and I’ve talked with several more educators who have left here for states with powerful unions. Every single one of them has talked about what an amazing, and positive, difference the union has made in the other state.
Sure, unions aren’t the perfect structure, due to capitalism not being a perfect structure; and I’m the first to gripe about specific unions and their ills. But it’s crucial to remember, in these conversations, just how much worse workers have it when we can’t engage in collective bargaining.
(We’re experiencing it in a relatively minor way right now: as our district prepares to re-open after Helene, our leadership is making a lot of decisions, and they’re not consulting front-line staff, through our union or otherwise, on almost any of these decisions. In a state with collective bargaining, our union could have a seat at the table, and the expertise of student-facing staff could be better reflected in the decisions.)
There are loads of union members who don’t appreciate how good they have it - but I’m not sure what that has to do with my post. I didn’t say anything about whether unions make things worse. I’m talking about members who have unrealistic expectations of the union* and who want to vote union officials out or decertify the union or go out on strike because the union didn’t get something that it’s unrealistic to expect.
* who in my experience are often the same ones who don’t realize how good they have it. I had a bizarre conversation with my coworkers in the 80s who didn’t realize that not everyone had the benefits and rights provided in our union contract. They thought everyone had inexpensive health insurance through their employer and that people couldn’t be fired for arbitrary reasons/without a disciplinary process. Turned out that they literally didn’t know anyone who worked in a non-unionized workplace but if you think everyone has those working conditions, I can see why you might think your union is ineffective if they didn’t get you much more.
This. 35 years in unionized career and 15+ as a union official. Lotta workers have no idea how good they have it.
The problem of course is the rest of American workers who have it sucky and are also oblivious to how good they could have it if only they’d vote in unions.
What gets me is the huge number of educators who say, basically:
- Our union sucks.
- The union is weak because there aren’t enough members to get anything done.
- Therefore, I won’t join the union.
It’s maddening.
I’ve got a story in my pocket to tell, the next time someone makes that argument. It’s about our school’s annual tug-of-war game between central office and the school staff, where the winning team gets big cash bonuses. Central office staff all play, but less than half of the school staff play, so school staff always lose. A lot of school staff sit on the sidelines, watching and complaining about how the school team always loses, and that’s why they won’t join.
I agree, I think the best that could be done for “pension restoration” is if Boeing offered improved company-match contributions to the existing 401ks to mimic what a pension restoration would be. But there is no way that the company is going to reestablish a new massive pension / fixed-annuity fund.
The last offer was something like matching 100% of contributions up to 8% of salary , an additional 4% of salary as a company contribution and a one time $5000 contribution and an increase in the payments those who were in the frozen pension will get when they retire. At the moment , it seems the union members will not budge - they want the pension to be reinstated. Which is not going to happen.
…as someone who lives in Everett and works in human services and feels the ripples of this strike in every aspect…
This op…is…woof… it’s like a Nextdoor post.
Without commenting on whether the whole package was good for employees or not, as an outsider a 401k with 4% flat contribution and matching up to 8% sounds amazing. I haven’t worked that many places, but this is more than double the highest contribution I’ve ever had from my employer.