Machinists Strike Boeing over Pensions, Health Care, Lost Jobs
Editor’s Note: Shortly after Labor Notes went to press, Boeing settled with its striking production workers. Machinist local members voted to accept the three-year contract September 29 by an 80 percent margin, though they were was a last-minute "vote no" campaign organized by rank-and-file workers at the plant (including this article's author, Don Grinde). Rank-and-file organizing had a greater impact in the Everett, Washington local—where the contract was narrowly passed. Local members in Seattle and Renton voted in higher numbers for the contract.
Members who voted no say that union leaders unwisely gave the pension and job security issues up, despite the fact that the strike was winning by grinding aircraft assembly to a halt in a profitable "just-in-time" industry.
Business press analysts estimate that Boeing had missed the delivery of 25-30 planes during the strike -- costing the company close to $70 million a day.
According to Grinde: “The new contract makes beating health care concessions the only gain. Rehires were left out of the 8 percent signing bonus and janitors are rumored to have taken a multi-dollar wage cut. The IAM failed to even mention the goal of a union pension plan and down played any negatives in the contract. The union leadership presented a raw offer.”
Grinde added: "This was the strongest membership mobilization we've had in decades, the strongest rejection of a contract offer before a strike, and the best bargaining position I can ever recall -- yet our strike virtually fell apart with one word from our local president: ‘recommend.’ Strikers abandoned the lines everywhere in droves for three days. It wasn't until other members began pointing out what was wrong with the offer that a no vote began to develop."
"I've never seen a flip this fast in 28 plus years. The contract is palatable, but we gave Boeing the best side of it.”
The Machinists’ 2005 contract is up at Boeing and we are now on strike. In the wake of corporate scandals at Boeing, the union’s rallying cry is, “Do the Right Thing.”
Fresh in the membership’s mind is the terrible 2002 contract when Boeing put 30,000-plus employees in the unemployment lines. The despair was so thick after the contract that a number of Boeing employees committed suicide that year.
But in August 2005 the airplane business looks bright. Boeing has record profits coming in, $1.8 billion this year, a huge backlog of orders, and a factory that is pushing the limits of lean manufacturing techniques.
CEOs and managers are running around with bad backs from all the cash in their wallets. Boeing handed out $454 million in stock to management last year. Boeing’s new President and CEO Jim McNerney took home $22 million in pensions this year after signing on as our new boss and is guaranteed $74 million if he stays till 2011.
The company divided the membership in 2002 with cash bonuses and team leaders that eliminated union-picked leads on the shop floor.
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We got medical takeaways and more erosion of our jobs through on-site vendor delivery and self-inspection practices. Instead of having quality control inspectors look at your work, you do it yourself—you just eliminated another union job.
Many members were resolved in 2005 not to repeat the mistakes of 2002. By a two-thirds super-majority, rank-and-file IAM members rejected the contract by a whopping 86 percent on September 1.
At midnight the pickets were up and the walls at the union hall could not contain the screams of joy as the TV crews filmed the occasion. With our fat strike vote in hand, many members felt they had their dignity back and had already won by showing Boeing it wasn’t okay to exploit its workforce.
RAMPING UP
The weeks prior to the strike are where the real story begins. A small group of stewards, local officers, and old dissidents like myself met daily to plan strategies.
Our main goal was to build solidarity among the rank-and-file members and reject the “job-stealing take-away contract,” as our local president Mark Blondin called it.
By the week of the strike vote we had reached most members. That week, members marched on our lunch breaks— thousands strong and all shifts. We chanted, “Strike, Strike, Strike,” “UnionPowerUnion Power,” and other chants like “What do we want? Pensions, Medical, Job Security!”
During the marches we had picket signs and fashioned makeshift drums out of empty water cooler jugs. At the end of the march someone would usually speak to the crowd. Or talk directly into the security cameras.
Boeing security and human resources filmed every march. They said it was for our safety, but we know it was for protecting their property more than anything. Just days before the vote, to our surprise we found out company negotiators left the table and came to the factory to watch our demonstrations.
We found out that it doesn’t necessarily matter what the skill level of your negotiators is, if the members are solid and unified on the issues. Boeing blew off our negotiators, so now they have 18,000 pissed-off members at the table.
I learned something too—don’t give up on people if they don’t have a history of participating. We had an out-building with 1,500 women and Asian people working in it. Management would routinely intimidate them with heavy-handed tactics and threatening attitudes.
When we marched through, it was discouraging at first because they just stared and wouldn’t join in. Finally this year, on the third march through, the building emptied out and 85 percent of those people joined in. The march became so long that when we exited a building people were still entering from the opposite end.
The members are going to win this strike at Boeing, with good old-fashioned solidarity and spine. Our issues are pensions, no givebacks on medical, and no two-tier contracts that divide and conquer. We’ve earned the right to be called “Fighting Machinists.”
