RENTON, Wash.—-At midnight, Friday, September 13, workers stood on picket lines at every gate of Boeing’s giant aircraft plant on Logan Avenue in Renton, Wash., holding up their picket signs and chanting “Strike, Strike, Strike.”
Mostly youthful members of International Association of Machinists (IAM) District 751, they were among the 33,000 Boeing workers who voted a day earlier by a resounding 94.6% to reject the proposed contract and by 96% to go on strike—far more than the two-thirds majority needed to approve a walkout.
It was pitch dark, damp as a dungeon, and cold when this reporter arrived at 3:30 a.m. To the north on a vast tarmac on the south shore of Lake Washington, scores of brand new Boeing 737 aircraft were parked, their fuselages, wings, and tails brilliantly lit up by floodlights in the darkness.
The men and women standing on the picket line are the skilled workers who build these aircraft. It is the most widely used commercial plane in history, with more than 10,000 constructed at this enormous factory, the planes sold to airlines around the world.
The dark and the chill did not dampen the sky-high spirits, the anger and determination of the young workers standing at the gates. Logan Avenue was mainly vacant but a car sped by, the motorist honking. A roar went up from the machinists, waving their strike signs and chanting, “Strike, Strike, Strike.”
A few hours after daybreak, Warren and Connie Payton were standing at this same gate with seven other strikers. It is typical this was a multiracial crowd of workers—African Americans, Asian Americans, and whites.
Speaking in many accents
I had heard workers speaking in many accents, including young white workers with European accents, Latino workers with Spanish accents, African-American and white, with a Yankee twang. Many are immigrants adding to the U.S. domestic product, not stealing family pets and eating them, as the Republican presidential ticket charges.
“We voted 94.6 percent to reject the proposed contract and 96 percent to strike,” Warren Payton told People’s World. “That’s an overwhelming vote. That’s what you do when you stand in unity. If we fight together, we win together.”
Payton, who is African American, said he has been a Boeing employee for 33 years. “I’m looking at three or four more years and I’m ready to retire.”
He decried that in 2008, Boeing stripped the workers of their defined benefit pension, forcing them to survive in their senior years on a 401K benefit subject to the whims of Wall Street, with thousands of dollars in retirement income wiped out when the stock market collapses as it did that year. “We’ve been struggling to deal with that ever since,” he said.
His wife Connie, who has worked for Boeing for 30 years, recalled Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun received a $33 million bonus before he retired, leaving a record of disaster driven by corporate greed. His successor, Robert “Kelly” Ortberg, just purchased a mansion in the Broadmoor gated community of Seattle for $4.1 million when tens of thousands of Boeing workers are on strike partly fueled by their struggle to pay ruinous mortgages each month.
“The people above us get all these bonuses. But what about the people who actually build the planes? We are looking for enough to retire on, to live on. We are not greedy, we just want to be treated fairly. We are close to retirement. We are thinking about the future generation of workers,” Connie Payton said.
The IAM District 751 leadership urged a “yes” vote, arguing it is the best proposed contract in history. They cited especially the requirement that Boeing build its next airplane at the plants in Renton and Everett rather than at the non-union Boeing plant in South Carolina.
Boeing and former Republican Gov. Nikki Haley and other South Carolina officials engaged in vicious union busting to keep the union out. South Carolina is a “Right to Work (for less)” state.
But the strikers point out Boeing is required to build a new plane at their unionized plants in the Pacific Northwest only if the project is launched in the four years of the contract–suggesting more dirty tricks up Boeing’s sleeves. As one top federal safety official recently told Ortberg, Boeing’s workers “don’t trust” the firm’s management.
After the vote to reject the contract, District 751 President Jon Holden said, “I’m proud of our members….for standing up and fighting for more, for each other, for their families, for the community.”
He added, “This is about respect. This is about addressing the past and this is about fighting for our future.”
Idled in the shutdown were Boeing plants in Renton, Everett, and more than a dozen other facilities scattered in the industrial zone of south Seattle. Also shut down were Boeing plants in Moses Lake, Wash., Portland, Ore., and Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. A union spokesman told this reporter even some Boeing operations in Florida and in the United Kingdom were shut down.
Walked out months ago
A couple of months ago, Boeing firefighters, members of the International Association of Fire Fighters, walked out on strike in a dress rehearsal of this walkout. Democratic President Joe Biden spoke out strongly in defense of the firefighters, declaring their demands just, and urging Boeing to meet their demands. The Boeing firefighters won their strike.
Striker Kim Wilson, interviewed outside IAM District 751 headquarters, said she has been employed as a wind tunnel model maker for six years, sculpting the model aircraft used to test airplane aerodynamics.
“Obviously this strike is not a fun thing to do, but this was not the best offer. It was a softball offer. I am not OK with this offer. Now that Boeing knows the temperature in the room, maybe they will make a realistic offer. I hope this is not a long strike.”
Before transferring to the south Seattle operation, Wilson worked for several years at the Everett plant north of Seattle, raising her son who is now grown, married, and his wife expecting a child. Her job as a Boeing worker is her sole source of income. After three weeks on strike, the workers will receive $250 each week in strike benefits.
The workers, she said, were outraged when they did the math. Boeing claimed they were offering 25 percent wage increases over the four years of the contract. The workers had demanded 35-40 percent increases. But Boeing demanded the bonus that increases their pay by about 4% annually be stripped from the new contract.
Factoring in that 4% annual takeaway means that Boeing was asking the workers to accept a 10% wage increase over four years or 2.5% annually, far below the increase in the cost of living.
“Calhoun, the former Boeing CEO got a $33 million bonus when he stepped down. And they want to take away our annual bonus?” said Wilson. And “a lot of people are ‘P.O.ed’ about the pension. It probably isn’t realistic to expect to get back what we have lost but it is reasonable to expect more.”
Wilson pointed out Boeing has been hit by a flood of “bad publicity” with the crash of two 737-MAX aircraft in Indonesia and Ethiopia in 2018 and 2019, with 346 dead. Just recently, a door blew out on an Alaska Airlines plane, a Boeing 737 in flight over Oregon.
A Boeing-built spacecraft Starliner carried two astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, to the International Space Station (ISS). The astronauts are now marooned on the station because the Starliner is so unstable NASA fears it may spin out of control and explode if it attempts to return to Earth. NASA says the astronauts must await rescue by Elon Musk’s Space Dragon next February.
“I don’t think this defines us,” Wilson said, citing the past in which Boeing—-and its skilled workers—were famous for putting safety first. “Now a lot of the corporate bureaucracy is saying ‘The Bottom Line’ is all that matters.”
This obsession with maximum profits, she said, “is getting in the way of companies thinking about people’s best interests.”
No one knows how long this strike will last. The last time the Boeing workers struck was in 2008, a walkout that lasted 57 days. The first Boeing strike was in 1948, a walkout that lasted 140 days.
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