ST. LOUIS—Voting members among Boeing’s 3,200 St. Louis-area Machinists, members of District 837, rejected the aircraft manufacturer’s latest contract offer on Oct. 26. They vowed to continue their strike, which has will hit the three-month mark on Nov. 4.
The company shot back that it would implement its “contingency plan” for keeping its three area factories running, including hiring “permanent replacement” workers, a.k.a. scabs, for the highly skilled workforce.
Boeing also claimed the workers voted down its proposed contract by 51%-49% score. It repeated unproven claims that many of the rank-and-file Machinists at the two plants in Missouri and one in Southern Illinois want to settle.
The Machinists in turn revealed they actually put a pre-ratified contract on the bargaining table in September, before the two sides tried mediation on a new pact. It’s still on the table.
“Boeing claimed they listened to their employees. The result of today’s vote proves they have not,” union President Brian Bryant said in a statement.
“Our members aren’t going to be fooled by PR spin. It’s well past time for Boeing to stop cheaping out on the workers who make its success possible and bargain a fair deal that respects their skill and sacrifice.” The pre-ratified offer “gave Boeing a clear path to end this strike and return to work.”
Boeing first offered a 25% raise over four years, then yanked it, replacing it with a 20% hike. The pre-ratified offer emphasized “real retirement security” by matching worker contributions to 401(k)s at the higher rate IAM’s 33,000 Boeing workers in the Pacific Northwest gained.
“The St. Louis workers also seek “stronger wage increases that keep up with inflation and fairly reward the most experienced and highly-skilled members” and “a ratification bonus “that more closely approaches” the bonus paid to the Pacific Northwest workers and to workers at the non-union 787 plant in North Charleston, S.C.
A past Boeing CEO specifically moved production of the 787s moved to North Charleston years ago, to “get away from” the Machinists in the Northwest, who were standing up for their rights. That decision set off a long political uproar which still has repercussions in the U.S. Senate.
The company’s non-response to the union’s pre-ratified offer led IAM to file more unfair labor practices charges with the National Labor Relations Board’s regional office. But the board can’t do anything about them right now, because its workers, like much of the federal government, is on a Trump-engineered shutdown.
That and other labor law problems led a Local 837 negotiator to tell senators in early December that while U.S. labor law is broken and favors bosses rather than workers, enforcement is a problem, too.
The union said its pre-ratified offer “would add roughly $50 million over four years,” a cost that is smaller than it sounds, since “Boeing paid its last two CEOs approximately $100 million in golden parachutes,” the union said.
“Boeing can end this strike tomorrow. All it has to do is put a fair deal on the table,” added IAM Midwest Vice President Sam Ciccinelli.
More federal funds, which account for a large share of Boeing’s revenues, will come rolling in, the union notes. It’s just won a $20 billion “engineering and manufacturing development phase” contract from the Trump regime’s War Department for the next generation of U.S. fighter aircraft, the F-47. The total contract would be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
“Boeing refuses to invest a fraction of those resources into the workers,” IAM said.
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