Boeing workers on fifth day of strike, halt aircraft production
Seattle, WA – At 12:00 a.m. on Friday, September 13, around 33,000 Boeing workers walked off the job and began a strike. The Boeing workers are represented by the International Association of Machinists (IAM) and were in negotiations with the airplane manufacturing giant for their next union contract. Negotiations broke down and the strike began after 95% of the IAM members at Boeing voted to reject the employer’s proposal for a four-year contract, and 96% voted to begin a strike. This is the first strike at Boeing in 16 years.
Boeing is one of the largest manufacturers in the U.S. and has close to 10,000 suppliers across all 50 states. They are also the largest exporter in the U.S. The ongoing strike has nearly halted the manufacturing of Boeing planes and is expected to have significant ramifications for the entire U.S. economy due to the size of the company.
The latest contract offer by management would have given at least 25% in pay increases to the majority of IAM members at Boeing. However, the union says that they have seen 20 years of mismanagement and concessions leading up to this moment. They say they have seen layoffs as a result of union work being shifted to the company’s only nonunion plant, and that concessions from past contracts over the last 20 years mean that this offer just wasn’t enough to for the IAM members to accept.
Fitch, a credit rating agency, said that Boeing “has limited headroom for a strike,” and that “an extended strike could have a meaningful operational and financial impact, increasing the risk of a downgrade.” The downgrade they are talking about would be moving Boeing’s credit to a category referred to as “junk” status.
Some of the key issues which the IAM members are fighting for include more job security, increases to time off and higher wages to make up for rising costs after recent spikes in inflation. The union members lost their pensions in a recent contract and say that wages have been stagnant for the last ten years.
The last time Boeing workers went on strike was in 2008, when they stayed out for eight weeks. In the last year, UAW workers went on strike at all three major auto manufacturers, winning huge gains. Shortly before the auto strikes, workers at UPS nationwide prepared to go on strike at UPS and won major increases as a result of their credible strike threat. More than a million union workers won pay increases of more than ten percent in 2022 and 2023.
With the strike at Boeing, the trend of building strikes and fighting for higher wages and benefits has extended to another major U.S. industry. Time will tell when and how the Boeing strike will conclude and in what industry the wave of major strikes will turn towards next.