Boeing bosses are staring down the barrel.
The twists and turns of the past week paint a picture of managers badly wrong-footed by the depth of fury among workers who tossed out a 25% pay rise deal and launched strike action.
“They probably didn’t think that we had enough people for the strike,” Kushal Varma, a Boeing mechanic, told Reuters. “But this is a movement of people who are willing to put their livelihoods on the line to get what’s fair.”
The Reuters authors are far too generous to corporate leadership. No, the bosses weren’t blindsided. No, the bosses weren’t surprised. All of the demands and expectations are ones you would predict.
This kind of situation is exactly when strikes happen, and if anyone in management wasn’t prepared for it, they’re unqualified for their job. Or they’re liars. Or both.
How the fuck are the bosses blindsided by this? I read about this shit on the Internet days ago. It’ll be cheaper to just pay them then fuck up your production lines and have to mitigate a PR disaster. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Does anyone have concrete info on the offer and why it was rejected? Reading between the lines, it sounds like some of the issues were:
- 24% is a lot, but doesn’t bring them back to where they were 16 years ago when their last general wage deal happened
- Contract reduces or removes performance incentives, which might reduce take-home pay overall
- Some employees are mad that their pension was taken away a decade ago
- They don’t trust Boeing to keep it’s promise about building the next commercial jet in the region
Anything else?
-
The 25% raise is actually a 13% raise then 4% more each year. This barely keeps up with the rate of inflation and isn’t a real raise. They are also trying to increase the rate at which they cap out their pay.
-
They are trying to fight the mandatory overtime which is understandable.
-
Yes the pension they definitely want their pensions back.
-
This is all about job security. They don’t want Boeing to make a plant somewhere else where it’ll be cheaper to pay the employees and such.
I hope they demand the resignation of the entire C suite
This is going to get complicated. I’m thinking for example that there may be some time sensitive items that are part of the building process and which would need to be restarted to be able to continue. Kind of like university classes, of you miss one they force you to pay for another year or quarter to take the class. There’s gotta be stuff like glues, assemblies, safety checks, long lead items, etc that are gonna be painful to Boeing just to restart the process.
