Portside

Third-shift workers walked out of Boeing’s giant factories at Renton and Everett, Washington, as their contract expired early Friday morning, blasting music and airhorns, shooting off fireworks, and waving hand-made signs. They immediately formed picket lines and began setting up homemade burn barrels with “IAM” carved in the side.

“People are really excited to strike,” said Ky Carlson, a third-shift assembler who walked out at midnight and was picketing the Everett plant at 3 am. She said they were aiming for what the union demanded at the beginning of negotiations, 40 percent raises and restoration of the pension.

The union’s negotiating committee recommended a tentative agreement to members on Sunday, to almost universal condemnation. That same day, workers marched through the Everett factory on their lunch break, then out the door, chanting “Strike, Strike!”

Union members snarled traffic with long lines to vote on Thursday, where 94.6 percent rejected the proposed contract and 96 percent voted to strike. Pay was the main sticking point.

The rejected contract covers 32,000 workers in Washington and Oregon, members of Machinists District 751 in Washington and W24 in Oregon. Most work at the two plants near Seattle.

It’s the largest strike in the U.S. this year, and the biggest since the Auto Workers strike at the Big 3 last fall when 46,000 workers walked out as part of a rolling strike strategy. Boeing workers in the Puget Sound area last struck in 2008 for 58 days.

COMPANY NOT PREPARED

Company leaders seem to have been taken by surprise. “They were pretty in denial up until yesterday,” said Carlson. Then as workers were getting ready to vote they sent a company-wide email, “‘Hey, like, you know, we're $60 billion in debt. Don't do anything too hasty,’” she said. “Nobody was buying it.”

In preparation for the Covid shut-down, management had workers tarp and tape open parts of unfinished aircraft, Carlson said, but by midnight no similar preparations had been made and workers just downed tools and walked out. Birds in the factory get in the planes, and there’s a risk of humidity and water damage.

“We did hear that some of the managers were taking training and trying to pick up certifications for some of the work that we do,” said Ian Shelbrack, a 777 mechanic who was picketing early in the morning at Everett.

However, workers thought it was unlikely that managers would get much aircraft construction done in their absence. Edwin Haala, who worked at Boeing for 25 years and now mentors workers on the shop floor for the union, recalled that during the 2008 strike, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered manager work to stop because it was subpar.

ENGINEERS SAY NO

Machinists have been circulating a leaked memo showing that management is trying to get members of the engineers union to do strikers’ work, offering extra pay.

The Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), which has 16,000 members at Boeing in the Puget Sound area, been telling members that they don’t have to volunteer for any Machinist work. The SPEEA contract does not allow them to refuse to work during a Machinists strike.

“Our message to members is absolutely do not volunteer to do any work normally done by IAM members,” Dimas said on the union’s website. If directly ordered, the union said, “Comply, but question your manager about training and safety requirements, and immediately contact your Council Rep.” (Council reps are the equivalent of stewards.) A lot of work done by Machinists members requires specific certifications that SPEEA members may not have.

Meanwhile, SPEEA union president John Dimas and other SPEEA members greeted Machinists as they exited the plants, said Michael Berryhill, a SPEEA council rep who works in a product development facility near the Everett factory.

Picketing Machinists told Berryhill that before the walkout they saw SPEEA members specifically decline to do Machinist work, “listing a myriad of reasons why they couldn't do the work, citing certifications, citing safety and quality issues, and flat out refusing to write off of quality inspections and stuff like that,” said Berryhill.

SPEEA encouraged members visit picket lines, bring food and firewood, donate, and put up signs in the workplace supporting the strike. “Show vocal and visible support for our brothers and sisters in the IAM,” said Dimas. “Their success in the current confrontation will lay the groundwork for all labor unions at The Boeing Company and especially for our own contract talks in 2026.”

Teamsters who deliver parts and materials to the factories demonstrated in May that they may honor picket lines. When Boeing locked out its firefighters, members of Fire Fighters (IAFF) Local I-66, Teamster delivery drivers refused to cross. “They even deferred train cars that had [737s] on them away from Boeing, because Teamsters don’t cross picket lines,” said Carlson.

Machinists and SPEEA members, on the other hand, were required to work during the firefighters lockout.

NOT GOOD ENOUGH

Discontent with the tentative agreement was so obvious that a day after recommending it, Machinists District 751 president Jon Holden told the Seattle Times that he expected members to vote to strike. “The response from people is it’s not good enough,” he said.

The biggest objection to the contract was a proposed 25 percent pay increase over four years, with 11 percent the first year, and 4, 4, and 6 percent increases in subsequent years. But the contract also ended an annual bonus that usually runs around 4 percent, so workers calculated the real increases for the four years amounted to 7, 0, 0, and 2 percent. They were unmoved by arguments that raises compound while bonuses don’t.

Most workers start at between $19 and $23 an hour, with a six-year progression to top rates, $43 for a grade 4 mechanic like Schelbrack. But the contract has not been fully negotiated since 2008 and mid-contract bargaining in 2011 and 2013 left them with no raises for a decade. As a result, pay in the area has risen while their pay stagnated, leaving entry-level pay below nearby retail and fast food jobs. And those who started six years ago have only seen a 2 percent raise since they started.

Bitterness from the 2013 negotiations remains. The company blackmailed the union into reopening the contract by threatening to move production of a new aircraft elsewhere. But workers rejected the concessionary contract by 67 percent. So a new vote on a similar contract was held in late December, when many senior workers were out of town and the factories were shut for maintenance. It squeaked by with 51 percent of the vote, ending the defined-benefit pension and extending the contract for another 11 years, leading to the slogan “Out the door in ’24.”

PENSION PUSH

Machinists at Boeing want their defined-benefit pension back. It was replaced with a 401(k) in 2016, and then the company ratcheted down its contribution for successive tiers of newer hires. The rejected agreement eliminated those tiers and brought the contribution back up, alongside a new $2 per hour company contribution to a pre-existing Machinists savings fund, which also provides a 401(k).

Schelbrack said he joined Boeing during a slump in construction work in 2011, solely for the pension. His pay was much lower than he could earn as a carpenter. “And I was willing to take that bitter pill of $15 an hour just knowing that someday I would make decent money and I would have a pension.” Then the pension was frozen.

“Just the time that I've been here, there’s been very little in the way of wage increases,” he said. “And obviously, most recently, our cost of living has just exponentially swooped towards the sun,” he said. He estimated that his family’s cost of living has risen by $30,000 in recent years.

“But at the same time, while the Boeing company talks about how broke and in debt they are—which we all know is a result of their poor decision-making—it wasn't that long ago that we would get quarterly reports here at work that talked about how Boeing had record profits for the quarter,” Schelbrack said.

NEW HIRES ROCK SOLID

Striking workers will receive $250 a week from the union starting the third week of the strike. Generally, striking workers in Washington can’t receive unemployment.

So workers have been economizing, picking up outside work, and helping each other. Carlson said co-worker on her shift helped two others get temporary jobs at Taco Bell. Some plan to work Doordash or Uber shifts.

For years the union has been urging workers to set aside $50 per paycheck in preparation, in a special credit union fund. Others plan to take money out 401(k) savings. But many people have no cushion.

“New hires, you know, a lot of them say they can't really afford to strike,” said Carlson. “But despite that, they're going to go out and find jobs. Or, ‘I have a job lined up or I have my applications in places.’ Or, ‘My lease expires and I'm going to go live with my parents for a couple months.’ It's so impressive. They're going to try to figure something out. Because they realize, this is their future.”

Carlson said when she was first hired five years ago, “People were always saying, the new hires are going to be the ones who screw us on the next contract. And that just was not true.”

“It's great to see people coordinating with each other to help each other get by. This is the most unified, the most solidarity I've ever seen at this place.”