The group’s employees have rejected the draft collective agreement that has been under negotiation since March. Production has been paralyzed in several factories in the Seattle region.
Several tens of thousands of employees of the American aircraft manufacturer stopped work on Friday. This is the first strike at Boeing in sixteen years. And the cause is identical to the 2008 strike, which lasted 57 days: negotiations around a new collective agreement. Since March, the leaders of the American giant and the machinists’ union (IAM-District 751) have been negotiating step by step.
On September 8, the planemaker’s 33,000 union members, out of a total of 170,000 employees, rejected the agreement by 94.6% and approved the strike by 96%. The social movement began on Friday and paralyzed the two large assembly plants in Renton and Everett, near Seattle, which produce the 737 Max, the 777 and the 767. On the other hand, the assembly of the Dreamliner was not disrupted, because the plant, which is located in South Carolina, is not affected by this collective agreement.
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Salary increase deemed insufficient
The rejected agreement provided for a 25% wage increase over four years, a commitment to invest in Boeing’s historic home in the northwest of the United States, as well as the location of the next aircraft in this region. Enough to ensure jobs for several decades. But these proposals were deemed insufficient, particularly in relation to the union’s demands for wage increases (+40%) and the group’s commitments on pensions.
The strike comes at a particularly difficult time for Boeing. Its financial situation has been very precarious since the crash of two 737 Max 8s in 2018 and 2019 (which caused 346 deaths), and numerous production quality problems. According to TD Cowen analysts, a 50-day strike would deprive Boeing of $3 billion to $3.5 billion in cash and would have a $5.5 billion impact on revenue.
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