Boeing engineers say company underestimated resolve

It appears Boeing underestimated the resolve of its engineers and technical workers during the last few months of negotiations.

The 96 percent vote against the company’s first offer last week made that pretty clear, and SPEEA said Boeing had better not make that mistake again, or it could be facing a big problem.

Boeing didn’t believe the union negotiating team really spoke for the 22,000 engineers and technical workers. That contract rejection last week sent a clear message. Ray Goforth is SPEEA’s executive director. He said Boeing should consider that vote closely as it moves forward.

“If the Boeing company pushes it and provokes more confrontation, I think that it will be surprised at the resolve in this workforce,” he said.

No one is using the “s-word” yet. The tentative deadline to get this done is November 25, and no strike or lockout could come before that even though the contract expired last week. But it’s becoming clear, the union membership is talking and acting a lot tougher that it has in labor negotiations past.

This union has only been on strike twice before, and only once for any significant length of time, and Goforth said there’s a reason for that.

“The SPEEA membership are problem-solvers by nature,” he said. “This is what they do for a living. It’s the way that their minds work. They really feel that now that the company has clear notice that the negotiating team speaks for the membership they expect us to get to the table and solve these problems.”

One could say this union is more pragmatic where the machinists’ union might be characterized as more emotional.

Goforth said it didn’t need to get to this point. He said Boeing wasted the last few months of talks because it miscalculated the union’s strength.

“So now where we are in the negotiations is really where we should have been six months ago, which is talking about what are the important issues of both sides and trying to figure out what a negotiated agreement looks like,” he said.

The union has said the initial contract offer never had a chance of succeeding. It said there were too many concessions and give-backs. Boeing called the offer industry-leading and more than fair. So you can see both sides have a lot of ground between them.

The company offered raises of 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 percent. The union wants 5-percent. Boeing wants to phase out the pension plan for new hires and replace it with a 401k-style plan. The union doesn’t want to budge on that.

Boeing also wants the workers to pay into their health benefits.

Negotiations resume Wednesday afternoon.