The pact covers some 25,000 workers, mostly in the Seattle-Puget Sound area, but also in Wichita, Kansas, and Portland, Oregon.

On August 26 union negotiators rejected the latest three-year contract offer from the company. IAM officials announced that they would urge their membership to vote down the proposal. If the contract is turned down a strike vote is expected to pass, leading to a walkout on the contract’s expiration date, September 2.

This year alone Boeing has laid off 30,000 workers. The bosses are using a drop-off in aircraft orders from commercial airlines as the cover for its attack on the union, saying "economic reality" should be the basis of its contract with the IAM. "We are in the midst of the worst downturn in commercial-aviation history," company spokesperson Charles Cadena told the press.

Boeing is also a major military contractor, supplying the Pentagon and other countries with warplanes, helicopters, missiles, antimissile systems, satellites, and other equipment.

Many IAM members say the company wants a strike to try to weaken the union at a time when the crisis in the airline industry has significantly cut orders for new aircraft production. The company rejected the union’s offer to extend the present contract and continue negotiations and has told all its workers to be prepared for possible furloughs if there is a Machinists strike.

"Strike may not cause Boeing immediate harm; analysts cite airline woes, low demand," read a headline in the August 27 Seattle Times. The article quoted Richard Turgeon, director of equity research at Victory Capital Management, which owns 2.7 million shares of Boeing. "I think a strike would be welcome in some respects by shareholders," Turgeon said. "The last thing you want to see is the union signing these generous labor contracts that provide all kinds of expensive benefits."

Union members explain that Boeing’s offer for a 6 percent bonus in the first year of the contract and a 2.5 percent raise in the second and third years, along with a slight raise in pension payments, is offset by several thousand dollars a year in increase in health premiums.

The most important issue, however, according to many IAM members at Boeing is the question of job security.

Matt Bates from the IAM explained that the company’s contract proposal would give Boeing management the right to carry out wholesale subcontracting. "They want to gut job security and weaken rights of recall," he said. "And they want the right to bring subcontractors and vendors into the union shop."

Ernest Mailhot is a meat packer and member of the United Food and Commercial Workers union in the Seattle area.  
 
 
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