Boeing Back in Bargaining — First Time in 16 Years

By Don McIntosh / Northwest Labor Press

A lot of eyes will be on the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) this year as it takes part in one of the most significant labor negotiations of recent times. Boeing is one of just two major commercial aircraft makers in the world. It’s an export powerhouse and a standard-bearer for American industrial and technological achievement. It’s also a company that’s overdue for a course correction. 

A terrifying Jan. 5 incident in which a door plug fell out of a two-month-old Boeing 737 over Portland isn’t even the latest. On March 7, a Boeing 777-200 lost a tire after takeoff from San Francisco. And those come after 346 people lost their lives in crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia in 2018 and 2019 when faulty sensors triggered an automated system in the 737 MAX that had not been disclosed to pilots; that system forced the jet’s nose down, which caused the crashes. In 2021, the company agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle charges that it conspired to defraud Federal Aviation Administration inspectors and later cover up that fraud. Between its image problems and production delays that followed a disastrous decision to globalize and outsource production of its 787, Boeing has been losing market share to Airbus, its principal competitor.

“We need to bargain and save them from themselves,” said Brandon Bryant, directing business representative at Machinists District Lodge W24 in Gladstone, Oregon. Bryant is taking part in the national negotiations with Boeing that began March 8. “Boeing’s not doing really well. We think there’s a solid future ahead of us, but they have to partner with the IAM. We have to be the valuable stakeholders in this company to get them back to being successful.”

The national contract covers 32,000 members of IAM District Lodge 751 at Boeing plants in the Puget Sound and 1,200 members of District Lodge 63 at the Boeing plant in Gresham, Oregon. It’s set to expire Sept. 12, 2024, and IAM leaders say it’s not going to be like last time. 

In fact, this is the first full-scale contract negotiation between IAM and Boeing in 16 years. Roughly half the current Boeing workforce has never been through union bargaining. The current contract was hammered out in 2008 after a 58-day strike. It was meant to be a four-year agreement, but since then, two multi-year contract extensions were bargained secretly between top IAM leaders and the company, without the usual union member surveys and participation. Both extensions came as Boeing engaged in a kind of hardball jobs blackmail against the union.

In 2011, after Boeing threatened to build its 737 MAX in other states, Machinists union members voted to extend their agreement by four years, thereby guaranteeing no strikes through 2016. 

Having flight-tested a strategy for using jobs blackmail to extort concessions, Boeing did it again in 2013. Union members are still steamed about how it went down. Boeing threatened to move production of its new 777X airliner out of Washington unless workers agreed to extend their contract by another eight years and make big concessions: give up their pension plan and accept a 401(k) instead; pay more for health insurance; limit raises to 1% every other year; and accept a two-tier pay scale in which new hires have a slower wage progression. Amid record turnout, workers voted that down Nov. 13, 2013, by more than 2-1. Boeing then dropped the two-tier proposal and demanded another vote. Leaders of Seattle-based District Lodge 751 didn’t think the changes were substantial enough to warrant a revote, but Thomas Buffenbarger, then national IAM president, stepped in and ordered a new ratification vote. He scheduled it for Jan. 3, 2014, when many workers were on vacation because of the plant’s annual holiday shutdown. IAM reported that it passed by 51% on the second vote.

Member anger over how the contract was extended led to a change in the Machinists constitution at the next convention. Now, Machinist officers aren’t allowed to negotiate a contract modification or extension unless members in the bargaining unit have specifically voted to authorize that.

Ten years after the controversial extension, IAM leaders at Boeing say they’re determined to reverse the concessions made then, starting with restoration of the pension. They’re proposing a three-year contract with wage increases of more than 40%. They also want an end to mandatory overtime on the weekends. They want to shorten the length of time it takes a worker to progress from new hire to the top of the pay scale, from six to four years. And in light of the disastrous series of mishaps, the union is calling for more quality inspectors and more union input into quality control. Significantly, they also want Boeing to retire its pattern of jobs blackmail and commit to building its next airplane in the Puget Sound. 

The 40-plus-member union bargaining team presented all that to the 20-plus-member Boeing bargaining team at the inaugural contract negotiation session March 8, held at the District Lodge 751 hall in Seattle. The company will take several weeks to evaluate the proposal, at which point the two teams will break into subcommittees to negotiate different parts of the contract.

Bargaining is likely to heat up in August after union members take strike votes on July 17. District Lodge 751 will have a mass strike authorization meeting at the Seattle Mariners stadium. Local Lodge 63 will have its meeting the same day at Mt. Hood Center, an event venue in Boring, Oregon.

“We think that there’s a pathway to get a deal here without a strike,” Bryant said. “We are not negotiating to go on strike. We’re negotiating to get a fair respectable deal that is beneficial not only to our members, but the company also, one that the committee can recommend. If we have to strike, we’re ready though.”

At the table for Lodge 63 

Local Lodge 63 is represented at the talks by an eight-person bargaining team: Brandon Bryant, Will Lukens, Eric Bitney, Dan Patterson, Dan Bricker, John Kleiboeker, Jeff Smith, and Scott Lacey.

By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss

As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin. 

Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.

Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes. 

Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.

Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.

On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.

There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.

The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.

Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.

They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel

The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.

We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.

The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.

After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago. 

What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.

“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”

“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality. 

Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.

“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.” 

Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed. 

“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”

When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.

He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.” 

I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows. 

We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.

/sp

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Don McIntosh

Editor Don McIntosh has been with the Northwest Labor Press since 1998. Born in Baltimore, he moved to Portland in 1985, and first practiced journalism at the Daily Vanguard, Portland State University’s student newspaper. After earning a bachelor’s in history, he served as an underground union organizer (salt) with Teamsters Local 174 in Seattle. Back in Portland, he wrote for the Portland Business Journal and Willamette Week and was editor of the Portland Alliance, a monthly community newspaper.

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