Strike! (Almost)

At what was for all practical purposes the last minute, Boeing asked IAM 751 to come back to the table. The IAM granted 48 hours for additional negotiation.

Frankly, if I were in charge of Boeing I'd have fired my negotiating team and brought in new people. While improving the contract is expensive, a strike is even more so. Some sources have estimated $100 million a DAY is lost when the IAM is on strike. I suppose not having to pay the people on strike saves a little, but last cycle (2005), the IAM got a bonus equal to about a month's pay when they signed the post-strike contract. So for a month Boeing paid its machinists to walk picket lines instead of building planes. Also, the way things are structed, while the union can "reject" the proposed contract with a simple majority, it takes a two-thirds majority to strike. If that two-thirds majority is achieved, the contract is accepted by default! Boeing only needs to get 34% of the machinests to vote for the contract. Really, how hard can that be?

Apparently, for the current team, pretty hard. Some 87% of the machinests voted to strike this time around, and IIRC a similarly large majority voted to strike in 2005.

Either the executives who hold the pursestrings and/or the negotiation team are, in my opinion, incompetent. Boeing is sitting on a SEVEN YEAR backlog of plane orders, the "global supply chain" for the 787 has proven to be a disaster with the "partners" causing a year delay in the program while Boeing (IAM) mechanics do their work, and we're paying a company to ship parts off-site so they can ship them back again. Oh, the last is copycatting techniques we already use internally! It should be really trivial for Boeing to offer the union gaurantees on outsourcing, and a good contract overall.

Add in allegations of illegal negotiating practices by Boeing, and I think some people up top need to be kicked into the real world.

Probably they're too busy checking their stock options and multi-million dollar pensions.