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Despite Threats, the Boeing Strike Continues
Since taking to the picket lines on Aug. 4, striking machinists have voted down four of the company's offers.
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On Oct. 22, Boeing union shop steward Joshua Arnold went to DC to tell a Congressional committee about how he and his coworkers are making ends meet during three months on strike. The members of IAM Local 837, who manufacture bombs, jets, and drones for clients like the US military, work for starting wages as low as $17 an hour.
“The wage and retirement improvements we are seeking could cost Boeing only half of the cost of one F-15 fighter jet over the next four years,” Arnold told the committee. “We produce those jets at a rate of about two per month.”
One new-model F-15 earns the company just under $100 million. But Boeing leaders insist that they cannot afford to pay their workers more — though, as the company revealed in an earnings call on Oct. 29, the company ended this past quarter cash-positive for the first time in over two years. In that same call, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg called the financial impacts of the strike on Boeing’s bottom line “immaterial.”
To the workers I met on St. Louis picket lines, though, this issue is anything but. As the weather grows colder and their savings run down, they’ve voted down four consecutive contract offers since they launched their strike on Aug. 4, banking on the idea that Boeing will blink first.
Boeing workers like 20-year-old Mason told me that — even before the strike — they simply weren’t making enough to pay their bills. In order to support his wife and infant child, Mason regularly accessed local food banks while working full-time for Boeing. Other workers told me they made more money as gig-workers driving for Uber during the strike than they ever did at their full-time jobs.
On Oct. 26, Boeing workers narrowly rejected the company’s latest offer. The company has vowed to replace them with permanent non-union employees, rather than caving to the union’s pay scale demands.
Read my latest dispatch from the picket line here.
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