By Dan Catchpole
(Reuters) -Striking workers at Boeing Defense voted 90% to approve a four-year contract proposal from union leadership that management has already refused to consider, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) announced Friday.
IAM leadership said Boeing can end the 46-day-long strike today by accepting the offer.
“Our members have spoken loudly – we are ready to return to work once Boeing accepts this agreement,” IAM District 837 President Tom Boelling said in a statement. “It’s up to the company to get our members back to what they do best: building world-class aircraft for our nation’s defense.”
“It’s unfortunate that union leadership led its members to vote on something that isn’t real,” Boeing Defense Vice President Dan Gillian said in a statement.
He defended Boeing’s previous offer, which included a 20% general wage increase and more vacation time. He has previously said Boeing will not consider any terms that significantly increase the cost beyond that offer.
The union proposal that members approved Friday would cost Boeing an estimated $40 million per year on average, up from $30 million for the company’s previous offer, according to the IAM.
The company has said it would hire replacement workers to assemble munitions, fighters and other military aircraft in the St. Louis area. Boeing has used non-union workers to dampen the strike’s effects on production, but company leadership has acknowledged that it has slowed work on several programs.
The IAM’s proposed offer builds on earlier proposals from Boeing Defense, adding a larger ratification bonus than management offered, heftier company contributions to the retirement plan and steeper wage increases for workers at the hourly wage ceiling. The retirement contributions and bonus match those won last year by other unionized machinists at Boeing.
Union officials said they drafted the proposal because the company has not been willing to resume talks since the roughly 3,200 members of IAM District 837 voted 57% to reject Boeing’s last offer on September 12.
The tactic of a union unilaterally proposing a contract is unusual, but the IAM has successfully used it to end a strike before, IAM official Jonathan Battaglia told Reuters.
Several U.S. Congress members have urged Boeing to resume talks, including in a letter Wednesday from the Congressional Labor Caucus’s five Democratic co-chairs.
U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, made comments to Missourinet slamming Boeing executives, saying they have been collecting big paychecks while short-changing the people actually making the airplanes.
“I mean, these people have strip mined that company,” Hawley said, according to Missourinet. “The C-Suite is doing great over at Boeing. Their workers are the ones who’ve been getting the shaft.” The problem is the workers are the ones who make the planes. So if you want anything to work, it’s got to be the good people who are on the line, the engineers and the designers, they’re the ones who Boeing needs to do right by and they haven’t.”
Hawley added that “management here needs to suck it up and get this thing over with.”
The strike began August 4, after union members overwhelmingly rejected Boeing’s second contract offer.
In July, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg said a strike by District 837 would have much smaller financial impacts than a 53-day-long strike last year by the 33,000 members of IAM District 751, who make most of Boeing’s commercial airplanes in Washington and Oregon.
“We’ll manage through this,” Ortberg said during a conference call with Wall Street analysts at the time.
Boeing has invested billions of dollars to expand manufacturing facilities and engineering capabilities in the St. Louis area for the new U.S. Air Force fighter jet, the F-47. It won the contract this year. The company is also competing for the U.S. Navy’s new F/A-XX fighter.
(Reporting by Dan Catchpole in Seattle; Editing by David Gregorio)
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