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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Boeing is offering its staff a 25% pay rise over four years in a bid to avoid a strike that could potentially shut down its assembly lines as early as Friday.
Union leaders representing more than 30,000 employees have urged the workers to support the proposal, describing it as the best contract they had ever negotiated.
If approved, the agreement would be an important achievement for Boeing’s new chief executive, Kelly Ortberg, who faces pressure to fix the company’s quality and reputational issues.
Most of what you have said is wrong.
It is a four year contract. The parties negotiated the rates for the next four years, once the contract is ratified it is binding. Boeing will be required to pay according to the wage scale. Its not boeing’s word, its a contract and the union has remidies if boeing violates the terms if the contract. This is how most union contracts work. Wage changes are spread out over the term of the contract. This is normal.
Also the raise is not 6.25% per year. That’s not how percentages work. The average would be 5.8% as annual percentage raises are cumulative. If they negotiated a 6.25% annual raise they would have a 27% raise over the term of the contract.
It is deliberately misleading to report raises for the life of the contract. It makes the win sound better in the headline than it is.
I realize the math is marginally inaccurate - precision wasn’t really the goal of what I wrote. We’re on the same page so far as the disingenuous headline goes.
Where we disagree I suppose is the contract being binding. You’re right of course, from a legal perspective, a signed contract is an agreement that must be upheld. When I wrote that it was taking Boeing at its word, I was leaning more into a possibility of leadership changing their minds.
As a hypothetical example:
Two years down the line the executives decide to ‘review’ the contracts and determine an alternative understanding of the principles of the agreement which leads to them reverting to the previous payscale. Then the union threatens to strike again, legal action might ensue, maybe months go by of back and forth with the corporation dragging their metaphorical feet at every opportunity.
Eventually this ends up in court with Boeing being told to quit the shit and pay what they agreed, maybe plus 5% as a ‘pemalty’ for bad faith operation. Finally, the agreed upon payscale resumes with backpay, plus that 5%. Workers aren’t exactly happy, but they aren’t angry anymore.
All the while, those extra tens of millions were sitting somewhere, collecting interest for Boeing. By the time it all gets straightened out and they accept a fine, they’ve made an extra few million. At the end of the quarter, or the year, the executives that set out on this path take a generous bonus.
All I was really getting at by commenting about the contract was that corporate greed exists - in Boeing of all places this is a certainty.
Giant companies pull these maneuvers all the time at the expense of the people they employ, their own customers, or both. I don’t think most of what I wrote was wrong. Inaccurate maybe? I can live with that.
your hypothetical shows a complete lack of understanding.
if they do these things all the time as you say, you would have a real example rather than a purely hypothetical one.
your delusional fantasy is not reality
Hahaha cheers mate for the laugh. Didn’t realize I was wasting my time with you.
You’re wasting everyone’s time by making up problems with a contract. Multi year contracts are standard. There may be a lot wrong with the contract, but the fact that its a multi year contract like every normal union contract isn’t one of them.
No one who negotiates union contracts is worried that an employer might randomly decide to revert a negotiated payscale.
The point I was trying to convey is that companies are run by people and people are corruptable. You’re correct to say there’s no reason to think any specific contact would be violated. It’s folly however, to think companies never take action against a union as a whole or a worker individually.
Given the recent whistleblowers that have stopped being alive in recent Boeing memory, I don’t think it’s alarmist to suggest they might not be a trustworthy bunch.
Either way, my apologies for the way I half heartedly wrote something the other day.
Yes, companies are corrupt. However, the way you described it cannot happen. Boeing is smart enough to not try to fuck over workers in a way that they are guaranteed to lose and all but ensures an immediate strike.
Even after the contract expires, they have to continue paying at the previous rate. If boeing wanted to pull something they would be smart enough to do it in a more subtle and effective way.
Ah so that’s the line you think they won’t cross? Glad we were able to narrow that down.
I’m of the opinion there are no lines a company won’t cross if there’s a dollar to be made, and there’s decades of evidence this is the case. It wasn’t that long ago that big business would hire people to give a beat down to protesting workers.
It’s not my goal to change the minds of people online. Ultimately this conversation has boiled down to me having an opinion based on actions I have seen taken against workers, and you believing there is a line in the sand that “cannot” be crossed because the company is smart enough not to.
We aren’t getting anywhere by continuing.
You keep saying there’s tons of evidence, yet provided none.
Find me one time an american company unilaterally decreaced the pay of a union contract during its term.
If that was common, we would’t negotiate multi-year agreements.
In fact, it would be far easier for them to do that after the contract expires, and a 1 year contract term would give them many more opportunities.