After reading about this last week, I've been hoping someone much more eloquent would bring this up, but I haven't seen it diaried anywhere. Here goes my attempt.
Last week, after a federal negotiator could not broker a deal, Boeing machinists began a strike against Boeing. While these stories are quite frequent with Boeing, I decided to look at their offers to the union workers.
The machinists say Boeing has proposed ending retirement health care coverage for new employees and wants to eliminate caps on out-of-pocket expenses for medical premiums and copays.
So Boeing's offer will help push out-of-pocket expenses higher, thereby reducing insurance coverage, and eliminating health insurance once you retire from a Boeing career. Things must be bad for Boeing to make such a soulless offer, right? The very next sentence will shock you, including a by-the-numbers rundown after the flip.
The workers argue that they should not be making concessions when the company posted $1 billion in net income for the last quarter.
Yes, you read that right. Boeing just closed a quarter where they made
$11,111,111 per day, yet they still have the audacity to ask their employees to take a reduction in benefits. They haven't always had such great profits:
they only made $5,555,555 per day the previous quarter..
Maybe this is a result of the reckless war & reckless war spending, so I decided to take a cursory look back across some of Boeing's more interesting numbers during the past five years.
One conclusion when considering the contract negotiations with Boeing: this is the end of a 3-year contract. This passing contract was signed after the airline crunch post-S11, at a time when the airlines were on life support and the economy appeared to be stalled. Ask Paul Veltkamp, a nine-year employee picketing 30 miles north of Seattle at the Everett plant, where 747s are built.
"It's one thing to bring us a bad contract during an industry downturn, but it's something else to bring us a bad contract when things are looking up."
And when you made $128 every second of every day last quarter, you can spend a few days to respect the backbone of your company & our country.
So what do you see in the numbers? Standard procedure for the juggernauts? A harbinger of the what labor will face?