Seattle Times business reporter
Boeing’s white-collar union members voted to accept the company’s contract offer Thursday, avoiding the possibility of a work stoppage.
The union, the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, or SPEEA, represents 17,000 workers in Boeing’s Washington factories and in nearby states, with the majority of its membership located in the Puget Sound region.
SPEEA has been negotiating with Boeing since July to secure collective bargaining agreements for its two largest units, the first time both groups have held full contract negotiations in nearly 14 years.
SPEEA’s professional unit represents about 13,000 engineers and scientists and its technical unit represents about 4,000 analysts, technicians, planners and specialists.
On Thursday, after about a week of electronic voting, SPEEA said nearly 68% of the professional unit had approved the contract, with 7,895 members voting to accept the deal and 3,780 voting to reject.
The technical unit also voted to approve the deal but by a much thinner margin: Just over 53% voted in favor of the contract, with 2,061 members voting to accept the deal and 1,793 voting to reject.
Ninety-six percent of the professional unit cast a vote, SPEEA said, and 89% of the technical unit participated in the vote.
This was the second contract offer SPEEA voted on in this round of negotiations. Membership rejected Boeing’s first contract offer in August, with 64% of the professional unit voting no and nearly 72% of the tech unit rejecting the deal.
During that first vote, SPEEA members overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike, giving the negotiation team the authority to call for a strike if they thought it was necessary. In that case, a strike would not have begun until the current contract expired on Oct. 6.
SPEEA’s negotiating team said the membership’s rejection of Boeing’s first contract showed a deep mistrust of Boeing management.
On Thursday, SPEEA’s negotiating team said that its work is still “not done.”
“We need to work with Boeing, and as needed, pressure Boeing management … to rebuild an environment suitable for reestablishing trust with the membership that has eroded over the past decades.”
With the second offer, “we secured many victories that some thought were completely out of reach when this negotiation cycle started,” SPEEA said Thursday.
The contract approved Thursday offers union members an average pay increase of 32% over its four-year length, a bump from the 26.5% pay raise in Boeing’s first offer to the union.
The deal includes a 10% guaranteed wage increase effective Oct. 2 and then a 4% raise in March.
The contract will then increase wage pools, or a pot of money divided among the workforce, by 6% for the next three years. Of that pool, individuals will be guaranteed to see a 4% raise each year, with the remaining 2% split based on performance metrics.
That’s a significant change from the first contract, which put most of the money into the wage pools, leaving union members feeling there were not enough guaranteed raises.
Under the second offer, the average base salary for SPEEA’s professional unit will increase from $152,000 to $208,000 over the length of the deal, an $11,000 bump from the first offer, according to Boeing.
The average base salary for SPEEA’s tech unit will increase from $119,000 to $163,000, an $8,000 bump from the first offer.
Lauren Rosenblatt: 206-464-2927 or lrosenblatt@seattletimes.com. Lauren Rosenblatt is a Seattle Times business reporter covering Boeing and the aerospace industry.
