(Boeing Dreamscape)
The
tentative agreement between the Machinists union and Boeing is no longer tentative, as union members voted to approve the deal, which extends through 2016. Perhaps most importantly, the contract keeps jobs in Washington state, though it also offers raises and a signing bonus; workers will pay more in health care costs. The deal has
national implications as well: The Machinists will be dropping their
complaint against Boeing for moving jobs in retaliation for a strike, and "If the NLRB follows suit, it would remove a potentially damaging element for Obama in the 2012 campaign."
Writing before the union vote, Steven Greenhouse compared the Boeing contract to General Motors' 1948 agreement with the UAW:
Both Boeing now and General Motors then were eager to ramp up production, but both companies worried that another round of painful strikes would throw a wrench into their expansion efforts. [...]
G.M.’s president at the time, Charles E. Wilson, feared another walkout by the militant U.A.W., then headed by Walter Reuther, especially because G.M. had ambitious plans to invest $3.5 billion — about $30 billion in today’s dollars — to expand production to take advantage of the huge pent-up consumer demand from World War II and the flood of Americans moving to the suburbs.
Fearing new union conflagrations, both Boeing and General Motors agreed, in essence, to buy labor peace by offering unusually generous contracts.
Of course, in a sign of the times, the unusually generous contract of 1948 offered "an 11 percent raise over two years, an annual cost-of-living adjustment to help workers keep up with inflation and a newfangled notion: an additional 2 percent annual raise, called the annual improvement factor," while the unusually generous contract of 2011 offers "annual wage increases of 2 percent, cost-of-living adjustments, a productivity incentive program intended to pay bonuses of 2 percent to 4 percent."