EVERETT — Neither the Boeing Co. nor its Machinists union seems ready to budge on job security, an issue that could keep union members on strike into November.
“We felt, we still feel, we need to get the jobs addressed first,” the union’s chief negotiator, Mark Blondin, said Tuesday. “They’re interested in eliminating the union in the workplace … long-term, that appears to be their goal.”
Boeing and the Machinists broke off contract talks Monday after reviving negotiations only late last week. In its second month, the strike has shut down production at Boeing’s jetliner factories and put 27,000 Machinists on the picket lines since Sept. 6. No further discussions between Boeing and the union have been scheduled.
Boeing’s lead negotiator, Doug Kight, said in an interview Tuesday that the company made substantial movement to address the union’s concerns when the two sides met with a federal mediator over the weekend. But the company would be unwise to guarantee jobs, Kight said.
“This is about how we, as a company, most effectively grow our business,” he said. “We believe we do that though process innovations and by continuously improving productivity. Time cannot stand still.”
Blondin said the sticking point in the latest talks was Boeing’s insistence on moving to replace about 2,000 union workers who distribute parts, deliver materials and perform similar tasks with outside suppliers and subcontractors.
Boeing offered to keep the 2,000 affected workers on the payroll for the term of the contract “but that over time they’re not going to be there,” Blondin said.
The company is interested in looking at new technology, such as barcoding and radio-frequency identification chips, to make materials handling and inventory processing more efficient, Kight said. Over the past six years, incremental improvements in materials and inventory have led to the reduction of 60 positions, he said. Those employees were reassigned to other areas.
The Machinists, however, fear if Boeing “succeeds in their plan” with the materials positions, the company will reduce jobs in other parts of the factory as well.
The issue of outsourcing is hijacking the negotiations process and preventing Boeing and its Machinists from building the roughly 3,700 jets the company has on order. The two remain so far apart on the issue that aerospace industry analyst Richard Safran of Goldman Sachs advised clients before the renewed talks last week, “Our new working assumption is that the strike lasts through November, and we believe this is a more conservative assumption … there is risk that the strike lasts into December.”
David Olson, chairman emeritus of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies and professor emeritus of political science at the University of Washington, would not venture a forecast on the length of the strike but said that it could be prolonged because of “a deeper bitterness, a greater distance between the two parties” than in 1995, when the union struck for 69 days. Then the economy was less globalized and job security still an emerging issue.
Olson said there was even a remote chance that President Bush could declare that the strike is “eroding the national interest” and invoke the Taft-Hartley Act after the Nov. 4 General Election, ordering the Machinists back to work for an 80-day cooling off period and sending both sides back to the table.
Taft-Hartley, enacted in 1947, was last invoked in October 2002 to end an employer lockout of more than 25,000 members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in a contract dispute that had shut down West Coast ports. It was the first use of the law since 1978, and Olson said it would be an unlikely and ineffective tactic this time, too heavy-handed to achieve more than a short-lived suspension of hostilities.
“I think both sides will have to feel the pain before this will get settled,” he said.
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