EVERETT – Boeing Co. workers in Wichita, Kan., need advice and support from their Puget Sound colleagues as they inch closer to a strike, a negotiator for about 4,000 technical workers said Wednesday.
But they don’t need the burn barrels that became a symbol of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace’s 40-day strike in 2001, said Bill Hartig, the vice president of the union’s Midwest region and a Wichita staff analyst.
“We’ll be using big sun umbrellas instead,” he said.
“We hope it doesn’t come to that, but if it does, we’re looking for you people to give us the expertise you already have,” Hartig told a SPEEA rally Wednesday. “Should it come to that, we will be victorious.”
Hartig spoke to about 100 sign-waving SPEEA members at lunchtime outside Boeing’s main Everett office complex on Seaway Boulevard.
Last week, 75 percent of the members of SPEEA’s Wichita Technical and Professional Unit voted to reject the company’s contract offer and to authorize a strike against Boeing.
It was the second time the union membership had rejected the contract, which first was presented in March.
Hartig said accepting the contract would have made the employees “second-class citizens.” The company has offered them smaller raises than any other union bargaining group within Boeing, he said, along with a health insurance plan that would require higher premiums among union workers. They’d also be the only ones having to pay for their own short-term disability insurance.
Hartig and other union officials blasted Boeing for unwillingness to budge on the contract offer. “If it was wrong in March, it was more wrong now,” he said.
Since the offer was made, Boeing has announced a $600 million quarterly profit, increased its dividend payment to shareholders and restarted a stock buy-back plan.
Boeing clearly can afford to pay more, Hartig said. “We’re asking for only a small portion of the profits we earned for them in the first three months of this year.”
Hartig and other Wichita union leaders are in the Puget Sound region this week for SPEEA’s annual meetings. While they’re here, the union is organizing training sessions with veterans of SPEEA’s 2001 strike, who can offer practical advice and moral support, said Charles Bofferding, the union’s executive director.
Boeing leadership “better not make the same mistake in Wichita that they made in Seattle,” Bofferding told union members during the rally.
SPEEA’s members around Puget Sound, who approved a three-year pact in 2002, are watching how the company treats their Wichita colleagues, union president Jennifer MacKay said.
“What’s going on in Wichita today could very well be the fight you have in 2005,” she said. “You can’t take something from our right hand and think our left hand won’t feel the pain.”
Reporter Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3454 or corliss@heraldnet.com.
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