Generations coveted Boeing jobs. Strike reveals how much has changed.

By Ian Duncan, Rachel Lerman and Lori Aratani / The Washington Post

Ariel McKenzie recalls that it was a big deal when her father landed a job at Boeing 20 years ago. So when he suggested she also join the company, it seemed like a smart move: Working at the company had given her dad and the other Boeing long-timers a good life, paying for roomy houses, nice trucks, motorbikes and vacations.

But after a decade making aircraft parts at a factory in Auburn, McKenzie, 35, said the job hasn’t given her the same financial boost.

“It’s a very comfortable upper-middle-class family that these Boeing jobs used to create. … It’s just not the case anymore,” McKenzie said. Only working a second job or logging massive overtime hours could match it, she said. “It feels demoralizing.”

Generations of workers coveted Boeing jobs in the Seattle area, where the company was founded over a century ago and helped usher in the age of global air travel. Going to work in its cavernous factories promised economic security and the pride of working on the world’s most iconic planes: the ubiquitous 737, the giant 747 Jumbo Jet and the high-tech 787 Dreamliner. The economic benefits passed down within families, as children and grandchildren landed jobs with the aerospace giant.

But many of the 33,000 workers who went on strike last week after rejecting the company’s four-year contract offer said that sense of shared prosperity has all but evaporated in the past two decades. Company managers, focused on financial performance, won costly concessions from the Machinists union including ending traditional pensions and wage increases that have not kept pace with inflation. At the same time, the Puget Sound region experienced a tech boom that has sent housing costs skyrocketing.

Reeling from the blows, bitter Boeing employees say they have been left behind even as executives claimed huge pay packages.

The strike that began Friday, the first for Boeing in 16 years, comes at a pivotal moment for the jet manufacturer as a new chief executive tries to chart a course out of a deep crisis in the wake of two 737 Max crashes five years ago that killed 346 people and January’s midair door-panel blowout on an Alaska Airlines jet that renewed scrutiny of manufacturing and safety failures.

Boeing said Monday it is preserving cash with a hiring freeze and other measures during the strike, which analysts say could last two to five weeks. Negotiations, with the assistance of a federal mediator, were scheduled to resume Tuesday.

Factory workers say they’re ready to help the company achieve excellence again — if they get a favorable contract that makes up for years of labor tensions.

“This is about addressing the past, and this is about fighting for our future,” Jon Holden, the president of International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 751, said as he announced the vote to strike.

That past includes what many workers now see as a 20th-century golden age, with the launch of the 707 in the 1950s heralding the beginning of the jet era. But it has also seen more recent rounds of divisive labor negotiations that led to the Machinists narrowly voting to give up their pensions in 2014. The offer they rejected Thursday included 25% wage increases over four years and improved health and retirement benefits. But the raises were less than what many workers had hoped. The deal eliminated a bonus program, and it didn’t restore fixed-benefit pensions, which have been phased out across much of the United States in favor of contributions to 401(k) stock plans.

The average pay for Boeing Machinists has risen roughly 15% over the past decade to $75,000, a pace that is far behind soaring costs in the Seattle area, according to figures provided by the union and company. The region’s housing price index rose 128% in the past decade; the average home sale price in Seattle last month was $835,000.

Asked about workers’ shifting views of their prosperity, Boeing said the average pay for union members in Washington and Oregon would have topped $106,000 by the end of the contract, before overtime. The company also pointed to education benefits it offers, including allowances for college programs.

Despite its challenges, Boeing remains a global behemoth, with just one major competitor, Europe’s Airbus. It has a backlog of 5,400 commercial planes on order, valued at $437 billion.

McKenzie’s dad, who worked in machine maintenance before taking on a full-time role with the union, touted Boeing’s benefits in 2014 to his daughter. For a single mom with a young daughter, she said the money was good at first — perhaps as much as she could have made as a nurse. So she stayed. But with inflation, McKenzie said her income hasn’t kept up.

Now McKenzie’s own daughter is 15, and McKenzie said she couldn’t picture recommending the job to her.

“It makes me kind of sad that’s the case,” she said. “These jobs have fed families in this community for generations and generations and generations, and most people now don’t want to recommend their kids to go and work there.”

While Boeing has its own unique troubles, people in factory jobs around the country, especially at the big automakers, have seen only limited gains in wages and the erosion of their benefits. Pay for most manufacturing jobs had fallen behind pay for all private sector jobs by 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“What makes the decline in wages and conditions in factory work particularly striking is that factory jobs used to be good,”said Eric Blanc, an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University. “You used to be able to have what was considered a middle-class life.”

Blanc said the surging wealth in the Seattle area, driven by the likes of Microsoft and Amazon, and the accompanying soaring housing costs magnify the impact on Boeing workers.

Mylo Lang, 24, recalled how his grandfather sustained a middle-class lifestyle on a Boeing janitor’s pay, living in a home in a middle-class part of Seattle. Lang stayed in that home in his own early days working at Boeing, helping him get on his feet. But, he said, as an apprentice machinist at a parts facility there’s no way he could hope to afford somewhere of his own in the same neighborhood.

“The material conditions available to people are very different now than they were then,” said Lang.

In 2001, Boeing moved its corporate headquarters to Chicago, putting thousands of miles between the people who built its airplanes and those making decisions at the highest levels. Since then, it has used the threat of moving jobs elsewhere to wring concessions from the union. The company decided in 2009 to open a production line for its 787 Dreamliner in South Carolina, a step the National Labor Relations Board alleged was taken to avoid labor unrest and was “inherently destructive” of workers’ rights. Then, in negotiations in 2011, it raised the prospect of manufacturing the new 737 Max outside of the Seattle area.

The next round of bargaining, in 2014, was especially contentious. The company said it might move work on a new version of the 777 out of the state and pressed workers to give up the traditional pensions that guaranteed them a steady income in retirement. Union members narrowly backed the deal and took a strike off the table until its expiration this year.

“Boeing’s track record of engaging with its workforce has not been successful over the last two decades,” said Michel Merluzeau, director of aerospace and defense market analysis at AIR Intelligence and Research. “The relationship has been excessively transactional in nature.”

The question of where to build Boeing’s next airplane was again a factor in the current negotiations. The offer workers rejected last week included a commitment to the Seattle area, but with plans for a new plane still hazy, some employees said the guarantee was worth little.

While younger workers say they’re struggling, 65-year-old Francis King remembers a different Boeing. King has worked at the company for 37 years and recalled how it was a place people came to build a long career. King is approaching retirement, but his son is preparing to start work at Boeing in November, and he’s seen younger workers take the view that “it’s a job, it’s not a career.”

“When I was hired on, buying a house was in sight. Buying a car. Living in this area,” King said. “Who wouldn’t want to come here? Then the tide turned.”

Like both analysts and longtime workers, King traces the change to Boeing’s 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas. It was a smaller company, but its management team rose to power at Boeing, bringing with it a new focus on financial performance.

Workers have denounced what they call exorbitant executive compensation. Dave Calhoun, the former Boeing chief executive who stepped down this year in the wake of the Alaska door-panel blowout, received a $32.8 million compensation package last year.

In recent months, the company, after agreeing to plead guilty to defrauding U.S. regulators in connection with 737 Max crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, has vowed to put a greater emphasis on safety and quality. Robert “Kelly” Ortberg, who took over as chief executive in August and stands to make $22 million next year, is an engineer and spent his first day at the 737 factory just outside Seattle. The company is also moving to acquire Spirit AeroSystems, a key supplier that was once a part of Boeing but spun out in an efficiency drive. Securing a labor deal was a key next step in Boeing’s recovery, analysts say, and a prolonged strike will prove costly.

Members of Seattle’s Boeing families, even while on strike, say they want the company’s stature restored. Machinist Jeremy Caldon followed his grandfather and uncle to work at Boeing more than 15 years ago.

“I always wanted to work at Boeing because he was there,” he said of his grandfather, who was a member of the engineers’ union. “Because they gave him a great life there. It was something to do, something to honor.”