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As Boeing’s 17,000-member white-collar union prepares to vote on the company’s latest contract offer Thursday, the deal on the table appears to have more momentum this time around.
Members of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace rejected Boeing’s first offer last month, with union members saying the deal did not include a high enough wage proposal or sufficient guaranteed pay raises.
SPEEA members also overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike, if the union’s negotiating team were to call for one when the current contract expires on Oct. 6. Union leadership said the vote showed a deep mistrust of Boeing management.
Days after resuming bargaining this month, Boeing and SPEEA’s negotiating teams reached a second tentative agreement, with a 10% guaranteed wage increase effective shortly after the vote and a guaranteed 4% annual raise for the length of the contract.
On Tuesday, a group of over 100 union leaders, known as the bargaining unit councils, recommended rank-and-file members vote yes on the proposal, a reversal from the same group’s reaction to the first offer.
Last time, the council representing analysts, technicians, planners and specialists, SPEEA’s smaller bargaining unit, recommended members reject the deal. The council representing SPEEA’s professional unit, including engineers and scientists, could not reach a majority agreement on how members should vote.
This time, the council for the professional unit determined the contract offer “meets most of the needs of the members,” the union said in a statement.
The council for the tech unit was more cautious, advising members to “examine both the advantages and limitations of the proposed agreement.”
'Phenomenal' offer
Though SPEEA's negotiation team recommended members vote for the deal, the offer did not go far enough to earn the team's endorsement, two members of the team, Katheryn Durkee and Kevin Boyd, told The Seattle Times in an interview Wednesday. Both declined to share what would have tipped the scales and emphasized that the team felt it was a good offer.
It wasn't exactly everything we were looking for, although it was the vast majority of it," Boyd said.
Since unveiling the offer details, the negotiation team has received a "more positive response" than it did after the first offer, Boyd said.
The Seattle Times spoke to nine union members about the merits of the deal. They all asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of union negotiations.
Six of those workers said they planned to switch from a no vote to a yes, citing the higher upfront raise and guaranteed annual wage increases.
“They addressed a lot of the concerns that we had,” said one employee, a quality assurance investigator in Everett. “I don’t know if you’re ever going to have (a contract) where everybody is going to be fully happy, but I think this is a pretty fair one.”
Another worker, an engineer in Everett, called the 10% upfront raise "phenomenal."
“When I look at the offers, I ask myself two questions: Is this going to allow me to buy a house? And is this going to allow me to buy a house while simultaneously funding my hobbies? And the answer to those questions is yes,” they said.
Another two workers said they still planned to vote no. One said the wage proposal didn't go far enough to offset years of wages that didn't keep up with the rising cost of living in Seattle. The other said the proposal didn't match the 43% compounded wage increase that Boeing's blue-collar Machinists union secured in 2024.
One worker told The Seattle Times Wednesday they were still undecided. The offer is good, they said, but "not excellent for a workforce that built the backbone of the industry over generations."
With the outcome of the vote uncertain, union members were still preparing for the possibility of a strike, the worker said.
Ben Nimmergut, Boeing’s vice president and functional chief engineer for production engineering, said in a statement Wednesday, “We’re optimistic our employees will see the value in our improved contract offers and how we’ve addressed their top priorities.
Details of the deal
The contract on the table offers union members an average pay increase of 32% over its four-year length. That includes a 10% guaranteed wage increase, effective Oct. 2, if approved, and then a 4% raise in March.
The contract would increase wage pools, or a pot of money divided among the workforce, by 6% for the next three years. Of that pool, individuals would 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 first deal, union members would have seen an average pay increase of 26.5% over the length of the contract.
The union also secured a one-time salary bump for about 800 workers who were not in the midmarket salary range compared with Boeing’s competitors.
“Our team sees this action as an acknowledgement by Boeing of underlying inequities in pay that have festered for years,” the union’s bargaining team wrote in a letter to members explaining their support for the contract.
If the contract is approved, the average base salary for SPEEA’s professional unit would increase from $152,000 to $208,000, an $11,000 bump from the first offer, according to Boeing.
The average base salary for SPEEA’s tech unit would increase from $119,000 to $163,000, an $8,000 bump from the first offer.
The second offer maintained three additional paid days off and three days of bereavement leave annually. The contract kept the same increased rate for overtime pay, though the union’s negotiation team told members it had tried to up that rate again without success.
The second offer further lowered the number of mandatory overtime hours for the professional unit, from 144 hours per quarter to 96. It kept the same lowered rate from the first contract offer for the tech unit, from 144 to 112 hours.
During this round of negotiations, the union again discussed more protections to prevent Boeing from moving union work to nonunion shops around the country or outside the U.S.
The company was “simply unwilling to guarantee specific jobs” at each level, the union’s negotiation team said in its letter to members.
The new contract offer includes a commitment from Boeing to provide an update on each job code twice a year to help employees gauge “the future of each skill” at the company, the union’s letter continued.
Such an update may have helped the union anticipate a “precipitous drop” in employment for manufacturing engineering planners, a group of workers that “have been particularly hurt by outsourcing and offshoring,” the union said.
SPEEA members will vote electronically on the latest contract starting Thursday, with polls closing Oct. 1.
Speaking at a financial conference last week, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg warned that a strike would disrupt the company, particularly its efforts to certify the long-delayed 777X family and increase production rates for the 737 MAX.
“We’re working very hard to try to avoid any kind of work stoppage,” Ortberg said. “That’s our key number one, two, three, four, five priority because that impact would be significant.”
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