Boeing engineers, technical workers reject contract offer

By Dan Catchpole

SEATTLE, Aug 21 (Reuters) - Boeing engineers and technical workers overwhelmingly rejected the U.S. planemaker's four-year contract offer, union officials said on Friday.

The 17,000 members of SPEEA, the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, also voted convincingly to give the negotiating team the power to declare a strike when the contract expires on Oct. 6, the union said.

The engineers voted 64% against the tentative agreement and the techs were about 72% against, the union said. No new talks are scheduled between Boeing and SPEEA, the company's largest white-collar union.

"We’re disappointed our engineers and technical workforce voted no on our offer. As a result, we are now implementing our strike contingency plan and diverting the dollars we had wanted to invest in our SPEEA-represented team to prepare for a potential strike," Boeing's Ben Nimmergut, vice president and functional chief engineer for production engineering, said in a statement.

"We have no choice but to implement our contingency plan. We have a responsibility to the rest of our workforce and our customers to build on our progress over the last two years and maintain our momentum," he said.

SPEEA members "really want to have careers and not jobs at Boeing," said Katheryn Durkee, another member of the union's negotiating team. 

A work stoppage by SPEEA members would further delay Boeing's certification campaigns for its 737 Max 10 and 777-9 planes, both of which are several years behind schedule.

A union spokesperson said its negotiation team plans to survey members to see what it will take to approve a four-year contract with Boeing.

The strike authorization vote "gives a lot of transparency," said Kevin Boyd, a member of SPEEA's negotiating team. "The membership has a strong need here, and they're willing to do what it takes to get it."

Several union members who voted no told Reuters the wage increases were not high enough to keep up with the high cost of living in the Seattle area and is less than competing companies have paid their employees. 

The offer included wage increases tied to inflation — capped at 3% — and individual performance, as well as other unspecified metrics determined by the company.

Several SPEEA members said that capping inflation-based raises at 3% would nearly guarantee their salaries fall behind inflation. 

The Consumer Price Index, an inflation benchmark, rose 4.5% over the past year for the Seattle area, where most SPEEA members work, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in July. 

Boeing said its offer would have been the largest wage increase for SPEEA in 40 years.

SPEEA has not negotiated a new contract for its Northwest members with the company since 2012. Members approved contract extensions in 2016 and 2020. 

The engineers and technicians units negotiate together with Boeing, but they vote separately.

SPEEA members last went on strike for 40 days in 2000. 

In 2024, Boeing commercial airplane production in the Seattle area ground to a halt when the roughly 33,000 members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers went on strike for seven weeks.

(Reporting by Dan Catchpole in Seattle and Allison Lampert in Montreal; editing by Philippa Fletcher, David Gregorio and Rod Nickel)