Westneat: Boeing strikers never forget

“What we’re hearing from the Boeing Machinists right now isn’t just the usual labor-management posturing,” I wrote back then, in November 2013. “It’s a primal scream of the middle class.”

It felt as if the political and corporate classes were colluding in a race to the bottom. Of course the workers feel all that like it was yesterday.

“This membership has gone through a lot,” union President Jon Holden said last week. “There are some deep wounds — takeaways and concessions, threats, job loss.”

“Boeing management was incredibly arrogant about it,” Richard Aboulafia, of AeroDynamic Advisory, recalled on KUOW. “So there are just enough workers left with the memory of that horrible experience to, understandably, have a level of anger.”

What makes the bad chemistry between company and workers more harsh is that the trivialized unions turned out to be correct about most everything.

“For more than a generation, Boeing’s unions have been screaming that management was destroying the company,” Gautam Mukunda, a professor at the Yale School of Management, said in a recent interview. “And at this point, basically everyone looks at Boeing and says ‘well, the unions were right.’

“The central critique they made, that the management had focused on short-term profits and destroyed Boeing’s engineering excellence, you know, I don’t know anyone who denies that anymore. That is just true.”

Ouch. You can see why this is all a bigger wound than could be bandaged with a pay raise.

I’ve noticed that some Machinists no longer call it the Boeing Company. They call it the “Boeing Stock Buyback Company.” That’s in honor of the $68 billion the company devoted last decade to repurchasing its own shares to reward investors rather than its engineers and line workers.

As retired Boeing physicist Stan Sorscher summed up: “The point of this business model is that the super-stakeholder (Boeing) extracts gains from the subordinate stakeholders for the short-term benefit of investors.”

So what now?

The Machinists have been carrying strike signs that read “No pension, no planes!” That formula seems clear enough. The company counters that pensions are impossible — despite the spectacle in March of its ousted Commercial Division CEO, Stan Deal, leaving with a pension set to pay him more than $315,000 per month.

Overcoming gaudy hypocrisy like that demands big gestures. If no pension, why not offer the Machinists stock grants and options, like the CEOs get? Give them ownership stake in the company. It can be had for cheap right now, and it could go a long way as an apology.

“Offer the workers some level of a say in how the company is managed for the next few years,” suggested Mukunda, the Yale professor. “They couldn’t possibly do worse than the last few CEOs of Boeing.”

Ouch again. But a fair point — incredibly.

This is the strike of the long memories. Money is a salve, but it alone can’t fix all the bad blood. Boeing’s going to have to go much further in acknowledging and repairing the past to settle this one.