Leeham on-line poll: 61% expect no contract agreement with SPEEA, Boeing; 57% expect strike

We put two polls into the public domain this week, asking whether SPEEA and Boeing will reach an agreement next month; and if not, will SPEEA strike (a target date is Feb. 1).

The results are in: 61% expect no agreement when talks resume Jan. 9 and 57% expect SPEEA to strike. (These figures reflect results as of this writing. The data may change after this post because polling is still open.)

The percentages are a significant drop from the 96% vote that rejected the Boeing contract offer in October, but it should be noted there is no new offer on the table for SPEEA members to read and evaluate.

Additionally, this poll is of our readers and not specific to SPEEA.

Clearly the expectations are not good.

SPEEA’s executive director, Ray Goforth, is on record expecting talks to fail immediately when they resume because the gap between the union asks and the Boeing positions are so far apart. A strike vote will be solicited once talks break off.

Unlike the IAM 751, which requires a two-thirds affirmative vote for a strike, SPEEA requires only a simple majority.

“We have no specific target [for a strike vote] other than that,” Goforth tells us. ” SPEEA is a democratically run union.  Decisions are made by majority vote as supplemented by broad consultation with the membership (townhall type meetings, polls, feedback from the elected councils).
“In the run-up to the October 1st vote the Boeing management negotiating team confidently predicted that the contract would be adopted because they knew what the employees wanted better than the union,” Goforth wrote us.
“Today, we at hearing the same language from Boeing management.  Today, we are experiencing the same dismissiveness and disregard from Boeing management.
“Boeing management is still proposing across-the-board pay and benefit cuts for engineers and techs while increasing compensation for themselves and the shareholders.  We expect any such proposal to be rejected by the membership.”

16 Comments on “Leeham on-line poll: 61% expect no contract agreement with SPEEA, Boeing; 57% expect strike

  1. The share holders are the people risking their money on Boeing. They should expect benefits and returns better than and before any of the unions, Mr. Goforth.

    • Sorry, share holders invest just a bit of money.
      _Workers_ invest a significant part of their life.

      • Sorry the employees can leave anytime and seek more of what they want elsewhere. Employees don’t invest anything, unless they buy stock in the company. They put in a day’s work for a day’s pay. They don’t “invest” their life, or a part of their life.

      • A person who spends 25 years of her life developing the skills, knowledge, and understanding to be a proficient large-aircraft landing gear brake cooling system designer (for example) is far more heavily invested in her employer than a Wall Street fund manager who buys and sells shares all day. At the age of 47 she can’t just pick up and find another similar job since (a) there is only two other employers in the world and she isn’t going to be hired in France or Russia (b) no one hires people with that type of specific skill for other work if they are older than 40 (regardless of what the law says).

        If you really want to create an economic system where there is no incentive for people to put in the long years needed to develop specialized, extremely technical skills then you need to think about and explain the long-term consequences of doing so. IMHO those consequences are eventual collapse of your society’s ability to execute complex technical projects; armies of mercenaries just don’t work as well as organic entities. Or at all.

    • Unless they invested when the company went public or participated in a new emission, shareholders have not done one bit to develop the company, they are passive owners and not even remotely part in the value added chain.

  2. It is sad that the shareholder is viewed as the all mighty. Without the employees to develop and deliver the product, then the shareholder has nothing. It is the employees that have the technical expertises, the shareholder is investing the money to get a return. Also, a manager or CEO is as good as his/her employees and their ability to recognize and properly ulitize the available talent.

      • What was the last date that Boeing did a significant issue of new shares? By significant I mean 25% of more of the value of the company (you can adjust that to 20% or 15% or whatever). Entities buying and selling stock of long-established firms on the exchanges {1} aren’t investing any money in the entity itself; they are trading a legal fiction of a claim on future dividends – yet no entities other than public utilities have payed serious dividends since the 1920s.

        {1} Something like 90% of stocks traded on Wall Street move among funds; very little is traded by “investors” as classically defined.

  3. Money does not create anything, and certainly not value.

    Management 101 states the value adding vector is the workforce, not the capital

  4. kc135topboom :
    Sorry the employees can leave anytime and seek more of what they want elsewhere. Employees don’t invest anything, unless they buy stock in the company. They put in a day’s work for a day’s pay. They don’t “invest” their life, or a part of their life.

    Ahh, I see.
    Neolitihic Capitalists. About the most primitive lifeform around, haven’t even learned to fission 😉

    But it actually matches current fundi management principles.
    Fortunately when these bright girls and boys have mathed the reality of their
    production process to their primitive model they are no longer able to produce anything.

  5. Customers are selfish critters: they want the best product at the lowest cost. Seeing ructions inside the manufacturer starts to raise their concerns about products and delivery schedules. Management may have the power, but they’d be wise not to put their throats to the razor and then shake their heads “No” – pyrrhic victories are not really victories at all.

    • Stop that!

      Just a note: shareholders that did not buy their shares from the company in an initial offering or a new emmission did not contribute anything to the company, not pne penny. What they paid for their shares went to whomever they bought them from.

      If you believe otherwise, you, to quote our dear contributor Howard, “don’t know jack!”

      Then you need an Economics 101 textbook. Send be your adress, I’ll give you mine.

      • What happens if all the share holders decides that they want to get the money back. Of course they can sell it to someone else, but if they were no buyers, what happens then. If I have money in a bank, I can expect to get that money if I wish to get it out of the bank, no? Even if share was bought after the company was formed, whoever owns a share, owns a part of it and is expected to get the market value of it, or something similar in value. If the company goes bankrupt, the workers loose their jobs (a sad thing indeed), shareholders might loose their entire life fortune.

  6. J.T. :
    What happens if all the share holders decides that they want to get the money back. Of course they can sell it to someone else, but if they were no buyers, what happens then. If I have money in a bank, I can expect to get that money if I wish to get it out of the bank, no? Even if share was bought after the company was formed, whoever owns a share, owns a part of it and is expected to get the market value of it, or something similar in value. If the company goes bankrupt, the workers loose their jobs (a sad thing indeed), shareholders might loose their entire life fortune.

    A couple of points you seem to miss:
    * Shares are not “money in the bank”
    ** you seem to overvalue the security of “money in the bank”
    * stockholder are freely replacable.
    * The market value of a corporation can be ZERO.
    * If you don’t pay adequately the persons creating added value with your
    money that will happen very fast 😉
    see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_(finance)

  7. A couple of points you seem to miss:
    * Shares are not “money in the bank”
    ** you seem to overvalue the security of “money in the bank”
    * stockholder are freely replacable.
    * The market value of a corporation can be ZERO.
    * If you don’t pay adequately the persons creating added value with your
    money that will happen very fast
    see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_(finance)

    No money in the bank is totally secure, but with Federal government backing (at least in the US) you should have a very good “secured” amount (I think is $250,000.00) as of today. So, if I have that amount, would I invested in a company that guarantees me nothing? Companies need shareholders more than the people need companies to invest in. After all, plenty of people decide to stock cash inside of mattresses because they do not trust the bank, and less so a company for them to invest that money in. If a company has zero value, what’s the incentive for investing in it? You can replace stocks. Can you easily replace the amount of money that a certain investor would be willing to invest then decide not to? I know that when certain not so good grade is given to a company, investors would be weary of investing in that company. Actual shareholders might see their shares depreciate, which then can create a shares “sell off,” further dropping the price of all outstanding shares which is no good for anybody involved. So, If you have a million dollars to invest right now, will you invested in Boeing or Chrysler?

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