It’s Tuesday evening, Feb. 19, and we are at SPEEA headquarters to watch the ballot counting on the contract vote offered by Boeing.
It’s 6:25pm and it’s too soon to spot a trend. However, as we watched the ballots separated from he envelopes were could see a lot of “Accepts” and a lot of “Rejects.” As can be expected, the Accepts do not approve of a strike authorization and those rejecting the contract OK a strike.
Final results aren’t expected until after 9pm. Stay tuned here for updates as well as on Twitter @leehamnews
6:45pm PST: Counting underway, tilt toward Accept at one table.
7:00pm PST: Can see several stations; it’s too close to call a trend.
7:15pm PST: As we scan the room at the counting tables we can see, it looks like this vote will be close. Caveat: we can only see perhaps 25% of the voting stations. Best we can see, it looks like the tilt is toward Accept. This is not at all like the IAM 751 vote in 2008, in which the Reject was obvious and clear early in the evening.
7:20pm PST: SPEEA reminds us there are two employee groups voting tonight, the Professional engineers and the Technical group. One group could Accept and one group could Reject. One could OK a strike, the the might not.
7:25pm PST: In response to Shuper, “Accept” or “Reject” refers to the contract itself. “Do” or “Do Not” Authorize a strike is the other vote. We’re not trying to identify the Do or Do Not because these are basically tracking Accept or Reject. There is no visual on ballots (as there was with the IAM): both questions are on the same ballot (they were separate at the IAM, so a visual card stacking was obvious). The votes are tallied by the old-fashioned five-count hash marks on a sheet of paper. That’s what we are spotting.
8:00pm PST: Kind of quiet. One Professional vote counter says his table is neck-and-neck. A Techie tells us his group tends to be more militant but he doesn’t have a feel for the vote.
8:15pm PST: A bit of a surprise: several vote counting stations appear to be done.
8:30pm PST: Results will be coming “soonish.”
9:00pm PST: SPEEA first told us 20-25 min, now saying 45-60 min.
Twitter: The Herald @EverettHerald
RT @chcktylr: For you engineers, that’s 79.17068889864% of membership. RT @sbhatt: 18,043 ballots cast in #speea vote on #boeing contract
9:15pm PST: While we are killing time here at SPEEA, there is speculation that the FAA may not approve the temporary fix of the 787 (no news there) and this means a full replacement of the battery design might take as long as 18-24 months. We don’t have enough data to give credence to this timeline but–if it were to be this long, the Airbus A350 might enter service before the 787 re-enters service. Think about that.
The results are here.
