Is there a march tomorrow? If so, what time and where is the meetup? I feel like most union members don't know about this. Everyone i ask has no idea it's going on.

*Should it come to it\*, any musician engineers & techs out there willing to join in on forming a pep band? Could visit various sites for encouragement and/or serenade the execs outside the delivery center.

Set list suggestions also welcome :)

Very much a newbie of ~2 years so bear with me.

It just seems to me that there’s very little urgency at this stage, but is this a normal timeline? I assumed negotiations would resume this week, but we’ll end up going over 2 weeks from rejection to resumed negotiations. Is this a normal timeline? Just seems like both sides could’ve been more proactive.

Boeing has now had a deeper dive into the SPEEA survey data. Boeing only needs enough people to become flip customers to get the sale. They're good at that. And predictably, they will try and split the Techs from the Profs.

I predict Boeing comes back with a little more guaranteed money bait up front and a guaranteed minimum raise inside the wage pools. I'm still not clear on what we actually want from everything else. 

Like COLA; the offer where COLA affects our minimum raise and could potentially move it downward seemed odd to me. It's almost like: if inflation drops, we get less guaranteed money and Boeing gets more flexibility to use the pool as they see fit.

And now that I say that, I have another question: How do new hires affect the wage pools? How exactly are these pools defined? Who is included in each pool, when is the population established, and how much discretion does Boeing have in dividing them up? Could the pools be structured narrowly enough that Boeing has more discretion over where the money goes? I'm not saying that's happening. Maybe I am uninformed on this but I’m also wondering how the boundaries of the wage pools are drawn. Can Boeing change the population or grouping in a way that changes the dollar amount of the pools and who competes for the money? I want to understand the requirements and verification methods. 

And what does “growing and investing in the SPEEA workforce” means. I hope it isn't placation while work and capability are being built somewhere else OKC, Charleston, the Gulf States, or more in India or Brazil. That seems to be a big risk on their part, given all the Boeing experienced contractors we have had to thankfully, pull back over the last several years. After all, building capability somewhere else is mostly a matter of time and money. If they want a new plane in ten or so years they do not have much time for that development.

My prediction: the next offer will be much better on guaranteed money than it is on structural job protection.

If Boeing gives us enough money to make the offer attractive, but doesn't give us meaningful protections or really much of anything else what do we all do?

Because Boeing doesn't need to convince everybody.

They only need 50% + 1 to overtake the market. But I wonder what the Wall Street will value more in the long run: lower labor costs, or confidence that Boeing still has the experienced workforce and capability to design, certify, build, and support airplanes?

And finally, I'm rooting for you Boeing. Make the right move.

I agree. We should keep pushing forward. But we also need to be smart enough not to win one thing and lose another.

Northwest Airlines is one warning. In 2001, its mechanics won raises of about 24%, but the contract also allowed Northwest to outsource up to 38% of their work. By 2005, Northwest was already at 37%. And in parallel with negotiations, Northwest spent more than a year preparing to operate without much of the AMFA workforce—hiring about 1,200 replacements, assigning more than 300 managers to maintenance, and lining up outside maintenance vendors. When negotiations failed and AMFA struck, Northwest executed the plan it had already built.

Alaska Airlines is another warning. The current IAM contract had language that allowed some outsourcing under specific cost conditions. The problem was that the language did not stipulate locations, only the allowance that oversight allowed Alaska to apply that language “against” the entire Seattle ramp operation. In 2005, during contract negotiations, Alaska outsourced the seattle work and 472 Alaska jobs disappeared. IAM said the contract did not allow it and fought the decision. Three years later, an arbitrator agreed: Alaska had violated the contract. But by then the work had been gone for three years. The union won the argument after losing the jobs.

That's the warning for us. It isn't enough for a Boeing contract to say outsourcing is limited or work is protected. We need to understand exactly what Boeing is allowed to move, where it can move it, under what conditions, and what stops the move while a dispute is being decided.

Because I don't want to discover three years from now that we agreed to language intended for one purpose, Boeing found a broader way to use it, and by the time we win the argument, our jobs are already somewhere else.

So this isn't an argument to stop pushing for better wages. It is an argument to keep our eyes on the whole contract.

Get the guaranteed raise.

Get meaningful wage growth.

But don't trade away anything to get it.

Read the outsourcing language. Read the subcontracting language. Read the work-transfer language. And most importantly, read what happens if Boeing violates it.

A contract is a set of requirements. We know how to validate requirements. We don't fix one problem by creating another.

MOVE FORWARD. GET THE MONEY. PROTECT THE WORK.

WIN THE CONTRACT. DON'T LOSE THE FUTURE.

Boeing may already be in the game of “diversifying” its workforce. And when there is a financial plan to move work, the math probably looks something like:

Move the work - accept the transition cost - develop capability elsewhere - eventually achieve lower recurring cost.

But after watching Boeing for the last two decades, I think there is a bit missing:

Move the work - accept the transition cost - develop capability elsewhere - introduce unknown plan failure modes - absorb the resulting losses and recovery costs - eventually achieve the projected lower recurring cost.

The failure modes might be rework, schedule, certification, quality, supplier problems, rediscovering an old lesson, or simply taking years longer than planned to build the capability that already existed. I mean they couldn’t experience a free fall or anything.

That's the cost we need Boeing to put into their business case.

We shouldn't try to make moving work impossible. We should make keeping the work with the known experts on Boeing airplanes the more cost-effective choice.

Don't win the raise and lose the work.

We are highly sought after skilled labor. NEVER FORGET THAT.

Boeing needs what we know. Negotiate like it.

As far as I know, Boeing insurance coverage would stop at the end of the month if SPEEA memebers go on strike. I hope the next round of negotation would produce better deal for both . However, if SPEEA would go on strike and it last more than 1 month or up to 2-2.5 months, would we be able to sign up for Cobra coverage or WA Healthcare Marketplace since unexpected things could occur beyond our planning
Any thoughts?

Do you think after reading the letter from Ben people will be more scared and more inclined to vote for "Yes" for the next contract offer. Or people are currently more pissed off and more inclined to vote for "No"? Whats your thought?

Just food for thought regarding proposed wage increases ...

Water is pretty important for most people.

For the Puget Sound region, the average residential water bill increase from July 2025 to July 2026 is about 6.3%.

Comparing that to the wage pools proposed, what is the likelihood employees will continue to lose ground throughout the contract duration?

What was the average Boeing executive total compensation increase?

I'm disappointed in the lack of awareness and emphasis when it comes to the need to sustain and grow the share of the SPEEA workforce relative to the non-unionized workforce. SPEEA was about 12% of Boeing's workforce in 2000 and is about 9% today. There's nothing stopping Boeing from further expanding the share of the non-union workforce by moving work to non-unionized sites, offshoring, or through any other number of methods.

We need to fight for a contract that addresses and rectifies this. Boeing is handing SPEEA a suicide note and demanding that we sign it. If we don't fight for SPEEA's future with all the power we have now, we won't get another chance later.

If Boeing continues to not want to budge on increasing the overtime premium in this next contract negotiation, would people like to see an option to save any overtime hours to be used for vacation throughout the year? The option would give employees to get cashed out or save it into a bucket for PTO. Any hours not used for PTO would just get paid out at the end of the year. This seems to be a good trade off that if Boeing doesn’t want to give us at least $20+ on premium pay, to make working overtime worthwhile. Would you want this alternative?

Curious to hear what other members thoughts are

WANT TO FUND BOEING’S FUTURE? INVEST IN THE PEOPLE WHO ENGINEER IT.

(And who warned you the problems were coming before they ended up in the news and on the balance sheet.)

Does anyone happen to know if the post contract downvote survey results have been released yet?

I searched the SPEEA website and even logged in to see if the results were posted, and didn’t find anything.

I know there a meeting today and the survey results were supposed to be released then.

Was that speea protesting outside of the Seattle delivery center? I couldn’t tell cause I couldn’t read the signs but they were wearing red shirts and had a megaphone.

Just curious what people thought of the CEO webcast yesterday and how he addressed the union contracts negotiations. He seemed much more congenial than Ben's email last Friday. Is this part of the game, good cop, bad cop? Or was he genuine in wanting to work with the union to find something that works for both sides?

There is an old lesson in car sales: An irritated customer is easier to close than a comfortable one.

Why?

Because once people become frustrated, angry, anxious, or exhausted, they start wanting the situation to just end. “Fine. Let's just get this over with.”

Don't do that with this contract.

Boeing will do what Boeing does. Boeing may make statements we don't like. They may tell us what an offer costs. They may bring in scabs, threaten us with consequences, or what could disappear from the next offer. Some of it may make you angry. Some of it may make you nervous.

None of that determines whether the contract is good.

This is a negotiation.

• Don’t negotiate angry. We design and build airplanes. We work to schedules, solve problems, and make decisions based on facts. Stay calm.
• Don’t negotiate afraid. We identify risks, evaluate consequences, and develop ways forward. Stay confident.
• Don’t negotiate offended. We deal with disagreement, criticism, changing requirements, and competing priorities every day. Stay objective.
• Don’t negotiate because you want the discomfort to stop. We work problems until they are resolved, not merely until they become uncomfortable. Stay patient.
• Don’t let them divide us. No airplane gets designed, built, delivered, or supported by one person or team. We do this together. Stay united.

Read the proposal. Look at the numbers. Look at inflation. Look at wages. Look at benefits. Look at outsourcing and work preservation. Look at what it means for your career and for Boeing workers four, eight, and twenty years from now.

Then make a rational decision about whether the deal is good enough.

Boeing has engineered its strategy. But remember who we are. They’re business majors. WE are the engineers. WE identify problems and solve them. WE evaluate risk. WE work the plans and schedules every day. This is our domain.

Today it was discovered that Boeing has implemented their "contingency plan". I don't know about engineers and the prof side, but on the tech side they are having other companies posting jobs for contractors to work at Boeing sites and shockingly enough for our jobs.

Clearly the disappointed narcissist father would rather spend a chunk of change to hire scabs than give us a decent contract.

And before any of you trolls say anything, I am very well aware hiring scabs costs less than a new contract.

Shall we use this post as our “unifying thread” for slogans and messaging we can rally around and flood online?

short, repeatable, and clever for posts/comments/signs etc.

A couple to start:

NO LESS THAN 10%

TEN OR TRY AGAIN

PROTECT WHAT FLIES, NO NERDS NO BIRDS

upvote the clever ones you’d actually use.

The goal is to have a handful of phrases we can all rally behind that are also consumable by the media yes?

If it’s catchy and clever, we can flood the waters and make it undeniable where we stand.

What I struggle with about this latest deal is disappointment about Boeing and SPEEA.

Now that the chips have fallen it’s clear that Boeings early negotiation efforts were not in good faith but instead to allow them more time for strike mitigation efforts.

It is absolutely not unreasonable to decline a first offer. However for SPEEA to agree to early negation is bewildering. As someone who has strived to excel I struggle with finding the motivation to even care about the production stream line now.

One overlooked issue I see is that with the current path Boeing has chosen in these negotiations, it dampens the motivation of the engineers that have been critical in the recent momentum.

For decades, Boeing was a place where people built careers, families worked across generations, and technical knowledge was developed, passed down, and accumulated through decades of continuous service. Now we are negotiating wages, work preservation, and outsourcing at the same time Boeing appears increasingly willing to absorb significant costs to both the bottom line and the brand—in pursuit of work transfers that look cheaper in the immediate business case. That may save money on a spreadsheet, but how often has Boeing ended up spending $1.50 relocating, rebuilding, reworking, and recovering capability to save a nickel in labor cost? And even when the new location eventually becomes profitable, how long does it take to recover those transition costs—and how much of that apparent savings depends on tax incentives, infrastructure spending, workforce-training subsidies, and other public incentives from state and local governments? Charleston, San Antonio and Oklahoma City show Boeing can build capability elsewhere but they also show that it takes years, transferred work, experienced people, training, infrastructure and enormous investment. 

The 787, VC-25B, B-52 modernization and other programs also raise a harder question: how much of the apparent savings from moving work gets consumed later by learning curves, rework, schedule disruption, lost knowledge and rebuilding teams?

That is why I see work-preservation language in this contract as much bigger than protecting today's jobs both from Boeing's stated interests and from ours. During these negotiations, Ben Nimmergut told us Boeing's “recovery and long-term success” depends on building and sustaining a high quality engineering and technical workforce, and that Boeing needs to become the “most-sought-after place to work.” I agree. But where, and for how long? If Boeing continually relocates, outsources, disperses and then rebuilds that workforce wherever the next business case looks cheaper, what exactly are we sustaining? How do you create careers, preserve accumulated knowledge and become the place people most want to work while treating the work itself as geographically disposable?

What kind of Boeing career are we creating for the people who come after us, and what capability are we preserving for the next airplane? If a young engineer or technician joins Boeing, builds expertise, puts down roots and commits to the company, is Boeing offering a career worth investing in or asking them to accept that the work may simply be moved again when another location looks cheaper? Boeing cannot depend on decades of accumulated engineering and production knowledge while treating the people and organizations that hold that knowledge as endlessly and easily replaceable. At some point, the question is not just whether outsourcing saves money. It is whether Boeing is slowly trading away the workforce and institutional capability it will need to design, build and support whatever comes next.

I don't think wage pools are the problem. The lack of visibility and where SPEEA compensation has ended up is.

I transferred into SPEEA from IAM. My first SPEEA raise was about 10%, which I took as me being “caught up” with others on my team doing comparable work.

That is actually a good argument for salary pools. They give Boeing the ability to make meaningful market, equity, and performance adjustments instead of giving everybody exactly the same amount.

My problem is what happens afterward.

The wage history SPEEA presented showed that in 2017 Tech's cumulative wage index was 2.3% ahead of IAM. Over the years that relationship narrowed, and after IAM's latest contract it reversed substantially.

I don't think the argument should be “IAM got X, therefore SPEEA deserves Y.” IAM and SPEEA are different bargaining units with different jobs and compensation systems.

But IAM is still a useful benchmark because it shows how dramatically the relative wage growth position between Boeing bargaining units has changed.

Using SPEEA's own chart, the 2026 cumulative wage index is 138.3 for IAM versus 128.3 for Tech. So there is already a significant gap. And IAM has another negotiated increase coming in 2027.

My concern isn't simply closing today's gap. It is closing the gap and establishing a wage trajectory that doesn't immediately let it open again.

I want the next SPEEA agreement to restore a reasonable competitive compensation position and then provide enough wage growth to maintain it not put us in a position where we need another major “catch up” at the next contract.

That does not mean every SPEEA employee should receive exactly the same raise.

The wage pool itself isn't necessarily the problem

Today Boeing can advertise a 7% wage pool while an individual employee receives substantially less, and most employees cannot see enough of the system to understand why.

There is also a structural problem with using the same fixed pool to accomplish several different things.

Suppose everyone in my group is doing their job and earning their normal annual wage increase, but someone is substantially below market and needs a large adjustment. Or Boeing hires someone whose salary needs to be brought into proper alignment.

I absolutely think Boeing should be able to make that correction. My own first 10% adjustment is evidence of why that capability matters.

But why should correcting that employee's market position require reducing the wage growth available to everyone else?

To the extent market/equity corrections are funded from the annual pool, they should be separately funded.

If Boeing determines that somebody is improperly positioned, Boeing should fund that correction no the employees.

It should not have to become:

“We need to give that person 10%, so several other people need to get 3% or 4% to make the pool arithmetic work.”

That turns ordinary annual wage growth, market correction, and performance recognition into competitors for the same dollars. It gives Boeing the flexibility it needs to solve market positioning and compensation problems, but at the expense of what employees reasonably understand the annual wage pool to provide especially when that pool is advertised to us as, for example, a “7% wage pool.” If part of that 7% has to be used to catch up under-market employees or make exceptional-performance adjustments, then 7% does not mean the same thing to the ordinary employee that the headline suggests.

Raise the guaranteed floor, preserve separate money for performance differentiation, and separately fund significant market/equity corrections. Boeing should retain the flexibility it needs without requiring ordinary employees to finance that flexibility out of their own expected wage growth.

And if management retains discretion, show us how it was used

I don't need to know what individual coworkers earn.

But anonymously show employees enough information to understand the system.

For example, if my comparison group had 10 people:

• How many were above or below market reference?
• How many were rated Met versus Exceeded versus Far Exceed?
• What was the distribution of percentage increases?
• Where did my increase fall within that distribution?
• Was the entire contractual pool actually distributed?
• How much went toward performance differentiation?
• How much went toward market/equity adjustments?
• What factors caused someone to receive above or below the pool average?

IAM uses a very different compensation methodology, but one advantage of that system is visibility. Your grade and negotiated wage progression are documented. Employees know what the system produces.

SPEEA already publishes salary distributions. Why couldn't we also receive meaningful information about the distribution of annual wage pool increases as part of our individual ACR summary?

I don't need everybody to receive the same raise. Differentiated raises can make sense.

What I don't want is a system where satisfactory employees routinely sit near a low contractual minimum because the same limited pool is also being used to correct market problems and reward exceptional performers.

Those are all legitimate purposes.

Fund them appropriately instead of making employees compete against one another for the same fixed dollars.

What would move me toward YES on the next offer?

1. A meaningful guaranteed wage increase at ratification.

Not because IAM received some particular percentage and therefore SPEEA is automatically entitled to another percentage. SPEEA compensation needs a meaningful reset after years in which its relative wage-growth position deteriorated.

1. Annual wage funding that maintains competitive compensation over the life of the agreement.

Don't just close today's gap and immediately start creating tomorrow's. The contract should establish a sustainable wage trajectory rather than leave employees arguing about another catch up four years from now.

1. A substantially higher guaranteed component in the annual wage pools.

Employees who are meeting expectations should have meaningful contractual wage growth that does not depend primarily on management discretion.

1. A separate and meaningful performance component.

Management should still have the ability to recognize exceptional performance. I don't think everybody should automatically receive exactly the same increase.

1. Separate funding for significant market / equity corrections.

If Boeing determines an employee or group is improperly positioned against the market, fix it. But don't make everyone else's normal wage growth finance the correction.

For example, a 5% normal annual wage fund plus a separately funded 2% market/performance fund would preserve differentiation without requiring ordinary wage growth to finance every correction. The exact percentages aren't the point the structure is.

1. Transparency around the discretionary portions of the system.

If Boeing wants employees to trust management judgment, give us enough visibility to understand how that judgment was exercised.

1. COLA that actually adds protection against unexpected inflation.

If inflation exceeds the assumptions built into the negotiated wage package, COLA should increase the available wage pool funding, not provide Boeing with further flexibility to meet their needs.

A COLA funded from an already-promised wage pool protects the distribution of the pool from inflation; it does not increase Boeing's total wage commitment in response to inflation.

If COLA simply takes dollars out of the same already negotiated pool and redistributes them, it isn't really additional inflation protection. It is primarily changing the distribution of money Boeing had already committed.

None of this requires eliminating management discretion.

I'm saying:

Give employees a meaningful guaranteed floor.

Fund market corrections without making coworkers pay for them.

Preserve the ability to recognize exceptional performance.

Protect the wage trajectory against unexpected inflation.

And make the discretionary system visible enough that employees can understand it and decide whether management is actually using that discretion fairly.

And none of the wage improvements matter very much over the long term if the work itself can steadily be moved away. Meaningful, contractually enforceable work-preservation protections belong in the package as well.

For me, that would move the next offer much closer to YES.

Boeing caught hiring scabs for SPEEA positions instead of getting back to the table and negotiating a fair contract.