Third-shift workers walked out of Boeing’s giant factories at Renton and Everett, Washington, as their contract expired early Friday morning, blasting music and air horns, shooting off fireworks, and waving handmade signs. They immediately formed picket lines and began setting up homemade burn barrels with “IAM” carved in the side.
“People are really excited to strike,” said Ky Carlson, a third-shift assembler who walked out at midnight and was picketing the Everett plant at 3:00 a.m. She said they were aiming for what the union demanded at the beginning of negotiations: 40 percent raises and restoration of the pension.
The union’s negotiating committee recommended a tentative agreement to members on Sunday, to almost universal condemnation. That same day, workers marched through the Everett factory on their lunch break, then out the door, chanting “Strike, Strike!”
Union members snarled traffic with long lines to vote on Thursday, where 94.6 percent rejected the proposed contract and 96 percent voted to strike. Pay was the main sticking point.
The rejected contract covers thirty-two thousand workers in Washington and Oregon, members of Machinists District 751 in Washington and W24 in Oregon. Most work at the two plants near Seattle.
It’s the largest strike in the United States this year, and the biggest since the United Auto Workers strike at the Big Three last fall, when forty-six thousand workers walked out as part of a rolling strike strategy. Boeing workers in the Puget Sound area last struck in 2008 for fifty-eight days.
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Auteur: Jenny Brown
