Boeing's largest white collar union has rejected the company's latest contract offer and authorized its negotiating team to call a strike, setting up a potential confrontation just as the planemaker tries to keep several delayed programs on track, according to Global Banking and Finance Review.
The Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, known as SPEEA, represents 17,000 engineers and technical workers at Boeing. Members overwhelmingly voted down a four year offer that would have tied wage increases to inflation but capped those increases at 3 percent a year, with additional adjustments left to individual performance metrics set by the company.
The inflation cap was the sticking point. With inflation in the Seattle area running around 4.5 percent annually, union members argued the proposed ceiling would all but guarantee their pay falls further behind the cost of living with every year the contract runs. The union now plans to survey its members to figure out what terms would actually be acceptable before returning to the table.
The current contract runs through October 2026, and the negotiating team has been authorized to call a strike once it expires if no new deal is reached. A walkout by SPEEA would land on top of an already strained production schedule, further delaying certification work on the 737 Max 10 and 777-9, both of which are already years behind their original timelines. The union's vote follows a 2024 strike by Boeing's machinists that shut down commercial production in the Seattle area for seven weeks.
Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg said the company is seeking an agreement that supports employees and their families while preserving the clarity the business needs to plan ahead, though the rejected offer suggests the two sides remain some distance apart on what that balance should look like.