A picket sign sits outside the Angel of the Winds Arena as striking Boeing employees gather to cast their votes on a proposed contract Wednesday in Everett, Wash.
A significant share of Boeing’s striking assembly workers are digging in their heels on a seemingly quixotic demand: the revival of their pension plans.
When members of the machinists union at Boeing narrowly voted in 2014 to accept a contract extension that froze the pension plan and closed it to new hires, from a distance it appeared to be bowing to the inevitable: pensions were going the way of the Dodo in the United States.
But 10 years later, benefits experts told Forbes pensions are making a quiet comeback, aided by better economic conditions, regulatory changes and new wrinkles on the plans that reduce the risks for employers in promising workers retirement income for the rest of their lives. And some aerospace industry figures say it could be a smart move for Boeing to play ball with the union’s pension demand to help the company retain talent in a tight labor market. The loss of experienced manufacturing workers since the Covid pandemic has played a key role in a steady drumbeat of quality issues that have dogged Boeing, aerospace experts have told Forbes. It can take years for the members of the machinists union to master complicated assembly tasks that are done largely by hand.
“No industry benefits as much as ours for having the same person be employed for his whole career,” said Cliff Collier, an aerospace consultant who negotiated a freezing of the pension plan when he was an executive at parts maker Vought Aircraft Industries in the 2000s. A pension has unmatched power for retaining midcareer workers, he said. “It more or less nails you to wherever you're working — you leave way too much on the table to go somewhere else.”
“Getting the pension back is a longshot,” said Scott Mikus, an analyst at Melius Research. But he also thinks it would help Boeing in the war for talent, including for engineers who might otherwise favor the cutting-edge tech and space companies on the West Coast. In the 1980s, “the pinnacle of engineering was essentially Boeing and Lockheed Martin.” Now, he said, “If you're an engineer and you're really good, why not work at Open AI, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft where you're really pushing the boundaries?”
The International Association of Machinists is asking for restoration of the pension plan for its 33,000 members who assemble........