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05-08-2025
VIRGINIA: More than three thousand Boeing defence workers went on strike on Monday, in a fresh blow to the embattled aviation giant.
It comes after union members at operations in Missouri and Illinois, who build F-15 fighter jets and other military aircraft, voted against the firm’s latest offer over pay, work schedules and pensions.
“We’re disappointed our employees rejected an offer that featured 40% average wage growth”, Dan Gillian, who is the vice president of Boeing’s Air Dominance unit, said in a statement.
Boeing is struggling to turn itself around after a series of problems, including safety issues and a damaging almost eight-week walkout by passenger plane workers last year.
The walkout is being led by a local branch of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) based in St Louis, where Boeing’s defence manufacturing hub is located.
“3,200 highly-skilled IAM Union members at Boeing went on strike at midnight because enough is enough. This is about respect and dignity, not empty promises,” the union posted on social media.
IAM is one of America’s largest unions, representing roughly 600,000 members in the aerospace, defence, shipbuilding and manufacturing industries.
It is the first walkout at Boeing’s defence business since 1996, when work stopped for more than three months but last week Boeing’s chief executive Kelly Ortberg downplayed the potential impact of the walkout.
He highlighted that it would be a lot smaller than a strike last year involving around 30,000 passenger jet workers that cost the firm billions of dollars.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about the implications of the strike. We’ll manage our way through that,” said Ortberg.
Boeing has been hit by a series of crises in recent years, including two fatal crashes and a dramatic mid-air blowout of a piece of one of its planes.
In 2018, a Boeing 737 crashed after taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board. A few months later, another 157 people died when a Boeing plane crashed shortly after take-off in Ethiopia.
Separately in 2024, a panel fitted over an unused emergency exit of a Boeing 737 Max came off mid-flight.
The company delivered just 348 aircraft to its customers last year, its lowest output since the pandemic.
Last year, after the Portland incident, Boeing was ordered by the US Department of Transportation to produce a comprehensive action plan “to address its systemic quality control and production issues”.
The aerospace giant responded by publishing a detailed strategy aimed at improving its production systems, gaining more control over its supply chain and encouraging employees to speak up on safety and quality control issues.
It also promised to strengthen its training programs and overhaul critical processes on the production line.
On 1 July, Boeing reached an agreement to take control of Spirit as part of its efforts to resolve quality problems.
There were also changes at the top of the company when Calhoun, who had become chief executive a year after the incidents in Indonesia and Ethiopia, stepped down and was replaced in August by Ortberg, a veteran engineer who had spent decades in the industry. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
