Boeing Workers Must Organize to Fight the Bosses
September 23, 2026
by Joan Wright, rank-and-file tech worker with OPEIU 153, and Justin Smeltzer, rank-and-file electrician with UAW 974, in coordination with Workers Strike Back members in the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), IFPTE Local 2001.
Rank-and-file SPEEA members at a lunchtime rally outside a Boeing facility
Boeing executives and wealthy shareholders have spent thirty years getting rich off the work of engineers, machinists, and technicians. Workers are fed up with stagnant wages and a skyrocketing cost of living crisis, with billionaire and multimillionaire bosses putting their profits above our basic needs as workers. Their quest for profits has also meant flouting even basic standards for the safety of passengers.
In August, SPEEA members rejected the tentative contract offer from the Boeing bosses by a two-thirds majority and authorized a strike with nearly 90 percent support. In response, the bosses have made a second contract offer that SPEEA workers will be voting on from September 24 through October 1.
This new contract offer still fails to meet the demands of SPEEA members and must be rejected. It is unsurprising that Boeing is framing it as the so-called “final offer” — they don’t want a strike. Unfortunately, the union leadership bodies have themselves voted in a majority to recommend that the rank and file approve the contract. But for workers and union members, a strong strike that shuts down the profit machine of the bosses is the most powerful weapon we have to force them to concede to strong demands. SPEEA represents over 17,000 aerospace engineers, technical workers, and pilots in Washington, Kansas, Oregon, Utah, and California. The union has the opportunity to carry out a historic strike action and win victories that could set a standard for workers everywhere.
From 2013 through 2019, while Boeing was posting some of the most profitable years in its history, the company’s major shareholders made $43.1 billion in stock buybacks and $17.4 billion in dividends. Yet, Boeing workers have seen wages devoured by inflation and union jobs eliminated. Boeing constantly threatens to move operations to other states in order to avoid taxes and attack union workers.
In November 2013, Washington state’s Democratic Governor Jay Inslee and the Democrat-dominated State Legislature gave Boeing executives and shareholders nearly $9 billion in what became the single-largest corporate tax giveaway in U.S. history. That deal also eliminated the hard-fought defined benefit retirement plans Boeing workers had won in previous struggles against the bosses. Democrats justified this stunning attack on Boeing workers by claiming it was what the executives needed in return for keeping jobs in the state.
In reality, it was daylight robbery by the bosses and the Democratic Party. Despite the massive tax handout, Boeing still moved nearly 13,000 jobs out of Washington state between 2013 and 2018 in order to exploit workers even more viciously in right-to-work states and union-free sites. This year, they're coming for engineering work too: all the remaining 787 engineering jobs are being relocated to South Carolina, where the workers do not have a union.
SPEEA members cannot afford to meet this union-busting strategy by backing down and accepting a weak contract. The logic is a race to the bottom for all Boeing workers across the United States. SPEEA and the whole labor movement need to fight back nationally. SPEEA can go on the offensive by organizing a powerful strike right now to stop this union busting. A victory for the strike can then be used to launch unionizing drives at other sites that Boeing operates and fight for higher wages for all workers, union and non-union alike.
Under capitalism, the relentless drive for profits by the ruling class means plummeting living standards for the employees and deteriorating social and material conditions for working and poor people as a whole. In service of their own profits, Boeing bosses have not only attacked jobs, wages, and benefits of the engineers, technicians, machinists, and other workers, but they have also cut corners leading to dramatically unsafe planes. Two recent 737 MAX crashes have killed 346 people. The 2020 investigation by the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure found production pressure, concealed information, and a company culture bent by "enormous amounts of money" flowing to shareholders while engineers were told to move faster.
None of that scrutiny changed anything because there was no pressure on either the Boeing executives or the Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress. After a door plug blew off an Alaska Airlines MAX 9 in 2024, the Federal Aviation Administration found hundreds of quality-system violations. Boeing bosses were accused of pressuring workers to sign off on planes that weren't safe to fly. Despite these shocking revelations, Boeing only paid a slap-on-the-wrist fine of $3.1 million, demonstrating once again that both the Democratic and Republican parties represent the bosses not working people or the union movement.
We need real protections against the unsafe planes, which is why SPEEA rank-and-file members have been demanding strong whistleblower protections in the contract for workers who raise safety concerns. This contract fight is an important opportunity for SPEEA to build a solidarity campaign in the wider union movement and the working class — all working people have a stake in Boeing building safe planes.
Fighting the Boeing bosses is also tied to building the antiwar movement against imperialist wars. Boeing is one of the largest weapons makers on earth, and its military business has only grown during the genocide in Gaza that’s being bankrolled and politically supported by U.S. imperialism. In 2024, Israel signed a $5.2 billion deal for 25 Boeing F-15 fighters, with an option for 25 more, and Boeing-made weapons, including JDAM guidance kits, have been tied directly to deaths in Gaza. Every worker, everywhere, has to oppose this genocide and the trillion-dollar war industry cashing in on it.
Workers have tremendous leverage over the bosses when we get organized and fight back, especially with a strong strike that shuts down profits. Boeing just posted $24.6 billion in quarterly revenue, positive free cash flow, and a record $715 billion order backlog. The executives simply cannot ramp up 737 production, certify the 777X, or deliver the backlog without the engineers and technicians they’re trying to shortchange.
IAM machinists went on strike in 2024 and won a 38% wage increase, a $12,000 ratification bonus, restored incentive pay, and greatly improved job security language. The UAW auto workers union carried out a strike in 2023 and won 25% raises, restored COLA (cost of living adjustment), and brought battery workers under the master contract instead of being isolated to lower-tier wages. SPEEA has its own history to draw on too: in 2000, Professional and Technical members shut down their work at Boeing for 40 days and the workers won significant concessions from the bosses. Every one of these gains started with rank-and-file workers who were fed up with the bosses and willing to fight back around concrete demands.
In this contract fight, rank-and-file SPEEA workers have been fighting for:
40%+ total wage growth, beginning with 10% immediately
A Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) so inflation cannot erase those gains
1.5x overtime for all workers
Enforceable restrictions on outsourcing and offshoring union work
Protection against job displacement through AI and automation
Strong protections against management pressures to sacrifice safety and quality
The SPEEA leadership has been failing to build for a strike. Instead, they have been pressuring the rank and file to accept a weak contract that does not include many of the important demands in order to avoid a fight with bosses. Rank-and-file members have been organizing for more, including lunchtime rallies and practice pickets. Now with Boeing's “final offer,” the union leadership is once again telling rank-and-file members to accept this weak contract.
The leadership of SPEEA and IFPTE, the parent union of SPEEA, have spent years using the strategy of business unionism, which means trying to stay on good terms with Boeing bosses instead of building a strong union that can strike and win bold demands. Tragically, business unionism has become the norm among most labor leaders today.
Business unionism is also reflected in union leaders making peace with the parties that represent the bosses — the Republicans and the Democrats. For example, IFPTE has endorsed Congressmember Adam Smith, who represents Boeing’s home turf. Smith has helped lead the warmongering and genocidal agenda in the U.S. Congress for nearly three decades. He gets massive donations from the war industry, including from Boeing executives and major shareholders. The leaders of the National Education Association, the Washington State Labor Council, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees also endorsed Smith.
The leadership of these unions endorsed Smith despite the fact that Kshama Sawant, socialist and co-founder of Workers Strike Back, was running in the primary election against Smith. Kshama was on the Seattle City Council for a decade, and offered a virtually unheard-of example of how working-class candidates should use their leadership positions, by relentlessly building mass movements and exposing the real anti-worker and pro-capitalist character of the Democratic Party. She won the nation’s highest minimum wage, the Amazon Tax, and unprecedented renters’ rights. In her Congressional campaign, Kshama called for an end to all military aid to Israel and a permanent arms embargo on Israel.
We need class struggle unionism as an alternative to business unionism. Class struggle unionism would mean a militant fightback against the bosses. It would also mean unions refusing to endorse politicians from the Democratic or Republican parties. Our interests as workers are irreconcilable with the bosses, their political representatives in the Democratic and Republican parties, and with the bloody agenda of genocide.
A strong contract will not come from endless discussion at the so-called “bargaining table.” It will be won by workers who are willing to fight and strike to win strong demands. SPEEA union leadership should immediately:
Retract their endorsement of the “final offer” and call for a NO vote and organize a strike.
Launch union drives to organize non-union shops in Seal Beach, South Carolina, Mesa, Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Southern California, and elsewhere.
Call on IFPTE leaders to rescind their endorsement of politicians who have taken money from Boeing and have voted to fund imperialist wars such as Adam Smith.
Organize a mass rally on September 26th, bringing together SPEEA members, IAM members, other Boeing workers, and the whole labor movement to discuss the contract fight, what it will take to win strong demands, and prepare for a strike.
The capitalist bosses are not going to hand workers a fair contract because we asked nicely. They never have and they never will. That is how capitalism works: rule by and for the rich, with them stealing the wealth workers create. SPEEA workers are the ones who build the planes, certify them safe, and keep Boeing running. Workers have the power to shut it down and force the bosses to concede to our demands, but workers must urgently organize to fight.
Strike actions to wrest concessions from the bosses will also need to be combined with building powerful revolutionary struggles to overthrow capitalism and win a socialist world, for which the first step would be to take the large corporations like Boeing into democratic public ownership by workers. As we have seen from Boeing’s example, the bosses will try to snatch away what workers win as reforms.
When the Democratic Party and the Boeing bosses carried out the historic sellout of Boeing workers in 2013, Kshama was the only elected representative in Seattle to stand publicly with the Boeing workers as then newly-elected socialist City Councilmember. In her speech at the union rally, Kshama said, “The only response we can have if Boeing executives do not agree to keep the plant here is for the machinists to say the machines are here, the workers are here, we will do the job, we don't need the executives. The executives don’t do the work, the machinists do. The workers should take over the factories, and shut down Boeing’s profit-making machine. We can re-tool the machines to produce mass transit like buses, instead of destructive…war machines.” That power is in the hands of the SPEEA rank and file. It begins with voting NO on an insulting contract from the bosses, fighting for bold demands, and organizing a strong strike.
