SPEEA delivers contract proposal to Boeing in Utah

To emphasize solidarity and resolve to fight attempts by the Boeing Company to fragment employee groups, the union representing engineers and technical workers delivered its initial contract proposal to management at the site of one of its smallest groups of represented employees.

Delivery of the initial proposal sets the stage for formal main table negotiations for new three-year contracts covering 20,815 engineers and technical workers of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), IFPTE Local 2001. Negotiations are scheduled to start October 28.

“We stand with our SPEEA members in Utah because this is where Chicago’s scheme to dismantle our collective bargaining agreement ends,” said Ray Goforth, SPEEA executive director and chief union spokesman for contract negotiations. “We are not abandoning Utah, and we will not let this become a precedent to fracture SPEEA members.”

Keeping SPEEA bargaining units intact, job security, stopping the mistake of outsourcing and improving wages and benefits are among the key issues facing members and Boeing.

During the past year, Boeing forced an election of SPEEA engineers in Utah in an effort to remove SPEEA as the bargaining agent of about 40 engineers. The corporate attack failed and actually resulted in SPEEA expanding the group to more than 100 engineers.

Delivering the detailed contract proposal to management were SPEEA president Cynthia Cole, executive director Ray Goforth, negotiating team co-chairs Dave Patzwald and Alan Rice, and SPEEA director of strategic development Rich Plunkett.

Boeing recently forced its other major union, the International Association of Machinists (IAM), to strike after the company failed to address members’ needs.

With the theme “Share the success, no more, no less,” SPEEA looks to improve the contracts covering employees who helped produce $4 billion of net earnings and build a commercial order backlog of $346 billion.

“There is no excuse whatsoever for Boeing to propose a single takeaway in these negotiations,” Goforth said.

A local of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), SPEEA represents 24,999 aerospace professionals at Boeing, Spirit AeroSystems in Wichita, Kan., Triumph Composite Systems Inc., in Spokane, Wash., and at BAE Systems Inc. in Irving, Texas.