Boeing Shifts Work From Canada
The Boeing Co. is shipping some production work from Canada to Washington state to offset the effects of a strike north of the border.
About 870 workers at Boeing’s plant in Winnipeg, Manitoba, have been on strike since July 11 in a contract dispute. The plant makes about 2,500 different parts, such as engine strut fairings, out of high-tech composite materials.
Boeing is moving 70 truckloads of parts and tooling to its Fabrication Division in Auburn, south of Seattle. That represents about 40 percent of the Winnipeg plant’s capacity.
“We’re doing this to ensure that our delivery schedule is not imperiled,” Boeing spokesman Peter Conte said. “We have not made any decisions about whether the work will remain in Puget Sound. There’s a remote possibility that some may not go back.”
Officials of the Canadian Auto Workers Local 2169 apparently plan to ask the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers here not to perform the Canadians’ work, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported Tuesday.
Officials of both unions could not be reached for comment.
However, an official of Boeing’s second-largest union, the Seattle Professional Engineering Employees Association, said the union encouraged its members to decline if Boeing asked them to work in Canada.
“We heard rumors that they were going to ask, so we thought we’d get on the front end of this,” SPEEA executive director Charles Bofferding said.
Conte said the company had no plans to send workers to Winnipeg. Management and non-union workers are continuing some production there, he said, but it “by no means is running at full operation.”
Boeing had offered the Canadian workers base-wage increases of 2 percent, 2 percent and 1.5 percent over three years; an immediate 44-cent cost-of-living adjustment with other adjustments quarterly; and improvements in medical and pension benefits.
The union workers average about $12 to $13 an hour in U.S. dollars.
The Winnipeg plant, opened in 1969, and one in Arnprior, Ontario, are the only plants Boeing owns outside the United States.