Boeing May Shift To Seven-Day Production Schedule Union Officials Say Any Move Away From Traditional Five-Day Week Won’t Fly

Boeing Co. is taking a look at round-the-clock, seven-day-a-week production, an idea that doesn’t sit well with union leaders.

Such a plan would reward workers for boosting production by eliminating premium pay and giving them worse hours, union officials say, adding that the five-day work week has been a fixture at Boeing for at least 50 years.

Don Grinde, an Everett crane operator and member of the Machinists’ District 751 governing council, called it “anti-worker and anti-family.”

The current contract for Boeing’s biggest union - the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, representing more than 30,000 Boeing workers - runs through September 1999 and prohibits implementation of “a seven-day, 24-hour work week,” said Machinist District 751 President Bill Johnson.

There is no formal proposal, but Bob Dryden, Boeing’s executive vice president for airplane production, advocates the change in a videotape circulated to 1,500 managers, supervisors and workers. The company has said it hopes in the next two years to halve the amount of time it takes to produce a plane.

As an example of possible options, Dryden describes the shifts of a factory crew that works from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. the first two days of the week, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. for the next two days, and then has four days off. All hours and days are considered interchangeable units under the plan.

British Aerospace, which builds wings for Boeing’s archrival, the European consortium Airbus Industrie, is using that timetable and “they’ve got us,” Dryden said in the video, meaning that the British facility is more efficient.

Under such a system, managers would have maximum scheduling flexibility to utilize plant equipment that sits idle at Boeing much of the time.

“We are going to have to operate three shifts a day, seven days a week,” Dryden said on the video, which was the subject of a Seattle Times story Wednesday. The company refused to make the video public, The Times said.

Boeing spokesman Steve Smith said Wednesday night the reference to British Aerospace was merely an “example of what our competitors are doing. (Dryden) is not proposing that we do that at Boeing.”

Smith said Boeing executives had not discussed eliminating differential pay, only other ways to increase productivity.

“This is a long-term look at how to utilize our assets and that would include fuller use of the clock,” Smith said.

In a tradition established over decades, Boeing operates on a Monday-to-Friday schedule, with most manufacturing and engineering work performed on week days.

There are fewer workers on the swing shift, which runs from mid-afternoon till late at night, and fewer still on the “third shift,” the over night or graveyard shift.

There is an average 50-cent-per-hour differential for swing-shift workers, said Machinists spokeswoman Connie Kelliher. Graveyard-shift workers get an additional 10 cents an hour and are paid for eight hours while working six and a half.

Boeing spokeswoman Mary Hanson said any changes “would certainly be done with the full cooperation” of Machinists’ District 751, which represents 26,000 workers, and the Seattle Professional Engineering Employees Association, which represents another 22,000 employees.