Union Leader Rallies Boeing Workers Company’s Comments On China Upset Machinists

Striking Boeing workers in Spokane are fighting both for their jobs and the future economic well-being of the United States, the international president of their union told them on a soggy picket line Wednesday.

George Kourpias, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, made a two-hour stopover in Spokane to meet with striking workers outside The Boeing Co.’s Spokane facility in Airway Heights.

Kourpias made his Spokane stopover on the way to a rally in Seattle later in the day and a union march on Boeing’s Seattle headquarters.

Kourpias noted a recent statement by a high-level Boeing official that the company “has a responsibility to help the Chinese build the infrastructure of China.”

China is one of several crucial emerging markets in the global commercial aircraft industry. Boeing and its competitors are scrambling to capture that market, but one of the things China requires is that the companies it purchases from contribute to the Chinese economy by manufacturing some of their aircraft components there.

This issue of moving jobs offshore that traditionally have been performed by Boeing workers in the United States is a crucial factor in the current strike.

“My question,” Kourpias told the striking Boeing employees in Spokane, “is who is going to build the infrastructure of America if we no longer have high-wage, high-skill jobs in this country?”

Some 32,000 Boeing workers in Washington, Oregon and Kansas went on strike Friday. The company employs 293 union members in its Spokane facility.

Key strike issues include job protection and what the union says is the company’s demand for give-backs in health care and retirement benefits.

“We know the company operates in a global economy,” Kourpias said Wednesday just a few minutes before he addressed the Spokane Boeing workers. “We understand it just as well as they do. We know Boeing has to be competitive throughout the world.

“And we know that if they are going to sell planes throughout the world, some of the work will have to be done (in places like China). The question is: How much?

“Are we just going to become the sellers of airplanes and not the builders of airplanes in America?”

Kourpias told strikers that Boeing has misread them. Frustrated with its inability to get union negotiators to bend on job protection and benefits issues, the company decided to offer the contract to the workers without the negotiators’ blessing, Kourpias said.

“But the company misread you,” Kourpias said. “Who is going to take an offer that dismantles their health benefits?”

Kourpias said the union is pushing Boeing officials to come back to the negotiating table immediately. No talks have taken place since the strike began.

The union president urged solidarity among strikers and concluded, “I can’t tell you how long it’s going to take, but we are going to do everything in our power to make sure there are no give-backs.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo