More than 30,000 Boeing employees have been on strike for more than a week. Boeing’s home state of Washington — and beyond — are feeling the strike’s economic effects.
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For more than a week, 33,000 Boeing employees have been on strike, calling for higher pay and more benefits. On Wednesday, Boeing announced that it would also be furloughing some nonunion workers to save money during the walkout. Most of those workers are in Washington State, where Boeing is the second-largest employer behind Amazon. From Seattle, member station KUOW’s Casey Martin reports on how the strike is being felt in the region and beyond.
CASEY MARTIN, BYLINE: Before he was an airplane mechanic, Jake Meyer considered working at a Seattle shipyard. He was trying to decide which would be the more stable choice to raise his family.
JAKE MEYER: And everybody always said Boeing over shipyard, and, well, this is how we’re being treated.
MARTIN: Meyer is on strike with 33,000 other machinists at Boeing. They make, on average, $66,000 a year according to their union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. They say that isn’t enough. A report from Redfin found a person needs to make over $170,000 a year to buy a home in Seattle. Boeing had offered a 25% general wage increase, which they called an unprecedented contract offer, but the union members rejected it. This past week, Meyer was on the picket line outside the Renton plant just south of Seattle.
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MARTIN: Meyer says one of the reasons he’s striking is that he wasn’t making a livable wage at Boeing.
MEYER: We’ve already been living paycheck to paycheck, and so now I’m going to have to be pulling other jobs, two to three, just trying to keep up.
MARTIN: If the strike continues another two weeks, strikers will get a small amount of pay from the union, but it’s only $250 a week. Meyer says he’s thinking about getting a side gig, working for DoorDash or doing child care. A lot of other people on the picket line said similar things. As it enters its second week, it’s not just the striking employees that could soon face financial hardship.
SCOTT HAMILTON: For every one direct Boeing job, there are four indirect jobs. So you can see how this will ripple through the economy if this goes on for very long.
MARTIN: Scott Hamilton is an aviation expert at Leeham Company, an aviation consulting and analysis firm. He says that he expects Boeing to cut back on spending for the duration of the strike, and that means the biggest potential losers could be all the suppliers that support Boeing, companies that make springs, seats and sheet metal that go into planes.
HAMILTON: Boeing uses suppliers in something like 45 states in the lower 48, and every one of those suppliers is going to be affected.
MARTIN: Suppliers like Spirit AeroSystems in Wichita, Kan., which builds airplane fuselages and flight decks. Hamilton says 60% of their business goes to Boeing.
HAMILTON: That other 40% isn’t going to keep the 60% afloat that they’re missing from Boeing.
MARTIN: Spirit AeroSystems didn’t respond to a request for comment. Fifteen other suppliers we reached out to in Washington State also didn’t respond or declined to comment. Anderson Economic Group, a consulting firm that evaluates financial damage, has done an initial assessment of the financial impact of the strike. Here’s CEO Patrick Anderson.
PATRICK ANDERSON: Over $100 million loss to Boeing and supplier employees already. And we’ve got $10 million of losses to other businesses directly caused by this already, a lot of that in the Seattle area.
MARTIN: Boeing’s Washington operations are concentrated north and south of Seattle. In those communities, many businesses we talked to said they weren’t feeling the pinch yet. But Anderson says that could change if a deal isn’t struck.
ANDERSON: A strike that drags on two weeks, three weeks, really costs the local economy, where you have a lot of workers.
MARTIN: However, he added that it likely wouldn’t be catastrophic to the region’s economy given how many people work in the tech industry.
For NPR News, I’m Casey Martin in Seattle.
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