Boeing – SPEEA

From the start, we said we wanted a different approach to these talks because we respect you and the work you do. We worked collaboratively with SPEEA’s bargaining team to find solutions after hearing loud and clear the priorities and concerns you raised. And we worked hard to reach a unanimously endorsed offer that would have continued to position you among the market leaders in pay and benefits in the Pacific Northwest.

We’ve also said that we would rather invest in you with early incentives rather than spending the money to implement our strike contingency plan. With the disappointing vote results, we are now diverting those dollars to execute our plan and prepare for a potential strike. That means the retroactive pay and higher incentive plan target for 2026 are no longer available.

We have no choice but to implement our strike contingency plan. We have a responsibility to the rest of our workforce and our customers to build on our progress over the last two years and maintain our momentum.

No further talks with SPEEA are scheduled. The earliest a strike could occur is Oct. 7.

We know this is a challenging time. We encourage everyone to stay focused on the job at hand. 

As the voting window opens today on our contract offer, we want to share what the value of a “yes” vote would mean right now.
 
We all have a shared mission to help maintain our company’s momentum, and the early incentives are our way to thank you for what you’ve done to get our company to this point. In fact, we started negotiations with SPEEA early so we could invest in you instead of spending money on our strike contingency plan. 

Because we are quickly coming up on the window where we’d have to start implementing our contingency plan, these early incentives are only available if the contract is ratified by August 21. 
 
Here’s a closer look at what a “yes” vote would mean on average for our employees: 

• Profs
• Techs

Thank you for continuing to learn more about the contract offer, trying out our enhanced Wage Modeler, and most importantly – taking the time to vote.

Many of you have been asking about the wage funds, and we wanted to take a moment to clarify.

First, the contract requires Boeing to spend every last dollar in the total wage funds each year during the Annual Compensation Review (ACR) process.

This means the entire SPEEA bargaining unit will see salary adjustment and performance funds of 7% in 2027, and 5.5% in each year in 2028, 2029 and 2030.

Second, there is a new inflationary guarantee, so that means every employee would receive a minimum salary increase equivalent to inflation (up to 3%).

• For example, if inflation is 3% in 2027, the guaranteed wage increase will be 3%. Then the remaining 4% of the 2027 wage funds will be distributed based on individual performance. So, in the end all of the 7% wage funds are used up during ACR.
• Regardless of inflation, the 7% wage funds must be entirely spent during ACR on SPEEA-represented employees.

Third, we set aside promotional and out of sequence (POOS) funds of 0.5% each year to recognize employees as they progress through their career. Here again, we are required to spend all the funds each year, or they will roll over into the next year. In fact, we’ve historically overspent these funds each year to invest in our team.

We hope this information helps explain how the wage funds work. We’re committed to rewarding you for your individual performance and contributions to the company. 

As you know, we worked closely with SPEEA for several weeks to reach a final contract offer that has been endorsed by the union’s bargaining team. We’re pleased to share the full details with you.

This was the first full negotiation with SPEEA in 14 years, and we wanted to do things differently than in the past. That’s why we went all in with our strongest offer that respects you and the work you do with immediate financial improvements.

We heard loud and clear that you’ve lost ground on wages due to inflation. Under our 4-year contract offer, SPEEA members would see the largest wage pools in 40 years. Total wage funds would increase by 28.5%, with the opportunity for 31.9% compounded wage growth. 

The offer is also designed to help us continue the progress we’ve worked so hard to maintain over the past two years. We’re taking the money we’d have to spend on executing a strike contingency plan and put those dollars into this offer as an investment in you.

That means the offer would give you more money today than you would have otherwise received, and it allows us all to focus on ensuring our company’s continued recovery.

We continued to reach more tentative agreements with SPEEA today on several topics including:

• Limits on mandatory overtime
• Flexible work
• Retirement benefits

Based on the progress we’ve made, we expect to provide the union with a comprehensive contract offer before the end of this week. We look forward to sharing full details with you in the coming days once the union completes its official process.

We reached more tentative agreements today with SPEEA in several areas including:

• Incentive plan improvements
• Improvements to the Learning Together Program
• Layoff benefits associated with work movement as well as job reclassification outside the unit

All tentative agreements will be part of our comprehensive contract offer that we anticipate sharing with the union in the next few days.

We made substantial progress today at the bargaining table by reaching more than 10 tentative agreements with SPEEA on various articles and letters of understanding (LOUs). Specific details of those tentative agreements will be released when we make our contract offer.

We look forward to our continued discussions with the union’s bargaining team on Tuesday.

As we closed out another week of negotiations with SPEEA, there’s positive momentum for the week ahead. We’re pleased to have reached four tentative agreements on non-economic issues over the past few days, and our discussions on pay and benefits have been productive. We look forward to continuing the conversation on Monday as we work toward a strong contract offer for you.

We made good progress today at the bargaining table reaching tentative agreements with SPEEA’s bargaining committee on the following items:

• Investment in the Ed Wells Partnership
• Creation of new SPEEA functional representatives within Ed Wells
• Improvements for remedial action (NORA)
• How seniority is used in retention

The specifics of those tentative agreements will be shared once we make our full contract offer.

We also continued to make progress during our discussions on pay and benefits. We look forward to more dialogue on those important topics tomorrow.

Today, our team continued to work through feedback from SPEEA as we further refine our economic proposals and address the priorities the union said are most important to you.

We also made progress today toward gaining alignment on several non-economic items. SPEEA passed back proposals on retention and performance management, while our bargaining team passed proposals on NORA and the Ed Wells Partnership.

We look forward to more discussions on Thursday.

Following our discussions with SPEEA on pay and benefits, our team spent today working through the union’s feedback on what matters most to you in a contract offer. We look forward to continuing that dialogue this week.

We also moved closer to wrapping up non-economics topics including performance management, retention and the Ed Wells Partnership.

We continue to work toward making a contract offer as soon as possible.

We started today by passing back our proposals on performance management, retention and the Ed Wells Partnership as we try to close out the final non-economic items.

This afternoon, we turned our focus to pay. We had a robust conversation with SPEEA’s bargaining team and appreciated the transparency and honest conversation.

We’re taking that feedback seriously and look forward to keeping the conversation going as we work toward a strong contract offer for you.

We’ve had a productive week of negotiations with SPEEA and made good progress on addressing many of the non-economic topics. We’re now starting conversations on pay and benefits and look forward to continuing to work toward a strong contract offer for all of you.

We spent today aligning on avenues to address Tech career growth and skill development, as well as talking potential concepts for flexible work and Performance Management. We also listened to SPEEA’s ideas on overtime and on-call.

The goal is to wrap up these topics soon and move forward with our discussions on pay and benefits.

Our bargaining team wrapped up the week by mapping out potential solutions to the list of non-economic problems identified by the joint Boeing and SPEEA subcommittees. We look forward to sharing those ideas with SPEEA next week before eventually turning our discussions to compensation and benefits.

We met with SPEEA’s full bargaining committees today to discuss the topics of performance management and job security. We’re now working to finalize the full list of problem statements identified over the course of this week and then move toward finding potential solutions.

We expect to begin passing formal proposals and counterproposals next week before moving on to economic discussions around pay and benefits.

Our conversations continue to be respectful, and we look forward to learning more about the issues most important to you.

There’s good progress to report today as the Boeing and SPEEA bargaining teams split up into two subcommittees. One group focused on work-life balance while the other focused on career development.

Both subcommittees jointly identified problem statements in each area and are now working on possible solutions. At this point, no specific proposals have been passed by Boeing or the union.

We know work-life balance can mean something different to each of you. As we focus on meeting our customer commitments, there’s no substitute for face-to-face collaboration on site. But we also want to make sure there’s some level of flexibility to help our team.

When it comes to career development, we’re committed to building a strong future by investing in you and your Boeing career. We already have a strong foundation and look forward to working with SPEEA in this area. Since 2020, Boeing has paid $91 million in tuition and flight incentive benefits for SPEEA-represented employees through our Learning Together Program, with more than 1,000 degrees earned. And 73% of SPEEA members have taken a course through the Ed Wells Partnership over the past three years.

We remain focused on getting to a common understanding with SPEEA in all the key areas.

During our conversations today with SPEEA’s bargaining teams, we discussed our mission to deliver engineering and technical excellence in all that we do. Our goal is to make our company the most sought-out place to build a career by providing the best environment, the best tools and the best resources.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be working with SPEEA to identify roadblocks and find solutions to ensure we’re able to meet that goal by attracting and retaining the best talent. We’ll be addressing a range of topics and initially focus on career development and work-life balance.

We look forward to listening, learning and identifying solutions as we continue to work toward a strong contract offer.

Today’s discussions with SPEEA continued to build on listening and understanding. 

We had robust discussions around the alignment of company and employee values. We talked about our customer commitments at length, and how important it is for us to deliver on those promises.

We also shared a business update which included a discussion of several key focus areas:

Stabilize our business: We’re focused on enhancing safety and quality, stabilizing the BCA production system and our supply chain, and executing on our production rate increases.

Development program execution: We have to keep our customer commitments by certifying the 737-7, 737-10 and 777X. On the defense side, we’re focused on continuing to improve performance and reducing risk on our fixed-priced development programs.

Culture change: We’re committed to living our Values and Behaviors as we continue to work together to rebuild our company’s culture. While the most recent employee survey shows we’re making progress, there’s still more work to do.

Build our future: We’re investing in our people and making additional strategic investments in research and development.

By listening and working together, we can be successful in all these areas.