Boeing ends crippling strike as workers accept latest offer

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-05/boeing-ends-crippling-strike-after-workers-accept-latest-offer

by toomuchtodo • 2 years ago

57 111 2 years ago

bloomberg.com

toomuchtodo4• 2 years ago

https://archive.today/YWHmq

pixelatedindex• 2 years ago

Read somewhere that they get 12% match on 401k. No pensions, but there’s almost none of that in today’s world.

brightball• 2 years ago

Pensions are absolutely crippling to a company long term.

toomuchtodo4• 2 years ago

Nah, Boeing management and shareholder comp crippled the org on its own just fine. Getting rid of pensions is what enabled more comp to go to these folks. "401k experiment failure" are the keywords you can search for on the topic.

Are we going to claw back all the comp and shareholder returns from the folks who stole from Boeing while it went down the drain? No, we'll just say that's the cost, even though it is obvious that is what crippled the org. "Pensions are absolutely crippling" while orgs are strip mined in plain site, with a noticeable lack of hand ringing over said strip mining.

https://www.epi.org/publication/retirement-in-america/

https://www.pionline.com/defined-contribution/401k-experimen...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/magazine/401k-retirement-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/retirement/great-401-k-expe...

koolba• 2 years ago

Pensions are fine if you actually pay for them by purchasing guaranteed annuities to offload the liability. Except nobody wants to do that because they’re insanely expensive. Even more so if they’re going to be inflation adjusted.

In reality if workers want pensions, the company should give them a fix annual amount that the worker can use to purchase an annuity.

rangestransform2• 2 years ago

some public transit agencies spend over half of their operating budget on pensions

doctorpangloss2• 2 years ago

If it's so obvious, why offer them? Why do deferred compensation? Why promise to pay in the future for anything?

rootusrootus• 2 years ago

The unstated implication is that retirement is not economically feasible except to a privileged few. Our healthcare system has a similar implication. Cannot afford universal healthcare, meaning the system only works if we can allow some people to go without.

Steuerheaven2• 2 years ago

If a company can't calculate something like this, you should not work there.

Otherwise absolutly not. You just have a company doing the pension plan for you and thats it.

blackeyeblitzar5• 2 years ago

And to governments, not just companies. Public sector pensions in America are basically scamming and stealing from taxpayers.

michael19992• 2 years ago

Pensions only hurt companies long term if they are lying about the long-term cost. If the pension is funded, how can it hurt a firm? A fully-funded pension attracts employees, and encourages retention in a competitive market.

Unless your argument is that management will always lie about the cost, and under-fund. Which is more of a comment about American management and the regulators than about pensions.

Normally I'd say corporate pensions are a terrible idea because no firm around today can credibly promise to be good for its debts in 40 years. But Boeing really is TBTF, so a pension from Boeing might actually be worth something.

toast03• 2 years ago

Pensions seem nice to have, but IMHO, it's generally better for employer and employee when compensation is paid immediately. The accounting is simpler, accountability is easier, and there's no long term entanglements.

plussed_reader2• 2 years ago

So it's better to assume my current employer is insolvent and to just follow that old conservative truism, "Fuck you, got mine."?

yohannparis2• 2 years ago

Technically a pension is a trust that is independent from the employer. Its duties are to hold the shareholders (employees) funds. The issue is that the trustees is most likely the employer. So in the event of a employer insolvency, the pension is not affected by.

Steuerheaven2• 2 years ago

Only if your tax system supports it.

In germany a pension comes from your gross salary, is untaxed and moved away. It then will be taxed later when you are retired but because you probably earn a lot less as a retire, you pay less taxes on it.

sidewndr464• 2 years ago

It depends on your income level in the US, but in general a 401k is a tax dodge for the employee

legitster4• 2 years ago

A pension is easier for people who are bad at money. You get your allowance doled out and then spend retirement complaining about prices and the economy.

On paper a well-funded 401k is better. You don't have to worry about the fund collapsing. You're safer against inflation. And your money doesn't disappear when you die. Etc.

12% matching is an insanely good deal for people smart enough to use it well. But you are going to have people who make really bad choices end up in a lurch. So it's a higher-ceiling/lower-floor range of outcomes for each individual.

hamandcheese• 2 years ago

What i don't understand about 401k is why is there such a strict limit on personal contributions, but employer can contribute significantly more? It's all compensation one way or another, why shouldn't I be able to allocate my compensation how I please?

PittleyDunkin• 2 years ago

and there's no long term entanglements.

Well, except for our crippling lifelong dependency on index funds.

bluedino• 2 years ago

That's crazy. 4% is a pretty common match.

vundercind4• 2 years ago

Which sucks absolute ass because 401ks working as a replacement for pensions requires employer contributions more like this 12%.

The plans are clearly structured on the assumption that’s what would happen—there are separate limits for how much an employee can contribute, and how much an employer can, and the employer limit is significantly higher. Even if an employee wants to max out the plan, they can’t, because their contribution level is capped way under the hypothetical max.

The idea was plainly that employers would contribute heavily to these. Instead they barely do, making them better than nothing, but kinda shit considering how they were supposed to work.

[edit] to put some numbers on it, for 2025 an employee maxes out at $23,500 contribution. Meanwhile, the overall max is $70,000. An employee isn’t allowed to contribute more than 1/3 of the max allowed. In fact, with straight matching only and no fixed or multiplier-based matching from the employer, you can still only hit about 2/3 of the max. It’s hard to overstate how entirely the 401k has failed to achieve its apparent purpose in practice.

buildsjets3• 2 years ago

Wow, that sucks! You should form a union and strike for more.

blackeyeblitzar5• 2 years ago

Pensions are very rare in private industry because they’re incredibly expensive and amount to a Ponzi scheme due to chronic underfunding. In the US everyone has moved onto 401k, except government jobs. But almost all state pensions are in a bad shape. Taxpayers are wasting tons of money paying out pensions that simply never made sense and were never deserved - after all offering up something that is “risk free” would be insanely expensive in theory. Unfortunately some states like California make it impossible for states to get out of those of obligations. Private companies can go bankrupt, but the state will keep taking from taxpayers

carabiner• 2 years ago

https://www.boeingbenefits.com/employee/emp-retirement.html

Regular nonunion employees get 10% match, immediately vested.

doublerabbit2• 2 years ago

Well, thats good news that striking still works in this semi-dystopian world.

dontlaugh• 2 years ago

Striking will always work under capitalism, because profits are a portion of the value workers create through their labour. Withdrawing labour will always cripple production.

kylebenzle• 2 years ago

Just "semi-" dystopian?

doublerabbit2• 2 years ago

I still have a job, can sleep and eat. Prices are hiking and we are all being slowly replaced.

Once I loose all those three things I'll ring the bell of dystopia.

tareqak• 2 years ago

Same story from the Associated Press: https://apnews.com/article/boeing-contract-vote-strike-machi...

johnnyanmac6• 2 years ago

Although she voted “yes,” Seattle-based calibration specialist Eep Bolaño said the outcome was “most certainly not a victory.” Bolaño said she and her fellow workers made a wise but infuriating choice to accept the offer.
“We were threatened by a company that was crippled, dying, bleeding on the ground, and us as one of the biggest unions in the country couldn’t even extract two-thirds of our demands from them. This is humiliating,” she said.

Yeah. I never expected the pensions to return, sadly. But 38% over 4 year after a 2 month walkout seems like this strike more or less settled.

For reference:

Machinists voted down another offer — 35% raises over four years, and still no revival of pensions — on Oct. 23, the same day that Boeing reported a third-quarter loss of more than $6 billion.

I can't blame them at the end of the day because mouths need to be fed, but this paints a grim picture in my eyes. The only way this can be salvaged is if someone in the background is giving other deals like what happened with the train strike (which we wouldn't hear about for months on end).

nisegami2• 2 years ago

Considering Boeing's prospects, what faith could there be in a pension plan tied to their company?

selimthegrim• 2 years ago

What happened with the train strike?

starfleet_bop• 2 years ago

I wonder how much money Boeing could have saved by averting the costly strike action if it had just agreed to the original proposal from the union.

ImPostingOnHN3• 2 years ago

They probably would have lost way more by agreeing to the pension plan the union demanded.

dingi• 2 years ago

Why these pension plans needs to be so complicated? 8% from the employee, 15% from the employer. Paid to a separately managed fund each month. That's how its being done where I work.

blackeyeblitzar5• 2 years ago

A true pension provides a guaranteed benefit in retirement (regardless of contributions). You get a certain amount of income, no matter what. So it is not based on the amount of contribution, but what you are given in a risk-free manner. That’s what makes it overly expensive and problematic - nothing is truly risk-free and such a generous benefit end up functioning more like a Ponzi scheme.

buildsjets3• 2 years ago

The issue is that the defined benefit pension was replaced with a 401k, where your retirement income is subject to the vagaries and collusions of the market as well as your own investment choices and skills over time. The 401k just passes the risk from the employer to the employee, but the employee is playing the game at a significant disadvantage. Pension funds can afford to hire full time money managers to play this game, I cannot.

The other problem is that the investment choices in the 401k are extraordinarily limited. You get your choice of - two index funds that track the S&P and R2K, two "actively managed large / small company funds" that really just track the S&P and R2K but with higher fees. You can choose from 10 different target date funds with high fees and low returns. You can choose the company's own stock, if you did not learn the lesson of ENRON. There are also a few "international company funds" and "bond market index funds" and similar that consistently under perform all the other choices.

There's no way to invest in individual stocks other than the employer's stock, sector targeted mutual funds, REITs, SPACs, actual real estate, annuities, non-US companies, precious metals, or numerous other investment vehicles that leave one less exposed than just "Follow the DJIA". You can't even gamble your money away on Crypto.

Boeing ends crippling strike as workers accept latest offer

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