SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–April 29, 2001

Members of SPEEA, the union representing engineers, technical workers and other professionals at Boeing will be on hand at the Company’s annual shareholders meeting Monday to encourage attendees to demand Corporate leaders live up to their talk about forming a partnership with employees.

More than 100 members of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) IFPTE Local 2001, AFL-CIO, will take the day off to perform informational picketing outside the Westin Hotel before the meeting. Representatives from the union will also address directors during the meeting.

Picketing is scheduled to start at about 9 a.m.

” Boeing Corporate leaders continue to talk about forming a partnership with their employees but at the same time they attack employees with aggressive anti-union campaigns and limiting incentive programs to non-union members,” said Charles Bofferding, executive director of SPEEA.

The union lifted a contract offer from the bargaining table on Friday for 4,200 workers in Wichita, Kansas. During negotiations Boeing refused to allow union represented employees to participate in the Company’s much talked-about Employee Incentive Plan (EIP). The plan is designed to encourage worker performance by awarding extra days of pay to workers based on corporate performance. The Company even refused to consider a proposal to form a joint committee to “investigate the possibility” of an EIP for Wichita employees.

Advertisement

“The Company has shown the EIP is an anti-union campaign,” said Bofferding. “What the Company fails to understand is when they attack the union, they are attacking their own people. The union is the employees of Boeing.”

SPEEA waged the largest white-collar strike against a U.S. corporation in history in 2000. More than 19,000 workers, including more than 5,000 non-union members, walked off the job for 40-days. The strike sent the price of Boeing stock plummeting while union membership soared. The year also saw Boeing scramble to fill technical jobs as more than 2,000 engineers left the Company.

” Boeing’s top people continue their campaign of bullying employees,” Bofferding said. ” Boeing today is not treating people with respect. Their employee-relations practices failed long ago. The insistence on these failed programs hurts the business of building and selling airplanes. No one is more concerned about The Boeing Company than the people who work there.”