With a narrow 51 percent "yes" vote, Boeing machinists approved a revised contract offer that sacrifices defined pension benefits and triples health care costs in exchange for securing 777X production in the Puget Sound region. It was a humiliating concession for the machinists union to make, especially during an era of record corporate profits. But of course, humiliating the union was always part of Boeing management's goal.

I'll have to more say about this later when I'm, you know, not writing at 10 pm on a Friday night. But let me just take this moment to remind all you politicians and editorialists who ridiculed the machinists for rejecting the previous contract offer—a contract that included smaller bonuses and punitively stretched the time it would take new hires to climb the pay ladder from 6 to 16 years—that this is in fact a better contract than the original take-it-or-we're-leaving offer the union overwhelmingly rejected. Machinists obviously knew management better than the pundits did, ending up with both their jobs and a better (if still sucky) contract. So the pundits can all, you know, fuck off.