https://www.facebook.com/pages/Washingto… Part of the reason Machinists rejected the 'extension' is that it proposed to merge pensions between workers and CEOs, allowing the $200K a month retirement package for Jim McNerey to be fully funded.

Yes, Goldy. And this is EXACTLY what the NBA, NFL, and MLB does to American cities and you cheer gleefully when they come to us, hat in hand, with gold coins falling out of their asses.

Egads! The minions are entertaining a socialist alternative?

1. Every time Tim Egan's linked to here I love pointing out the weirdness of him being married to JONI BALTER.

B. Every time "blame the machinists" comes up here I remember Brendan Kiley's epic prediction way back when.

The Boeing machinists' strike last year totally fucked up the company's efforts to roll out a new jet, which may mean that Boeing leaves Washington for, say, South Carolina, which would mean that the strike—in the long run—totally fucked over tens of thousands of working-class families.

http://www.thestranger.com/slog/archives…

@6 Yes, just accept you and your children will be slaves of the super rich. Ugh.

Shorter Ken Mehlman @6:

Give up your hopes of a better future and just lay down and let the priviliged few own you and your children.

However, people really need to adjust to the fact that pension plans, in their current state, just are not tenable anymore. People are living too long after retirement age. Either the retirement age needs to be raised, or pensions need to kick in after X years after retirement, or something. They worked 30 years ago, but the system needs to be overhauled if pensions are going to stick around.

The problem with Egan's piece and Goldy's position is that they assume the machinists are a monolithic group. But not everyone wants to be a machinist for life. Some want to be able to start their own airplane factories, but they won't be able to if Boeing goes out of business because of the high union costs and they lose their jobs.

@9
Actually if you want to start an airplane factory the best thing to happen would be for Boeing to leave so that there would be plenty of skilled workers available for a startup

Pension plans are perfectly fine when they're funded and held by the people who will benefit from them. All you fucking do is hire an actuary, make sure you set aside your payments and don't be fucking stupid about your investments. It's not that fucking difficult and anyone who tells you otherwise has been drinking the fucking kool-ade.

Pensions are nothing more than deferred compensation. Compensation that would have otherwise been handed out with the rest of someone's paycheck. Not everyone has the time to be their own investing expert (much like people don't always have the time to do their own dentistry or build their own cars) and 401ks are a shitty, risky alternative.

#8...I have a real problem with companies that break promises...aka fucking liars. So if they want to change future workers to 401K that is one thing. But has Boeing provided the spreadsheets, all the data projections that show that if the current machinists don't dump their pensions that Boeing will fold? Or are they just avaricious pricks with craven, old testament stonable, upper management - the kind who slip it in dry and rough while keeping their pensions.

Remember, a homeowner who has trouble paying their mortgage is bad, but a corporation with unfunded pension liabilities is in need of a bailout.

@9 Don't worry about @10. Righties are fucking humorless.

The person who's nailed the whole situation is Talton. He faced reality and basically said: it sucks, but the union has to be honest about the company's leverage.

Companies are going to do what they're going to do. There's no reason to expect Boeing to "be generous" unless it's in their business interests to be so. I'm not celebrating that fact, but it is the reality of the situation.

It's the rare company (Costco?) that says they're better off giving people incentives instead of using coercion and competition to force their employees to the lowest possible cost. The only way this thing turns around is if taxation goes up, government infrastructure programs lower the supply of labor, and consumer spending increases to the point where companies can make money by growing and hiring.

For that to happen, the corporate stranglehold on the government would have to end. Even if the electorate starts voting straight democrat, that won't happen anytime soon. It'll take a major catastrophe - something so severe that people are ready for radical (but not too radical of) change.

I'd say that's the silver lining to Boeing's move - the gloves are off, people can't pretend anymore that the wealthy overlords they slavishly worship are doing any good - but in truth it seems like most people want to blame the union and turn Washington into a "right to work" state.

And for that, the Seattle Times still sucks overall. Talton is their lone voice of reason.

This is a depressing thread-merge, but it does, very sadly, appear that whatever -ISM and theoretical ideology you run your country under, we all eventually revert to Feudalism with Rentier Economics (aristocratic parasites on societal productivity).

I think the election of an open socialist and the return of socialists and other "radicals" - in other words, increased polital diversity, is indicative of real unrest. We had that in this country from the 1890s through the 1930s. One hopes it's a sign of some vibrancy and vitality left in democracy.

Boeing knows Washington Union Labor builds the best airplanes. Boeing's stockholders know Washington Union Labor builds the best airplanes. They said as much when they came back to the best to save their plastic airplane.

They don't have the leverage they think they do. They have a bunch of useful idiots willing to mindlessly repeat "job creator! job creator!" They have a bunch of politicians.

If Boeing didn't need Washington, Boeing would have already left. Consider Washington's tax breaks a state-sponsored contribution to all of the pension plans which hold Boeing stock.

http://m.bizjournals.com/washington/blog…

@9 (seatackled): What @14 (Goldy) said. I got it, and I got a good chuckle out of it.

seatackled is one of Slog's several wonderful sycophants. Their input is badly needed to keep the propaganda flowing.

@6 yeah we COULD do that. Or prefer not to be trod on over and over and just shoot the boss.

Is that shocking or sound "too much"? Then fuck you. Because you are proposing the very same thing just, instead of a bullet its starvation that kills us and instead of one person its millions.

This is a global problem and you, are a part of it, you ideological politruk idiot.

For a mere $55B, a controlling interest in Boeing can be yours! Even less, if you can ally yourself with some of the institutional holders, state and municipal retirement funds, etc.

Meanwhile, Boeing figures prominently in our national economy. Pity we can't just nationalize the fuckers. Union busting does this nation no good whatsoever. The spoils go to shareholders, taxes go down, and public expenditures in the wake of the labor displacement go up.

In other countries, when a company pulls this shit, they at least have to pay for it.

@24: "shoot the boss" turned out pretty well in 'Murka. except we didn't shoot the boss, just his soldiers.

or doesn't that one count?

This is what happened in Detroit.

Truth is the machinists aren't some entitled/golden parachute a-holes, they are actually the people whose wages and compensation kept up with inflation and increases in productivity over the past 30 years. The rest of us should not look at Boeing machinists and think "Look at how good they have it," we should be looking at ourselves and saying "how in the hell have we fallen so far behind?"

Don't get me wrong, it would suck for Boeing to pull out of Seattle (let's pray their business intelligence people realize that the decline in quality and productivity make leaving Seattle untenable) but given that Boeing is apparently going to tell the city and its employees that no matter how much they sacrifice, no matter how much support they offer, how little tax Boeing has to pay, and no matter how much compensation employees give back, Boeing will return and say "Give us more," at some point you have to fight. It might as well be now.

@26 No, what happened in Detroit is 30 years ago they made crap cars that fell apart after 50,000 miles and the Japanese ate their lunch. Then VPs were rewarded financially for decisions that made quarterly reports look good but were horrible long-term strategy, and they pulled the ripcord on their golden parachutes before the consequences hit. And now, with the exception of maybe Ford, they are making cars nobody wants and playing catchup on technologies they should have been pioneering like electric or hybrids.

@14 @19

I figured a few people wouldn't get it--or at least not the reference--though if someone is commenting here, it seems there's a strong likelihood they'd be familiar with the background.

It is Goldy's doing that I have developed considerable disgust for SPC. When she was hired, I thought it was a booby prize for her in that it was a Seattle Times job, but I also thought it was cool that they hired an Asian American woman. But now that I know how pro-corporation and anti-people she is, I have little more than contempt for her.

@12: I agree wholeheartedly.

@31 - you are a wonderful patsy for the 1% - a perfect example of "divide and conquer". Let's get the lower middle class to resent and attack the upper-middle class rather than the real targets. @27 has it exactly right: we'd all be where the machinists are if we'd had union solidarity.

80k isn't exactly high on the hog in Seattle either, given cost of living.

It shouldn't be forgotten in all this that Boeing is a fundamentally EVIL company. They're an arms manufacturer. They profit shamelessly by selling hunter/killer drone aircraft to the highest bidders. One whisper from a Boeing lobbyist killed an anti-domestic-police-drone bill in Olympia. Yes, they produce jobs, but Boeing is fundamentally an EVIL EMPIRE. Aren't we smart enough to build something besides war machines?

I'm most pissed at Gov. Inslee in this sordid affair. He should have stayed on the fucking sideline when Boeing presented their obviously one-sided proposal. Instead, he couldn't wait to jump right in and tell the machinists to take this shitty deal. He seemed to forget who supported him in his recent election.

Jay Inslee is a taller Norm Dicks. Of course he carries water for The Man.

@29,

Given that Boeing is ditching a competent labor pool that builds shit that could kill hundreds of people if put together incorrectly for an incompetent, cheaper labor pool, I'm not sure why you think that comparison isn't apt.

Boeing execs, who seem to know apparently fuck all about running a company past the next quarter, are making these decisions in defiance of what's actually good for the company.

It's not greedy corporations who ruined Washington and Seattle for the middle class, but the Social Planners in Olympia.

Over immigration, not building highways, and letting house prices skyrocket due to GMA and a cap on property taxes that benefit the lazy entrenched liberal turned Seattle from a good place to be, to a museum for patriarchs.

Bailo, where are these vaunted Social Planners? Are they hanging out at some Olympia bar that no one else goes to? The halls of the office buildings are filled with suits and I don't think Social Planners wear suits. Take your iPhone down there and bring us back some proof they exist.

@38 you are dumber than a half-empty box of rocks.

@31:

Wait, wait - did anybody read Egan's thing all the way down? $80,000?

I'm pro-union, pro-middle class, pro-fucking-everything - but that is absurd. That's enough money to buy a house in cash every three years. You could buy a porsche every year - and still have $10,000 left over.

So much bullshit in just a few sentences!

Sure, you could buy a Porsche every year, but you'd have to live in it, since $10K won't pay for a mortgage and food and clothing and transportation. Your Porsche wouldn't be able to move, since you couldn't pay for gas.

As for buying a house, where do you find one for $240,000 ($80K * 3) in these parts? And, as above, what will you do for food, clothing, and transportation?

Per capita income in the Seattle-Tacoma metro area is $50,944 (as of 2011). So unless that hypothetical average machinist lives in a household with fewer than 0.57 other people, s/he is actually below the median in terms of household income.

@41,

It also said *as much as* $80,000. So, yeah, a machinist who's been working at Boeing for his/her entire working life is making comfortable middle class wages. Big fucking deal. Wake me when that's the starting wage.

#31 also doesn't take into account the taxes those employees have to pay.

Although, I would like to point out that you can, in fact, buy a house for $240,000 in this region, although not so much in Seattle.

Boeing's latest shenanigans really puts the lie to the hubbub about on-shoring and all these "good-paying", "middle class" manufacturing jobs coming back to the U.S. I've seen a number of articles about how manufacturers who come back here "can't" find qualified people, even though those manufacturers are offering a whole $10-12/hour as a starting wage (with 1 percent "raises" year after year) for people who need vocational training to handle the complex systems and software that come with modern day manufacturing processes.

Well no shit, Sherlock. You're offering *lower* middle class wages and little to no benefits to people who need to get extra education (on their own dime), when you're clearly not going to offer any guarantee of job stability? I can't even imagine why Americans aren't lining up for that deal.

When American business is this detached from reality, I start to wonder to what degree we benefit from their presence here anymore. Let's all turn into Detroit, the hipsters can run roughshod over the entirety of North America, and we'll have fixies and ironic mustaches for all.

The sad truth is that Boeing has the IAM where it wants it.

@43 Let's please stop calling $10/hour wages "middle class". It's working class, or upper lower class. I'm not trying to disrespect it, but let's be realistic. If you're not making a living wage in a 40-hour workweek, you're not middle class. If you'll never be able to buy a house and build equity, or save for your retirement, you're not middle class.

To a large extent, corporate America seeks to diffuse the reality of class divide by trying to convince people on the lower end that they're in the middle class, too, and that policies that favor the upper middle class ("lower taxes!" "cut public employment!" "fewer government handouts!"), somehow benefits them. Calling a person who lives paycheck to paycheck in a low-end rental, with no ownership of their means of livelihood, no savings and no job security "middle class" is preposterous. Middle class economic status either requires income substantially above the poverty level, proprietorship in a going business or established assets. We used to count a college education as enough established assets, but with the current employment environment and the level of debt many undergrads accumulate, that may need reevaluation soon.

We do struggling working people no favors by verbally "elevating" them into the middle class. They deserve the right to see their situation clearly, to organize and to work politically to change it.

Seattle Times and King5 really don't know what to do with the Machinists refusing Boeing's insulting offer; just like they don't know what to do about Kshama Sawant's victory in the City Council. They are so used to their cushy insulation and cozy relationship with corporate and banking interests they don't see who's working in Seattle. I don't think we are likely to become Detroit here, but we could take some lessons from places we know well: Iceland and California. Perhaps it's time (and I do mean this without irony) to consider building the dirgibles in the hangars and the other innovative transportation systems with government funding. After all, what kind of funding did WASL just offer, and doesn't the US military buy from Boeing? Time to stop going along with with tired, revisionist fossil fuel systems and create that new green economy right here.

@45 Thank-you. I feel the strength that comes from finally having a name for something that has always bothered me.