Please, Please, Let Me Keep My Job––Boeing Vote A Blow To Southern California (Demo)

By the slimmest of margins, aerospace giant Boeing Co.‘s largest union approved a controversial contract proposal that cut benefits in exchange for decades of work in Puget Sound on a new jetliner.

The International Assn. of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 751, which represents more than 31,000 Boeing workers in Washington state, voted 51% Friday in favor of a contract to build the 777X, a more fuel-efficient version of its wide-body jet.

After the union voted down the deal the first time, the company opened a nationwide sweepstakes to find a potential home for the program. Boeing said it has received incentive-laden proposals from 22 states, including California, in case the union deal didn’t come through.

“We faced tremendous pressure from every source imaginable influencing how to vote today,” said the union local’s chief of staff Jim Bearden at a press conference. “The politicians, the media and others — who truly had no right to get into our business — were aligned against us and did their best to influence our peoples’ vote.”

This contrasted starkly with IAM International President Tom Buffenbarger, who lauded the deal, saying: “Despite individual differences, I believe this vote preserves thousands of good-paying IAM jobs, while assuring the success of the 777X program.”

Moving the assembly line out of the Puget Sound area would have been staggering to the Seattle area, where Boeing was founded in 1916. It is estimated that the 777X would be responsible for 10,000 jobs.

“For Boeing, it’s a long, long campaign to effectively neuter the IAM. If the contract is passed, the IAM can’t potentially strike until 2024,” said Scott Hamilton, an aviation industry consultant and managing director of Leeham Co. in Issaquah, Wash., before the vote. “Boeing will come back to the union when the next airplanes are ready for launch and do this all over again: offer a contract extension, reduced terms and conditions, in exchange for building the airplane here.”

The labor dispute drew attention of Southern California lawmakers still reeling from Boeing’s decision in September that it would close the C-17 Globemaster III cargo jet plant in Long Beach in 2015. The plant was talked about being a potential home for the 777X program.

In addition, conventional pension plans for newly hired machinists will be converted to a 401(k)-type of retirement program. Boeing will contribute 10% the first year, 10% the second, 6% the third and 4% for each year up to the end of the contract.

This story is perfectly descriptive of the mass dependency we Americans have on jobs as our ONLY source of income, making us effectively job serfs beholden to wealthy capitalist owners who are remiss at not sharing in the growth of their companies by empowering their employees to acquire ownership in new wealth-creating, income-producing productive capital asset formation on terms that capital credit loans are repaid out of tax-exempt future earnings. This means capital acquisition not requiring a reduction in wages or the pledging of past savings. Once the loans are repaid, the new owners and the existing owners would benefit from full-dividend payouts of all future earnings.

But we live in a era where Americans are oblivious to the source of income that makes people rich––capital ownership––remaining stuck in the JOBS ONLY paradigm. Thus, the rallying call is “Please, Please, Let Me Keep My Job.” This results in creating further dependency on the wealthy ownership class and the “State,” which is effectively controlled by the that class of people to enhance their ownership interests and positions of power, and which effectively creates dependency and economic slavery. It will be only through widespread, expanded private sector ownership of FUTURE productive capital growth that we will be able to reform the system and create a society where every man, woman, and child is an owner and benefits from the income produced as a capital “worker” owner.

I had written about this development in my blog post at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=11337.

This IS the fight of their worker life. But they won’t win because in a competitive global world, the competitive cost of production is critical to business success. Full employment is not an objective of businesses, nor are businesses any longer able to be loyal to long-term workers when competing globally. Companies strive to keep labor input and other costs (using machines, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc.) at a minimum in order to maximize profits for the owners. Private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role. Over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. The aero space industry is a perfect example of this ever-constant shift to the employment of non-human instruments to produce its products.

Labor workers are essentially demanding that they be paid more for the same or less work input, while the real gains in productivity are due to the employment of human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized automation, etc.––productive capital assets owned by the owners of the company. For Boing to develop and build a new platform for the production of the 777X it will require investment in expanded productive capital assets. What the workers should be demanding is an opportunity, via an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) trust to finance the investment using pre-tax dollars that result in creating new employee owners in a larger company. Doing so will enable the workers to demand less wages and benefits as they gain more and more income sourced through their ownership shares in the company and assure that Boeing will manufacture the 777X in the Puget Sound area. The entire company will be able to become more competitive globally because the company will be able to invest in the most efficient employment of productive capital instruments to enhance their global competitiveness and profitability, which will benefit ALL owners, including the employee owners.

Boeing is in competition with Europe’s Airbus. Both companies operate their sales and marketing on a global basis and both are constantly seeking ways to reduce costs of production and increase efficiencies and productiveness (the rule of business).

Companies such as Boeing are constantly caught up in the never-ending march of technology and are representative of the state of tectonic shifts in the technologies of production that are destroying jobs and devaluing the worth of labor. Boeing employs a unionized labor force yet U.S. sentiment toward labor unions has deteriorated in recent years. To further reduce cost, Boeing and other manufacturing companies are electing to move production to right-to-work states, where laws allow most workers to refuse to join unions even if their workplace is unionized.

Workers are faced with the reality that they will sooner than later be threaten by replacement technologies such as human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc. Employment as it was in a time when technology was less of a threat and manufacturing production was labor intensive is gone forever. Thus, what strength labor previously held is continually being diminished with companies constantly automating production processes.

What workers and unions should be doing is proposing a means to lower production costs by shifting emphasis to OWNERSHIP in incentivize employees rather than increased wages and pension for less and less worker input. The question should be WHO SHOULD OWN the FUTURE productive capital asset growth of Boeing and other private sector companies? The employees should be the first in line to be empowered to acquire ownership stakes in the Boeing Company using an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) to pay for their acquisition of shares of stock with pre-tax dollars via capital credit loans which would be paid pack out of FUTURE profits to be generated by the increased production rate.

When will our elected representatives learn that they must attach stipulations when awarding corporations tax incentives to build facilities and require them to document new employee ownership creation using Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) financing? And when will labor unions transform to a producers’ ownership union movement and embrace and fight for employee ownership.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-0104-boeing-union-vote-20140104,0,397740.story#axzz2pS3B4Bnb