Labor unions representing Boeing Co. and Airbus SAS workers are trying to follow the planemakers overseas and organize more employees as production shifts to developing countries.
More than 100 union leaders from around the world met in Seattle this week to map ways to help labor groups take root in the emerging aerospace industry in nations such as China and Mexico, and to keep tabs on unionized employers that are expanding abroad.
“If the work is sent from the Puget Sound to Poland, we need to be working with the Polish union to make sure compensation is commensurate with the work they’re doing so we’re not participating in the race to the bottom,” said Greg Junemann, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers.
The push to improve pay and job security outside of the companies’ home markets puts the labor groups at odds with the two biggest planemakers’ pursuit of cheaper markets in which to build aircraft.
The two-day meeting that ended yesterday near Boeing’s commercial headquarters marked the first global conference among the aerospace union chiefs since 2002, when they convened in Toulouse, France, where Airbus is based.
Air-Show Meetings
Machinists union President Tom Buffenbarger, who attended the Farnborough Air Show in July for the first time and met Airbus Chief Executive Officer Tom Enders, plans to hold union sessions to coincide with the industry’s Paris and U.K. shows to ensure workers are visible at the every-other-year gatherings.
“The big shift will be working more closely with the Airbus unions, sharing best practices,” such as how to interact with employers, Buffenbarger said in an interview. “We need to take international solidarity to a new level.”
Unions’ global push is “not necessarily” a threat, Boeing CEO Jim McNerney said yesterday after a speech at the meeting.
“We will partner with people that want to help us build airplanes more productively,” he said. “In some cases unions help us do that, and in other cases non-unions help us do that.”
Aerospace employment is 460,000 in Europe and 624,000 in the U.S., where the total has fallen 45 percent in the past 20 years as manufacturing efficiency rose and companies sent work abroad. While data aren’t available for China, estimates of the total there range from 200,000 to 491,000, said Owen Herrnstadt, the Machinists’ director of trade and globalization.
U.S. and European aerospace workers earn about $30 an hour, compared with about $5 in Mexico and an estimated 50 cents to $2 in China, Herrnstadt said.
Mexico, China
That’s encouraged companies such as Textron Inc.’s Cessna Aircraft to move production abroad. Wichita, Kansas-based Cessna is completing a fourth expansion in Chihuahua, Mexico, even as it cuts another 700 jobs in its hometown.
Airbus began assembling A320 single-aisle jetliners in Tianjin, China, last year. Workforces are also expanding in China, Russia and Brazil as those countries begin to develop their own commercial jets.
Independent unions aren’t as strong in developing countries, so organizing workers there will be difficult for the mostly European and North American leaders who assembled in Seattle this week, said Harley Shaiken, a University of California at Berkeley professor who specializes in labor.
‘New Strategy’
“It’s going to be tough, but not impossible,” Shaiken said. “This is adapting the very soul of unionism to the 21st century. It’s a global solidarity that unions are trying to establish. It’s hardly idle talk; it’s really laying the basis for a new strategy.”
Labor groups are already making moves toward each other. A delegation from Airbus’s engineering union flew to Seattle in July to meet with the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace for the first time, said Ray Goforth, the U.S. group’s executive director.
Airbus has an engineering base in Wichita, among other U.S. facilities. Part of the unions’ plan includes more collaboration to make sure the U.S. workers’ relationship with the company is similar to that in Europe, where organized labor is stronger.
Boeing’s ties with unions at home have included strikes in the Seattle area that forced five shutdowns of its commercial operations since 1989. About 36 percent of its 157,000-person workforce belongs to unions.
Dreamliner Delay
Outsourcing is among the sore points for labor groups, with the Chicago-based planemaker’s engineering and machinists unions blaming work sent overseas for the delays in the 787 Dreamliner, now running almost three years behind schedule.
Suppliers from around the world are carrying out 70 percent of the work done on the jet, up from 50 percent on the 777. McNerney told union leaders yesterday that while Boeing ceded too much control over the 787, the company will learn from its mistakes and keep that approach on jets it’s about to develop.
He said planemakers also must continue to expand abroad, because aircraft orders often require agreements for adding overseas production or parts purchases.
That means labor groups must adapt their own global strategy, said Bernie Hamilton, the national officer for aerospace for Unite, the U.K.’s largest union.
The trade-union movement, which started out as local groups of workers and followed employers’ nation-wide expansion, has “lacked that next step, to go global,” Hamilton said. “The unions have to change with the times. We have to take it to the next level, because the companies have.”
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