The SPEEA Negotiation Team continues to prepare for our upcoming contract talks with Boeing.
That included a June 18 preliminary meeting with Boeing executives where the SPEEA team pressed for insights into how committed the company is to building for the future in the Northwest.
The question for SPEEA members, our negotiators told Boeing, is whether we should view a role at Boeing as a job or a career. Is the company a place where we can build lifelong careers, or should we treat it as a temporary stop where we can build skills and resumes before moving on to something else?
The answer is key to the Teams as they work to finalize our initial contract offer, the SPEEA negotiators said.
Boeing executives – including Vice President of Quality Doug Ackerman, Chief Engineer David Loffing and Vice President of Engineering Functions Ben Nimmergut – said they want cooperative problem-solving with SPEEA.
“We are very interested in having a dialogue, having a relationship,” Loffing said.
Our Prof and Tech Negotiation Team members urged the Boeing side to put action to those words. “The more we can show that there’s a career here, not just a job, I think that behooves all of us,” said Prof Team member Andrew Ferguson.
The Boeing team also responded to the list of contract priorities that the Negotiation Teams had published earlier in June, saying there were “no showstoppers” and that the company would be willing to bargain specifics addressing the concepts outlined in the document.