Good Morning Brothers and Sisters. I ask that you please stand for the Pledge to the Flag, and then remain standing for a Moment-of-Silence, as we remember:
• the Victims of 9-11…4 years ago today;
• the Victims of Hurricane Katrina;
• Let’s also stand for our fallen soldiers in Iraq;
And remember, too, our IAM Brothers and Sisters who have passed since we last met.
Thank you.
I’d like to welcome everyone to the 2005 Aerospace Conference of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. It’s an honor for us to have our conference this year in Tucson, Arizona, the home of Local Lodge 933. The Western Territory is home to some of the IAM’s great aerospace districts and locals, and I want to thank them all for their help with this year’s conference.
I also want to acknowledge our Aerospace Coordinators: Dick Schneider, John Crowdis, Frank Santos, and Ron Eldridge. There may be, somewhere, four guys who are busier, or work harder, but I haven’t met them.
With their help and yours, we’re going to have a good conference. We’ll work hard, play hard, and hear some first-rate speakers and presentations. Let’s make this a week to remember.
To get things started, let’s turn our attention to the screen to see the new Aerospace Department video.
I hope you were paying close attention to that video, because we really are at something of a crossroads in this industry – and I believe there are just as many challenges as there are opportunities. More than ever before, we need to employ strategic planning to our endeavors. And that means our efforts at the bargaining tables, in the legislative arena, and in our organizing campaigns. Much of our work this week will be aimed at creating just such a strategic plan.
But before we go any further, I want to pay special tribute to our Boeing members in Seattle, Wichita, and Portland. Their shutdown of the Boeing Company was the right thing to do - at the right time - and for all the right reasons. When I heard that more than 85 percent of our members voted to reject the company’s offer - and told them exactly where they could stick their signing bonuses – I felt proud to be a member of the Machinists Union.
And I’ll bet you did too.
Personally, I’ve heard just about enough over the past couple of months about the decline of labor and how the labor movement is in trouble. We may have our problems, but we are far from disappearing.
There are opportunities in every corner of this industry. They might be hard to see sometimes, like in a commercial airline industry that seems intent on pricing itself out of existence. Or in massive military and civilian sales to foreign countries that include the transfer of critical technology, like composites and advanced avionics. But we still have the means to make our voices heard in Washington and Ottawa, where so many of these decisions are being reviewed. It’s imperative for us to ramp up our legislative efforts. Doing nothing is simply not an option. It would be a big mistake for anyone to under-estimate our resolve and our determination.
We’ve got more than 118 years of tradition to build on, and 118 years of tradition to live up to. Sure, aircraft-makers have had problems. Some have been by their own making, some not. But most have made solid profits over the past three years, and many are sitting on a back-log of aircraft orders.
Those orders may not be coming from the legacy carriers in the U.S., who haven’t placed a major order in years – but there is no shortage of orders coming from developing countries around the world. There is absolutely no good reason - not from a business perspective or any other – to try and force a second-rate contract on our members at Boeing, or anywhere else.
They made the sacrifices in hard times. But they are not about to make those kinds of sacrifices while Boeing heaps huge sums on their senior executives. Twenty-two million just for the new CEO.
Twenty-two million!
Some of the other proposals in that contract were just terrible – Like the total elimination of health care benefits for future retirees. There was one member quoted in a newspaper article who said he was willing to share his food with his dog occasionally, but he sure didn’t want to count on his dog to return the favor after his retirement from Boeing!
And with the cost of private health insurance skyrocketing, and the current administration blocking any kind of national solution, just what are people supposed to do? Maybe this is that “compassionate conservatism” we’ve heard so much about.
We caught a glimpse of it at work in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and it angers me as an American, not just as a union member, that our own government is so incompetent and indifferent. If we leave it up to this government, there won’t be much left of Social Security for future retirees to rely on either. And pensions? We’ve seen what a bankruptcy court can do to defined benefit pensions. There are bills that will be debated in the current session of Congress that will claim to strengthen private pension plans. But some of those same bills include language that will severely limit our ability to negotiate pension increases. It will be up to us to make sure our legislators know how we feel about any bill that would handcuff our collective bargaining rights.
Frankly, it’s hard to believe a company would provide tens-of-millions to secure the pension of their CEO’s, and then turn around and offer their employees the lowest pension increase in years.
Now Boeing’s hardly the only company trying to re-write labor contracts to eliminate long-standing obligations to employees. But they are the biggest, and just like in the airlines, where-ever the Big Dog goes, the others are sure to follow. The issues of pensions and health care have become so big that they cannot be reserved exclusively for the bargaining table.
These have become national issues with the potential to affect the quality of life for all Americans.
It should not be necessary to strike to win a decent standard-of-living and a secure retirement. But a single strike, well planned, well timed, and well backed, may be a small price to pay to prevent an industry-wide feeding frenzy. Let’s let the sisters and brothers at Boeing know that their strike is our strike. Never before has it been so true: An injury to them, would be an injury to all of us.
As I said before, there’s a lot more to talk about than just what’s happening at Boeing Commercial Aircraft these days. We’ve got issues that are no less critical at Raytheon, Lockheed and Bombardier. The loss of good aerospace jobs to overseas locations is hardly limited to one side of the U.S./Canadian border.
I want everyone here to look at this conference as an opportunity – an opportunity to meet with your fellow representatives, to learn from them, exchange ideas, and then to forge a strategic plan together that will work for all IAM members, no matter where they live, or what company they work for. It’s a big job, and like anything we do, it can only happen if we’re all pulling in the same direction.
Welcome, everyone, to Tucson and the 2005 Aerospace Conference. Thank you for coming, and thanks to all who had a hand in putting it together, with a special thanks to the Officers and Members of Local Lodge 933 for all their time and effort.
Thank you all.
