After 40 days on strike, 33,000 Machinists rejected an improved contract offer from Boeing by 64 percent on Wednesday. The offer included a 35 percent wage increase over 4 years.

Members of Machinists (IAM) District 751 and District W24 build passenger jets and and freighters, including the 737, 767, and 777. Most work at Boeing’s huge factories at Everett and Renton, Washington.

“It’s a little bit better, but it still needs to go further,” said Ky Carlson, who was staffing a picket line at Everett on Tuesday, where she would normally be assembling the 777.

“It’s an easy no vote for me,” said Jon Voss, a mechanic and steward at Renton, where he builds wings for 737, “because I know Boeing has multiple offers ready to just throw at us until we finally get what we deserve.”

Mylo Lang, an apprentice machinist at Boeing’s Auburn, Washington fabrication plant, said his priorities were pay, retirement, time off, and no mandatory overtime. “We’ve made progress in each of those areas, but we haven’t gotten a big win, a definitive win in any of them.”

The union originally demanded a 40 percent raise, and most strikers still see that as the goal, with a bigger bump in the first year.

In the new offer, the company proposed to contribute 4 percent of pay into a 401(k), plus a match of up to 8 percent that a worker contributes, and a one-time $5,000 contribution to each worker’s 401(k).

But many people are sticking with the slogan, “No pensions, no planes,” said Carlson. They want the company to restore their defined benefit pension, which Boeing froze in 2016: Those who were vested couldn’t accrue more, and everyone, old and new, was given a 401(k).

About 40 percent of the current workforce had the pension before it was frozen. Voss, with 13 years in, calculated that the loss cost him $600,000.

Workers say the pension was stolen by company job blackmail and union collusion. In 2013 Boeing forced a contract reopener by threatening to move more work away from the Puget Sound area.

“During that extension we lost our defined benefit pension, stagnated wages, there was a massive cost-shift on healthcare, and we were stuck in that agreement for almost 11 years,” District 751 President Jon Holden told “Valley Labor Report.”

After a decade of stagnating wages, pay is still the key........

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