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Comment by linotype | Hacker News Reader

What a great way to alienate people that haven’t gotten a pay rise at all for years to your cause. Insane.

Only if you're unwilling to understand why. I'm neutral so far and the BBC article conveniently doesn't give any details on why the offer was rejected. It's perfect for painting the people on strike in a bad light.

TLDR from the initial demands:

- 40% raise

- Reinstate the defined benefit pension plan they lost a decade ago

- Higher contributions to employee 401k retirement funds

Boeing knows this, the workers know this, the media knows this and the public knows this. Yet Boeing plays dumb and proposes deals that fall short of the demands. Boeing could stop the strike whenever they want, if they had some sort of semblance of empathy for their employees.

It seems Boeing already offered all this, save for the defined benefit plan, which obviously won't happen, and a 5% difference in the raise, from "extremely large raise" to "ridiculously large raise".

What compromise has the union offered from their own initial demands? They could stop the strike anytime they want.

Why will a defined benefit scheme “obviously” not happen?

Because defined benefit plans (at least in the US) are dead and have been for a while (10 years in the Boeing case).

Thank you for asking a good faith question. To answer, I've provided a couple of links below, but the tl;dr is that they're unaffordable for companies, and as a result have become an anachronism. Boeing specifically was already losing billions before the strike, so has a negative ability to give more, much less increase their 60+ billion dollar unfunded pension liabilities with new generations they'll have to keep paying for another half century.

https://finbox.com/NYSE:BA/explorer/unfunded_vested_pension_...

https://www.barrons.com/articles/boeing-strike-pension-plan-...

Notably, the question I asked before yours, was also in good faith. I answered yours first as a further show of good faith, but the question that now must be addressed is: What compromise has the union offered from their own initial demands?

Thanks for the links, that does indeed seem to support your assertion.

I don't know enough about this dispute in general to offer opinion on what any party has or hasn't done though, so anything I have to say about the union representing Boeing workers would just be noise in the conversation.

The union had already compromised, and if Boeing has unfunded pension liabilities, why in the fuck were they doing stock buybacks? Unfunded pension liabilities = undelivered compensation for people who have already worked for you.

What in the Sam is wrong with this bloody country man? Does anything actually bloody work?

I know, I totally support Boeing selling their buyback'd stock, even if it tanks the stock price (executive compensation be damned), and using the proceeds to account for a portion of their unfunded pension liabilities.

Even if they did that, though, I don't think it would cover their current pension liabilities, much less new ones which will continue to grow for decades.

> and a 5% difference in the raise, from "extremely large raise" to "ridiculously large raise".

Sorry, but we've had a large run of inflation _and_ we have no idea what kind of raises they've had in the recent past. Have they had cost of living raises, or nothing from the last 5 years so they need to catch up? There is always more context than can fit in a single sentence.

It's called negotiation. When you go to the car dealer, do you pay the full list price? Or do you make an offer that "fall[s] short of the demands?"

Negotiation can also be boneheaded and incredibly stupid. I went to a car dealer who was asking me for $4k over their own advertised KBB value (this was before covid too). I countered with $1.5k over their own advertised value. He insisted "we can't possibly go lower" than the list price. So I noped out of there.

Months later he texted me out of the blue and offered me the same price minus $600. That car sat on their lot for years.

Not all offers should be considered valid. Sometimes, an offer in negotiation is clearly, plainly, an insult to your intelligence.

The pay raise wasn’t the only thing they were looking for. They wanted pension benefits back, which were stopped for new members a decade ago:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/business/boeing-union-str...

> What a great way to alienate people that haven’t gotten a pay rise at all for years to your cause.

What other opinions matter in the negotiation between the union and the employer?

The benefits weren't "stopped", they were swapped out to something that's really a better model for everyone. Defined benefits plans are very hard to administer and they often fail when the investments don't deliver. At least defined contributions are more transparent for everyone.

> The benefits weren't "stopped"

You left out where I specified the pension. They were stopped.

I personally prefer a 401k - it enables greater career mobility, but also requires greater knowledge and planning by the employee.

In an area or industry with few comparable employers, they might not value that flexibility as highly. They’re allowed to negotiate for the retirement plan they want.

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