Boeing Strike Settles

And a good thing too. Boeing has a backlog of 900 plus orders for the new all-plastic 787 jetliner at $150 mil a piece. That's $135 billion worth of business, if they can keep it. The 787 is late, and the strike made it later. It hasn't made first flight yet. Yesterday Boeing discovered a mistake in the drawings that will require replacement of thousands of fasteners in the already half built aircraft. Program is two years late and it will get later. Sooner or later, the customers will start canceling back orders and buy Airbus instead.
The terms of the strike settlement are unclear. Aviation Week says the new contract will go for four years, up from three. Pay hikes are 15% over four years. Pension contributions go up $83 a year.
The major work rule issue concerned Boeing's newly instituted practice of having suppliers deliver right to the shop floor. They used to deliver to the loading dock and Intnl Assn of Machinists workers would move the product from the dock to the line. Boeing is only doing this on the 787 line, but wants to make the practice general to the 737 and 747 lines. The compromise allows vendors to deliver to only a few spots on the line rather than everywhere. The machinists claim the jobs of 2920 union forklift operators were saved. Which is an astounishing number of fork lift operators. In USAF we only had a dozen forklifts for an entire Air Force base.
With the rest of the economy sliding down the tube, it's good to get Boeing back to work.